a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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"Not approved by Jason Rohrer" is equivalent to "Not permitted by Jason Rohrer" or "Against the wishes of Jason Rohrer".
I agree with Chrostoffer 100% here. To the average *english speaking* person, 'not approved' is going to be synonymous with 'disapproved'. Nevermind non-english speakers. I agree that I would be far less likely to buy a game with that in the title or description, and it is entirely unreasonable to ask them to torpedo their work in that way when they have made every effort to work with Jason, getting his specific approval for verbiage and other conditions earlier. It seems to me that the mobile version *is* in fact approved by Jason. He simply doesn't want confusion between the two, and wants it to be clear he has no influence over the development of the mobile, and not be bothered with suggestions and bug reports regarding it. If he failed to stipulate a sufficient means of that at the early part of their discussion, that to me is his fault. Moving the goal posts now is not reasonable to me, and frankly I think Christoffer is being reasonable under the circumstances.
It seems pretty clear to me (a non-lawyer) that Jason is going to have virtually no legal legs to stand on here, even if all the parties were in America, so this is basically going to be tried in the court of public opinion. And as a member of the public, I find it hard to have any sympathy for Jason here when he (apparently) failed to establish thorough trademark protection. If the mobile had simply used a different name, and different art, I think there would be no need for verbiage question, as nobody is reasonably going to confuse two games named differently and with different art. I'd imagine they may want to revise the player art at least, anyway, for the asian market.
Well I'd understand if you weren't reading this topic anymore after Spoonwood's rants. But:
how would you realize that this was the case? Where would this information be displayed?
The clothes turn to rags when they block a bite (along with a tearing sound). This tells you what happened. If the clothes didn't block it, you died. Aside from that, as another guy said, word of mouth. The same way so much is taught in this game. I honestly thought that passing on game knowledge by word of mouth was one of the charms of this game - complementing the generational family dynamic. Have you added something to explain to a new player the very un-intuitive way shock works? There's tons of things explained nowhere in the tutorial or anywhere else aside from videos. And I would definitely add durability as a third fundamental mechanic, though not directly linked to death. All that said, if the data shows minimal impact to deaths, and you're happy with sales trajectories, then I guess it's no big deal. But seriously though, more storage.
The fact that people weren't wearing clothes or building buildings was something that needed fixing.
The interesting thing here is that if this is in fact your goal - fixing the fact that nobody was wearing clothes, or building buildings - did you ever once consider using factors other than temperature to encourage these things? Because you did not say "temperature was something that needed fixing". I think the problem is you're trying to use temperature as a broad cudgel to get people to do all these things that you want them to do, when there's other, better ways that don't create an early game that is a steep cliff to new players.
Clothing could extend the time before a player dies from wounds, or even have a chance to negate something like a snake bite (rabbit boots 10% chance, fruit boots 30% chance, etc). Buildings could protect advanced equipment from the elements. This stuff has all been suggested before though, so I won't go into detail. But I think you need to widen your tunnel vision with regards to clothes and buildings Jason. It's what's forcing you to create all these weird conditions and rules that are counterintuitive and not fun. You're using a giant cudgel when you could be using a carrot and a smaller cudgel.
I think of dumpling. Rice is rather hard to farm because it technically grows in water
Growing rice in standing water is not required. But rice can tolerate it while most weeds and insects cannot. Its a weed/pest control method. Has some other synergies as well. But its not required.
As for asian elements, good luck. Its virtually impossible to get jason to add anything reasonable or sensible. If youre lucky he'll add chopsticks. But they'll be deadly with no cooldown.
so basically a system where wearing clothing makes you "bigger" and healthier
I like this idea but what if instead of hunger, it was the time till death? So when you get wounded, the better your clothing the more time you have before you die of the wounds? This makes clothes useful regardless of temperature. It would represent that the clothes protect you a bit from the bear or wolf mauling, or the knife/arrow did not go as deep, or the snake bite did not go as deep and didn't get as much poison into you before you pulled it off. For yellow fever, the clothing *reduces* the duration. With the right balance maybe that makes clothing better than no clothing, even with the heat.
A lot of good ideas here, and absolutely important is the point that it is far too tedious to remove and put on every single piece of clothing to make it practical. How clothing works needs rethought.
CLOTHING
You need to have a maximum of 3 temperature affecting clothing items - head, outfit, and coat. Footwear needs to not affect temperature, especially if you insist on keeping it as two separate pieces. Footwear can increase your speed a bit - very slight though.
Your outfit constitutes your shirt and pants (they are one item though - 'a rabbit fur outfit' for instance). Your outfit always stay on, even in a desert. It, along with a light hat, keeps you from getting 'sunstroke'. Naked outdoors in hot climate equals sunstroke, with outfit mattering more than hat. Sunstroke could have many potential affects. Better (higher tier) clothing lasts longer.
If you're going on a cold trip you need to put on a coat and hat, NOTHING MORE. You already have your outfit on all the time; the coat goes over the outfit.
Then give us a coat rack that is built on building walls. One click puts your coat and hat one the rack, the other click takes them off. ONE CLICK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Perhaps clothes on the coat rack remain yours as long as you live. Nobody else can take them. If you die, they fall on the ground - free game. You can always place them one the ground manually, or give them to others. This obviates the theft problem. The coat rack for a given section of wall can hold multiple coat/hat sets, with the possibility that each can be owned by a different person.
BUILDINGS
Buildings, as has been suggested I think scores of times, need to have the benefit of allowing stuff to be built inside that would otherwise decay. Once you've enclosed an area in walls and doors, with floors, it becomes a building, indicated by the floor tiles becoming a darker shade. If you want you could require roofing material be added to each wall section, and once they all have 'thatch' or 'shakes' or 'asphalt shingles' or whatever, *then* it becomes a building.
Regardless, an enclosed building should allow things like coat racks and shelves to be built on the walls. Things like furniture and machinery can be built regardless of building or not, but if not in a building they decay rapidly. A building protects you from the sun. If the biome is cold, the building is warmer, and with a fire warmer still. The fire can only heat a building of a maximum area. Beyond that it does nothing. Later you can make better stoves to heat larger buildings. If buildings were require to have better storage and higher tier machinery, that alone would drive people to build them regardless of heat affects or lack thereof.
BIOMES
Now, think outside the temperature box. Start thinking about biomes and how you can make them support the behavior you want.
Right now people cluster in deserts, for the pips. You need to make deserts have more drawbacks if you don't want people settling there. For instance, crops in a desert need to be watered *twice* before they will grow. Now you've made farming in a desert have pluses (lower food drain) but minuses (heavier water use). Or take it further. Deserts need 3x the water, plains take 2x the water for plants that are not native to plains.
Next, make swamps NEVER appear next to desert biomes. Now there will be no ponds near deserts, so that double plant watering becomes more onerous. Make biomes consistent. Get rid of these tiny pieces that pop up here and there. and make sure that each biome is sizeable. What you're doing here is trying to prevent swamps and desert from being so close that a town can straddle them and whatever biome is between.
Now address the clothing-mosquito problem a bit. Make mosquitoes despawn in any biome other than jungle or swamp. This obviates the problem of people getting ninja-skeetered in off biomes. So then they might be more willing to wear warm clothing in areas they know mosquitoes cannot live ever. If they can still 'overlap' into swamp, fine, they might be there occasionally. If biomes can't overlap because of previous changes, then give swamps a lower chance for mosquitoes. And maybe make the two mosquitoes give different effects. Jungle mosquitoes give malaria (green tinge), which becomes the deadly one. Yellow Fever is swamp mosquitoes, and it does not have the heat component, just forces you to drop your stuff.
If necessary, keep going and give other biomes more disadvantages *aside from temperature* that will make people reconsider settling there. When all this discussion just focuses on temperature, the solutions have to become very complicated to get all desired results. But if you bring other factors into play, you can give each biome its own distinct advantages and disadvantages that don't have to be as complicated as they do if you try to divide the biomes based on one vector alone.
Along the lines of what a previous person said, I think this obsession over 'realistic' heat calculations is muddling the forest for the trees. Stop agonizing over how to most accurately calculate heat - work backwards from the behavior you want. I don't think you need heat calculations at all. When you're in a given biome, you are at the heat level of that biome, modified by clothes, buildings, and fires, but trending toward neutral. You should not be able to overheat in cold biomes outside of something truly extraordinary, like if you have a blast furnace or something in the game. It's very easy for animals to deal with heat, outside of certain very extreme environments, and even then it's mostly the lack of water that's problematic. That's why the tropics are so teeming with life. Cold always has been the far, far more severe threat to life.
In summary, think outside the temperature box. Examine the behavior you want or don't want, then think how the many factors of the game can be brought to bear to change that behavior.
The game has a lot of things working against trade ever being a realistic thing right now.
- The primary one, as Booklat mentioned, is that there is only one truly important resource, which is iron. Everything else is infinite or optional. Moreover, that one important resource has a very shallow availability. It exists scattered about, or in mines of limited supply. A town which has a large iron supply needs nothing else from any other town. All you need to access those mines is a single ingot of steel in the form of a pickaxe.
- The tech tree is too easily accessed. A few simple machines allow you to manufacture all sorts of goods. Really one machine with a few simple attachments. This makes it easy enough for every town to do everything.
- The reason iron is the only critical resource is because food and water are easy to get, and no other resources truly matters. The only other thing that qualifies as a possibly important and limited resource is fertile females. But you cannot control those in the same way you might try to control a mine, and the supply is not fully within Jason's control.
- The player's life is too short to make an individual's skill a marketable thing. There are experienced players who can make complicated things like cars or radios, and this normally would be of value and marketable, but within the context of OHOL, your life is too short, and you don't 'belong' to any one town. Yes, you can churn through lives or wait till your lineage ban expires, but the game does not encourage the concentration of trade knowledge.
The 3rd item isn't really fixable, and the fourth would require a huge shift in the game meta. I think the best solutions that would move the game towards trade would be to increase the depth of the resource tree, and at the same time require ever more complex and resource intensive machinery to fully exploit those resources.
So your first iron mine access just costs a pick, but then one the pick-iron runs out it should cost auger bits for a time, similar to how the oil well costs a random amount of bits. Or perhaps you have to hook up a water pump to keep the mine drained, and run it between every 'picking' of the mine to keep it drained. And that costs more piping each time. Then bits aren't enough and you have to have a pneumatic drill and dynamite, then some kind of excavating machine. And every time you move up a tech requirement you need more resources. A pick and maybe the first drill are just iron. The auger requires rubber belts and leather seals, which randomly wear out. The pneumatic drill requires copper for the electric motor, which can burn out. The excavator requires all that plus diesel and rubber. The costs need to continually mount, and eventually the towns have to decide where they will spend their resources. And the same kind of thing would apply to a copper mine. Or a nitre mine. Etc.
Each resource point needs to require ever greater infrastructure, such that one town cannot do it all. One town focuses on extracting the iron, another focuses on copper. Every appropriate resource should have a mine, including limestone and pigments. And down the road aluminum and more. But mines should be rare enough that they are spread very far apart, so that one town can't easily exploit multiple mines. The machinery for each mine needs to be non-transportable (or maybe only by rail, which will be close enough).
Also far more of the machinery in the game needs to require enclosed buildings to keep it safe form the weather. Your lathes and other tools should rust into useless scrap if they're built outside exposed. This would further increase infrastructure cost, preventing random machine spam.
The more costly it is to pursue resources long-term, the more likely you can have specialized traders. Both in primary resources (iron, copper, other mined stuff) and secondary resources (rubber, leather). You'll know when the game has an economy of sorts when people are choosing town locations based as much on what mines or secondary resources are near, rather than just water.
I think the wells should recover water every 5-10min. then it is possible to sustain a small community.
No, that's the easy way out. What needs to happen is Jason needs to sharpen his pencil and work on upper levels of the tech tree. Make upgrades to deep wells, using pumps of various sorts, and/or aquaducts. I'm told he has said at one point that the tech above current is 'cosmetic', but this is a perfect example of an actually useful tech advancement.
There is no way that any artist will ever listen to any consumers
He climbed down off his high 'I'm not going to solve griefing for you' horse and implemented donkeytown. So I'd say 'no way ever' is inaccurate, thankfully.
Considering the game slid from highs of around 100 players when I first found out about it, to less than 40 by the time of steam release - a matter of about 3 months in which he added little of real importance - Jason may have to choose between having a dead game 'his way', or an active game that maybe pays attention to what players want.
It's important to differentiate between mechanization, and automation. The former really needs to happen. The latter does not. Even today, in this modern era, huge swathes of farming are still heavily dependent on unskilled manual labor. Mechanization simply allowed fewer people to farm more ground. It did not automate it. The only part that's really automated even today is planting, via satellite gps. Compound this with the fact that in game there's no need to feed even thousands of people with one farm.
Beyond that, lumbering, mining, construction, all these things are not truly automated in the hands-off sense, except for some extremely niche machines for building houses of masonry. The savings over the years have been more matters of time, and numbers of people required. But the game already requires mere seconds to build a wall, or cut down a tree. So where can the game go from there? The best target for automation in the game is watering. Anything else, the game meta will need to change to support it, unless we're just talking futuristic factorio robot stuff that auto-harvests crops.
Maybe there could be another upgraded stage to mines? Or even a few. This could go on top of the tech-tree.
This. Emphatically this. There should be multiple tiers of mine. First tier should consume an entire pick and yield more pieces. Second tier should require a minecart kit, and yield yet more. Tier three involves explosives (a hand cart full?), Tier four a pneumatic drill. And maybe more beyond. Each upgrade yields progressively more ore, commensurate with the requirements of the tech level.
If you want to make minecarts actually useful, The tier 2 and higher mines output a different kind of iron ore, that is heavy like boulders, and only fits in minecarts, not handcarts. Now there would be an actual use for minecarts potentially. Well, after you also reduce the iron cost of rails.
This kind of tiering would make the mine continually useful, and encourage teching up. Think ahead a bit.
As for potatoes, has nobody ever heard of a potatoe fork?
Have you ever noticed that mangoes make your mouth itch a little bit? Now imagine being force-fed the leaves!
I gather there is an 'urushiol poisoned cow' in the game? Check around the web a bit; urushiol is only harmful to humans. To the best of my understanding literally no other animal (besides humans) on the planet is affected by it, and certainly not cows. The Indian Yellow practice was cruel because the cows were malnourished, not because the mango leaves contained urushiol.
You do have the benefit of using one of the most used languages on Earth, behind Mandarin and (I think) Spanish.
THE most spoken, according to many sources. Though far from it if you only count native speakers. But native or not doesn't really matter when it comes to selling games.
I wouldn't mind graves being permanent either if they went ancient like walls. This way you can have your nice little graveyards be grief proof while allowing people to remove a quickly put up uncle grave.
Ya this kind of delay is key, I think, to allowing some things to be permanent. Becomes permanent after 10 hours or so. This gives the citizens plenty of time to remove it if a griefer puts it in a bad spot, but also allows it to become a permanent un-griefable fixture in the town. This could be done with graves and rose bushes at least, I think. If citizens fail to fix a grief placement for 10 hours, it's their fault really.
And tell me why steam players will improve the game?
No guarantees on the players. But their money will, if it allows Jason to continue paying his bills while improving OHOL.
Like I said in the other thread, require they live a certain length of time, or it doesn't count. They're griefers, shouldnt be a problem if they do it legit. If you want to provide some leeway, then they have to survive a number of years equal to their permanent curse score. By the time you accumulate 60 Curse points you should have no trouble dying of old age
Yes, I had suggested this before. That buildings should prevent decay.
Yep, I've seen both these general suggestions - tables/shelving and buildings to prevent various effects - many times. It just floors me that rather than picking actually good ideas, Jason does useless stuff like paper, minecarts, and dogs.
The game really does need more incentive for buildings, but not temperature, and not requiring a building just to build a thing. It needs to be the case that higher tier tech than we have now needs protection from the elements to survive. So you drill presses, table saws, and other machinery need an enclosure or they rust into lumps of steel (which can be recycled). They'd just check every minute or something, to make sure they are in an enclosure. If they aren't they accumulate an 'exposure' point. Once they've accumulated, say, 20 exposure points, they're rusted solid. The long exposure time is to allow people to rebuild griefed walls and doors before damage occurs. But still well within a person's life. I cannot possibly be that hard to check for enclosure once in awhile. Obviously there will be a limit of range that can be checked, which will limit building size, but they should be able to be plenty large enough to use.
Also the game needs tables which can hold four items on top, and shelves which can also store numerous items. But, being nice carpentry, they will decay if exposed for too long. This would incentivize players to start cooking inside, or at least have mess halls, while reducing clutter. You'd start having buildings that are more than just warehouses.
Starting the timer 5 minutes in would do the trick.
Only count cooldown time after they grow hair.
Depends if you believe Joriom's claim that his bot can live till old age pretty regularly. End of life food bar is so small, even a bot just running around grabbing wild food may have a hard time of it. To say nothing of the animal risk from constantly running around. The thing about only counting time after some certain point is, if they're legit playing you're cheating them out of time all the time. I think it's better that it be backward-inclusive.
I doubt jason is interested in bot cat-and-mouse games. How about only lives where you die of old age count toward working off your curse points. Would foil a fair amount of bots i imagine. And regardless of bots, would make the cursed take banishment more seriously.
The problem is permanent curse tracking fundamentally changes the nature of cursing. Previously it had no consequence in and of itself - just an indicator, and even when that threshhold was reached, it was brief, so people (theoretically) only cursed in situations where they thought the person had pissed off enough people to possibly reach the 10 curse threshhold. It was better to keep your curse point 'fresh' for someone that really really deserved it, rather than use it in a petty fashion and not have it when you need it. Because if you used it on someone unlikely to get 10 curses, you well and truly wasted your point.
With permanent curse tracking, now every single curse point you get is a liability due to increasing banishment time. So now cursing is a punishment in an of itself, rather than just an indicator. So now you're at the end of a life, haven't used your curse point, you know half the griefers are in donkey town anyway, and you're not likely to need it. But there was that player that wouldn't give you their backpack when they were old. Or ate that potato, depriving you of your best yum chain ever. Or that one that just rp'ed most of the time. Ya, might as well drop a curse point on them - it's not wasted, because it's on their permanent record. In fact NOT using it is wasting it, really. This is a bad incentive. It will incentivize petty behavior. It's bad for the social game. Moreover, it's going to throw a wet blanket on all activity. Now more, if not most, people will tipetoe around not wanting to attract a petty curse point. Better to keep your head down and work, never cause a ruckus, never do anything controversial. Basically the opposite of interesting.
One can debate all they want on exactly what 'Jason solving it' means, but it's undeniable that permanent curse tracking fundamentally alters the very nature of cursing itself. It makes it no longer an indicator that players can use as they see fit, and turns it into a punishment in and of itself. Curse tokens to give are free for everyone, don't require any work, and so contributes nothing to the game economy. A knife at least requires use of in-game resources.
Lol superfuns auto clicker will have to run for a month to get him outta donkey town by next week
Yeah, at some point the amount of electricity one is using running their auto clicker may be more than just buying a new account. Of course if one lives with one's parents then you're not worried about the utility bill.
I do think punishment based on a permanent curse score is not going to work out very well though in the long run. It creates really bad incentives
Id still like to know how long it's going to take to get out of donkey town. 3+ hours in-game and still black.
Depends how many curse points you have. And also whether Jason implemented the permanent curse score. See here: https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewt … 616#p30616.
Especially note the formula: 1 + ( totalCurseScore / 20 )^2. If your total curse score is 20, you will decrement your current curse score at 1 per 2 hours. If your total is 40, 1 per 5 hours. If you're the guy with like, over 100 total curse points that Jason mentioned, then you're looking at decrementing at the rate of 1 curse point per 26 hours.
He did lower the curse cap from 10 to 8 though. I don't know what happens to those who already gathered 10 curses prior. They might have to live out 3 hours to get out of donkey town instead of one.
I think what he did was make Donkey-town exile happen at 8 curses, but the cap is either still 10, or was removed. It should definitely be removed. These and the increased visibility were good ideas.
However, he may have created a problem if he implemented the permanent curse tracking. Because that will turn cursing itself into a form of griefing, that will catch possibly innocent players, but almost certainly those who are firm and ready with the knife to kill sponges and such, but are not really griefing, not in the true sense. I really hope he didn't implement permanent curse tracking yet because he for sure needs to remove note cursing first. That would make it super-easy for griefers to run up innocent players' permanent curse score.