One Hour One Life Forums

None of this problem is helped with how many YouTube videos there are on just killing people. I get that those channels are trying to come up with spicey content--it's a whole ass click bait game--but there isn't other types of videos on OHOL. I imagine this kind of publicity attracts players who want to form cults that go on killing sprees or sacrifice people to create apocalypses.

THIS.

Fences are new and they're not perfect. For what game play they add, they're pretty... "uneven." Maintaining a fence line didn't quite slide into our task cycles, like you could expect, and managing the gate is a chore. Like the gate is really such a bad object to click on and it doesn't give you the feeling like you "own" something. Permission, sure, but not like the ownership you'd feel if you could just walk through the gate with impunity. For what fun it is having a bear be let into the village, the other 90% is irritating. But this will all change. We're just playing with the live elements of the game, different updated objects are offline--being built and tested--and since the elements we have now don't break the game they can stay put as work hours are spent elsewhere.

Eye roll. Ok.

If this is a grift I'm not parroting Jason, I'm a shelling for him, lol and yeah, I think calls for more content are about the most misconstrued sense of excitement for a game, on any board, a player can make--we want more of the thing! The only solution to our problem is more of the thing! We hate the thing now but want more of the thing soon!

Clearly developers want to add more content. That same urge/desire/commercial interest is what prompted them to make the game in the first place. Reminding people that content is coming, I find, is a worthwhile endeavor. Just as much as they find it's worthwhile to huff that they want more of the thing that's already on it's way. Your amazon package is on it's way--you already ordered it, lol. Jason isn't sitting there, with all his dreams and visions for the game, and going "Yuuuuuup, this--right here--yeah, that's FULLY realized. Wouldn't change a fucking thing. Can't wait to shelf this and just bank for next ten years of my life. Feet up, drinks out!"

Anytime a developer has to sideline making additions to their project, to do other work, it's not without cause.

That PAX convention was huge, for an indie developer, and it's gunna change some work flow. Change your expectations accordingly. I don't see it as a failure, either, that we don't have 100 new broken and fucking boring items crammed into the game. I'm not interested in a bunch of "skinned" items that don't add impact, and I'm def not interested in playing task cycles that require no knowledge, no mechanical/skilled input (outside of a click), and zero inter-player actions to utilize or complete. But that fundamental flaw wasn't highlighted when the rift was novel through constant expansion (and the game was novel in and of itself). Inflation, if you will, hid a lot of those problems and I'm happy that they are being worked out now. Like, it's still a hundred new items, but they will be/are reworks of old things. Would all your woes be fixed if a new recipe item for tomatoes comes out on thursday or would you be more interested in berry farming not being a flippin chore? A lot of items can be implemented, exponentially, but they'll be iterations derived from a system, and if that system is shit--fundamental flaws in the game--then (excuse my analogy) we'll just have a rift with a bunch of recently fed sheep in it; a rift full of shit.

TBH, I'm surprised you didn't see the road fixes, Morti, as a direct nod to your recent projects and an endorsement, or thank you, by the developer for your work in the community (which has been cool to watch both in and out of game, btw). You and your global works probably put that project right on his plate. Gotta be real fun smoothing out a buggy bit of code that you think will directly benefit some of your most active/vocal players but instead find out they're pissed they can't make a green straw hat to shove onto their babies using the same boring harvest system that every other item is structured on as well. Such a failure.

Right? And that's what Destiny mentions, non-berry pies are a great food source--for everyone! It's so counter intuitive (the tutorial might not help here either...) but that's why this game is a such a cool toy/tool. It's such a great cost analysis demonstration. Wrapping my head around the usefulness of corn, a crop I currently don't interact with at all, is forcing me to think about "value" differently.

We're still flushing out the gamepedia but this such good information! Can't wait to row me some corn now.

Holy shit, thank you for all this work!

The arc ends we're playing with are interesting, but not fun, for some people. There's something to be said about how players shift from people producing villages and towns while the world is open and new, to trying to kill off the remaining families when tech reaches it's cap or when the remaining family number gets too low to resist... Like, these greifers aren't just logging on to grief, and only grief, they live lives as "normal" players all the time. They didn't buy the game to just greif either, they still play the game like most of us do. But they do also grief, or--and I think more accurately--switch their play style to be adversarial. I wonder what makes them switch.

I'm sure, in the way that the mother/child mechanic and interaction creates a sense of family in this game, that group activities, efforts, and jobs will create a sense of comradery. Like, right now there isn't a meaningful way to interact with other players. You might say hi, or emote, and if you have a new player maybe you'll show them a task. But outside of teaching someone a skill, the only meaningful or impactful play we have with one another is a knife to the guts. The "community work" in OHOL is still designed around solo play with zero player interaction but as that changes and we gain the ability to work together and achieve cool things--not just by playing beside one another but with--we'll also see cool and interesting behavior changes in players. Exciting stuff that without a doubt is on the horizon but we play faster than that track can get laid, so to speak. Until then the "bunch of solo players forced to survive in, and share, a persistent world" thing can easily lose it's novelty for people.

Still a fan of the rift, if that's not clear. I just think it's a way better option; need we bring up No Man's Sky? Biomes can be more usefully generated in a finite map and resources better designed. For instance, we have so many rabbit holes right now. In a finite world you can reduce the number of holes and increase the regeneration--you know so they actually breed like rabbits--all the while maintaining a similar level of "production". In a well designed finite world you're not using up as much land on indestructible rabbit holes (the added bonus is that this would feel more like you're hunting them than tripping over them) but in an infinite world you're always going to have scarcity issues that force the needless ubiquity. Resources shouldn't feel absolutely abundant and yet remain non-interactive for almost the entire time you play. That's such a waste of an asset but isn't really an issue in a infinite world; there's always more resources for you to interact with.

So, I think the rift is a good thing because it highlights these issues; OHOL is boring because most of the elements are non-interactive and players have limited options for meaningful interactions. That's changing tho so... yay.

Swamp trees aren't the best source to grab wood for fire; Swamp trees don't have branches they have valuable real estate and they're hungry work. It is to the benefit of the game that people can't simply find the most primo spots for a village, off the rip, and plant roots right away. And
be building a huge stockpile of wood that doesn't depreciate over time while they're at it. That system is doubly rewarding and maybe shouldn't have been in the game in the first place.

In the time that it takes a community to go from gathering branches to make tinder for purposeful but fleeting fires, to managing some sort of tree farming, what happens that prevents these communities from growing or advancing? I don't see the issue because we still have villages.

What I do notice, like you pointed out, is that there is more tree farming--awesome--and there are more trees in and around a camp. I'm not being spawned into mid game villages that have trees wiped out for miles but have a vast array of half built projects left dead by all the random players who spawned before me that will never be completed because they simply logged on to play around in the sandbox before they fucked off. Like op says, HW is the best thing ever because it's brought chopping trees into our cooperative group play--you'll need a good source of food, like a dedicated baker--and out of our individual play, which, is what most if not all parts of the game should be guarded from. That's where griefers can thrive. Things that affect large change and can be done immediately by one person should be limited.

This is all moot anyway. It's likely we're going to see more tech come out in the future that addresses your issues in a novel and fun way. For instance, a two man saw that requires half the amount of food. You'll have a partner and have to work in a team. It might take several seconds to use and thus be partnered with another person whose job it is to collect the wood that you and another player are cutting down. Like, that stuff IS COMING, as more content is being added to the game, but there isn't really an issue--that's breaking or preventing the game from functioning--with us having to build a couple more fires in the early game, since we're using tinder not firewood, than we would have had to in previous versions. Like maybe firewood would have been restricted outside of this greifer problem anyway, but it was left easy because the game had other problems at the time and it was to benefit of "the game" that players just have an easy source of wood. As the game develops, all the stages of each arc are going to gain nuance and reward different play styles. I think this is something Jason has mentioned before, in terms of removing a steady state, so I can see why these changes are a benefit, overall.

These aren't solutions tho--this is content. And more content is coming! These are all things that would be in the purview of a game creator already, I mean, he's built this world so far.

As someone who's designed games, feedback like this takes a certain patience because you have to see the post for it's enthusiasm despite it's lack of critique. Jason isn't wrong, there are underlying faulty structures to look at, and the answer isn't always something new. For instance, most of the job cycles are boring. People would bake if baking was fun. People would be happy to farm if farming is fun. People grief, because... griefing is fun. And those players, as much as they are a nuisance to the rest of us, are trying, like the rest of us, to have fun in a game that has limited options. It's tricky, no doubt, to provide just the right amount of toys--and right kind--so that we are both satisfied with the mechanisms in the game, like a challenging and rewarding tech tree or an engaging micro game like farming, but is open enough to allow surprising and interesting emergent game play.

But before we get MORE of everything we should have GREAT of something and right now, we're playing through the growing pains--it seems--of a game hammering out those specifics before exponentially growing.

This sounds fun, not going to lie. A bit like how swapping the tiles, and their numbers, up in Settlers of Catan keeps the game fresh. Also like Catan players, we seem hell bent on making the longest road, lol. And monuments from the previous arc becoming ancient relics in the next arc sounds fun too! But I'm sure stuff like this is bubbling away, somewhere, already.

To the point though yeah, removing the novelty that's created from an endlessly sprawling eve cycle--full disclosure, I never played during that epidemic--has probably highlighted how some of the techs aren't all that engaging. While time is a finite resource in this game, I mean, we only have that one hour, lol, it's probably not cool that most things are just set against it with no playable mechanics in sight outside of clicking on it to interact. The milkweed plant stands out tho. It's an object that takes time but also has "timing" and your interactions with it change greatly based off of a short cycle compared to how long most things take. (Smithing is like this too, and oddly, so is removing a berry bush. Which happens to have a REALLY HIGH SKILLED timing threshold out of nowhere! That shovel damn well better be heckin ready, you newb!)

I wish there was more play around rewarding my growing knowledge of this mini world. As it stands, there's not a lot of difference, in my play, between tasks that I already know how to complete and ones I have to wiki while in game. Which is nice, while learning the game, but without new things to learn, I can totally sympathize with how stale and "repetitive" that might feel for more veteran players who don't have the novelty of this huge tech tree to explore--what was the last job that was completely new to you? There are some basic strategies and techniques to learn with the current game/meta (for the life of me I can't understand why people plant milkweed like they do carrots) that make the game feel "solved" but it's so dope that you can pass on novel techniques to other players just by carrying them around. I just learned a new milkweed practice--laying your seeds out before you till--which solves the problem of players not knowing what you're going to use this space for. Or that you probably need more milkweed grown as they're currently just in their seed form. Like that is so cool. That's not a fix, that's an adaptation and I'm thankful I had some one show me this superior milkweed method.

That kind of "method" based play is also passed down in the sustainability of resources but considering that most resources are on time cycles larger than a single player's life your interaction with that decision making is fairly limited. You can literally watch the iron change color, or the milkweed flower, and those acts engage you more in what you're doing. I mean, baking is all about the mindless prep you do before those five seconds of magic where you fire everything in one shot like the boss ass baker you were BORN TO BE! Those large resource timers are cool in that they make the world immersive, immersive in the sense that while I'm playing with silly animated characters I do feel weight and severity with my resource management choices, but considering how much we farm berries, and then pick them, in this game... the act could use a little more thought/knowledge, out of me as the player, than where to stand so my character moves the least amount so that I may finish this boring chore and fuck off from doing this shitty task. Like berry play should have levels to it, where yeah you can pick that bush, but you should do it like the way your old g-ma is doing if you want the most [quantity/sustainable/rewarding/special] berries. And your gma should kick around and show you instead of just getting naked and choosing a spot where to die. Just kidding, they're not choosing crap. They're going to find the most inconvenient spot to rp their twilight years so that you are forced to remember them as you clean up their shitty ass bones and cart them off to the most nearest patch of undesirable land you can find. As is the law of the rift. So say we all.

I'm sure berry pruning--to produce bushes that now multiply their berries in denominations that better work with sheep feed--and other engaging play is on it's way, and that the current rift won't last forever, but until then, unless we make up fun tasks for ourselves--like the roads joining all four corners of the map--we're not going to have the most meaningful arcs. There will be a day when you want to high five someone because they timed something with your job and the two of your coordinated perfectly (through kismet or skill), but our objects and food persisting the entire length of these arcs, irl days, can leave our time in the rift a little less than impactful.

EDIT*** (To provide an example)

As the example making a backpack in a pretty standard village is:

FIND the snare; FIND a rabbit hole with a family (This is a resource management decision and will be the only choice I make. Baked into this part of the task is where rabbit holes are found and how to get back home/keep myself alive in the "wild" which is made all the trickier because I don't have a BP--this can be fun!); SET a trap; WAIT for rabbit to die; COLLECT the rabbit; FIND a flint chip (again, in a village, this isn't even a thing and if you're a making a flint post Eve-window you are literally littering--reduce reuse recycle); SKIN the rabbit; REPEAT steps 2 through 7 (omitting 6 if you don't lose your chip) until you've collected enough furs; SEW together a backpack following the pop up recipe (with the ball and thread that your village has--see snare and flint chip annotations). Done. Add more steps if you don't have a snare, flint chip, or needle and thread.

So... what if the rabbit can escape it's snare? (timing) What if there is a wasteful way of making a backpack? (method/practice) What if the task could be done solo, but the best strat was done as a duo or trio? (Player interaction)

The rabbits could be plentiful but centralized leading to fights over furs until trade develops but that doesn't change the steps within the task, just the play around it. The task itself is still boring. Though fighting for turf isn't. Like it won't matter if we get reed backpacks, or any number of cool things like statues or submarines, when the steps themselves are mindless/non-engaging within our expected, and or typical, play. After the eve window its not only likely that you'll be born into an established village, but as the arcs get longer our whole play experience is likely to be in those established villages and not at the beginning or end phases of an arc.  ***

I just looked into this Chance To Use mechanic that's used everywhere in the game, from resource regeneration to Bison movement, and I think it totally fits this idea. We already have a Chance To Use on steel tools (their chance to break is governed by a probability that expends one of their Number of Use charges) and I believe providing this same uncertainty to weapons, like you mentioned, adds risk/reward to the combat system. Other games introduce this by adding a "miss" chance and the ability to dodge, either passive or active, but these mechanics could be potentially mirrored and implemented by weapons having a Chance To Use as well.

It would be interesting if you had to risk your life in order to attack.

I'm excited for when armor gets added in too, which I'm sure will be here someday, and it's neat to think about whether it will be introduced as a finite Number of Use item that depletes as you get hit--low level armor good for a few blocks, high level armor good for many blocks--or if it will be probabilistic--5% chance to foul their attack, 15%, 25%. I can't wait.

Until then, wtf?! lol

I feel like this is solved by your community telling you who you are at war with. As in, you kind of need to tell your bbs what's up, what's going on. Giving information like this to the players makes them independent but also breaks with some of the themes of the game--how would a bb know if they were at war? Considering you only need to be 4 to able to ask if you're at war--3 really--we could play this solution instead of fixing it.