"Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

Joriom · 2018-05-22 01:18:32

I don't like where this is going...
Rebalancing the same thing for the n-th time...
Game balance is just like optimalization...
1) Don't.
2) Don't yet... (expert mode)
3) Profile first.

Question directly to Jason:
Did you spend half a year rewriting protocol code 50 times just to get it perfect, ideal, super fast, include every possible message you will add in the future, "the basics right", before you started to write 2nd function in LivingLifePage.cpp?
Or even better - apply it to database. Which you had to reimplement but only after it started acting up.

Three months have passed. 500 "items" were added to the game (mostly multiple states of the same item though). That makes average of 2000 per year - under 800 if we talk only about "unique" stuff without StateA, StateB, StateC.

Lets have a reality check.

Morti · 2018-05-22 06:54:19

Joriom wrote:

I don't like where this is going...

Agreed.

Please give us more branches of the tree to explore.

What happened to 10,000 leaves?

pein wrote:

lets say you introduce cabbage, ...and one more plant like potato.

This is what we need.

More resources. More branches to explore. More combinations. More ways to balance priorities.

Give us more metals. Give us more animals. More plants. More food recipes. More tools.

Give us minerals and chemistry. Let us make structures with functions like windmills and water wheels. Make a new biome like a river, lake or ocean, with new plants animals, resources and useful tech to exploit it at various levels.

Make some of the existing things do more. You have iron and flint, why can't I put the iron on a pile of tinder, strike the iron with a flint, the spark jumps onto the tinder, I remove the iron and plop some kindling on it and POOF, fire. If you thin thats too easy, make the flint consumable, or at least give it limited uses.

I could make recommendations like this all day, but, that's the easy part. You have the talent and the knowledge to do the hard part, make it a reality in game.

I don't want to play on a private server where people are doing their own things. I want to play your game. The way you want to see it unfold.

Please, take a day to to decide what the next x things are you're going to add, and then put them on paper, scan them in and we'll be happy.

I'm okay with you tweaking things along with the new stuff. You want to make milkweed rarer? Give us flax to farm too. You want to make iron rarer? Give us copper too. It's a logical pre-iron step; it's softer, takes less heat to smelt , but it's not as durable. Place it's tools somewhere between stone and iron in terms of durability.

Please, give us more to play with so we have more options. It'll give old players new things to toy with and new players can feel like they are on even ground when we don't know what to do with the new things any more than they do. Then we can all have more rolls to fill.

10,000 things over the course of two years, sounds like a lot of fun.

10,000 things / 730 days, thats like 14 things a day, 100 things a week. You've put so much work into that engine, and it really does seem pretty easy for you to add things into the game. I imagine it's even easier when you;re not talking to a camera or giving a presentation at GDC, at the same time.

Just toss us some bones to gnaw on while you sort the other things out.

Christoffer · 2018-05-22 07:39:15

Though I will concede that Pain, Joriom and Morti have a point, I still think that enhancements are also good, though new additions should perhaps get a larger piece of the work pie. Here are my two cents on Jason's plan:

jasonrohrer wrote:

My main goal here is to eliminate the "be careful or ruin stuff forever" feeling. That feeling is separate from whether stuff runs out or not.
These are the changes that I'm making in this direction:
1. Ponds refill slower, and a dry pond isn't fatal (it's just one final state of emptiness that refills at the same rate).
2. Wells are bigger than ponds, refill faster than ponds, and deep wells refill way faster than ponds. A dry well is no longer fatal (just a final stage of emptiness from which they refill at the same rate).
The idea with 1 and 2 is that the rate at which you can farm food is more limited if you are using ponds, and water-generation is wasted if a well is left full for too long, meaning that cisterns become useful to even out water production. Maybe I will boil the frog here and keep slowing down ponds so that wells become even more necessary.

3. Milkweed never regrows, regardless of when it is picked. However, milkweed seeds can still be gathered infinitely from one fruiting plant (as always), but now milkweed seeds last forever. They can be easily disposed of in a fire.
4. Loose iron is 10x less common, but iron vein is 2x more common, and iron mine produces 40 iron (instead of 20) on average.

Changes 2 and 4 are also aimed at making wells and mines more necessary for an advanced civ, but also helping to make iron run out a bit more.

5. Tilling tools now have 6, 20, and 50 uses instead of 10, 40, and 100. Iron/stone is supposed to be the limit on food production, in the end, so I'm tightening this up gradually as part of boiling the frog.

I think these changes are good, but for number 3. That one is dangerous and will likely break more than it repairs. To make Milkweed work that way and not break the game will require more changes than the ones listed here, I'm betting. So it's either A) leave Milkweed as is, or B) make more changes, probably ones that have to do with Soil.

argument for A:
People make mistakes with Milkweed, but they are not of the same magnitude as drying up ponds and wells. As a settlement grows, people eventually start to grow back Milkweed, which you can't do with ponds. In short, the system kind of works and changing it risks breaking something significantly.

argument for B:
Here I will float a previous idea in a new form. Soil is a bit of a problem already, as you can destroy it through griefing or mistakes, and it feels a bit artificial how it's used. What about making soil space limited instead of having it artificially limited? Like this:
1. Using a hoe on bare green ground produces a tilled row. (don't think you should be able to plant in snow, swamp, desert, rocks. Possibly the yellow ground in addition to green?)
2. Some step of the farming cycle has a chance to turn the ground infertile through the usage system (could be tilling, planting or harvesting, not sure which is best). Infertile ground could be implemented as a type of Floor, so it stays in place, you can put things there, but you can't grow there again.
3. Later on, compost and fertilizers like manure or ashes could provide ways to reclaim infertile land.

So, for a new civilization, fertile soil is abundant and farming is limited by other factors (work, water, tools). For a big civilization, good farming land might run out, farms may have to be relocated, which causes the need for new types of decisions. Should we invest in producing fertilizers or should we re-plan the city? If we move the farm, do we have to dig new wells or is it ok to run twice as long for water? ...

My suggestion: As much as I would like to see B) happen in some form, go with A) for now and take time to figure out B) well before implementing. Perhaps start a new thread to discuss Soil specifically and get more ideas from the community?

Potjeh · 2018-05-22 10:52:08

You guys don't get it, you can't build a straight house on crooked foundations. This isn't so much about the concrete examples as it is about principles behind adding new stuff. What's the point in getting new things if they're useless shit? Show of hands, who's ever seen a main server town using an actual iron mine? Or a town with a significant number of non-dry wells? The only things that get some use (but still very little) are pure cosmetics. Is that what you want from future content - nothing but letter stocks and wool dyes?

Last edited by Potjeh (2018-05-22 10:53:00)

FounderOne · 2018-05-22 11:36:27

I think this is more a ground laying decision, then some tweaking around.

Jason said "My main goal here is to eliminate the "be careful or ruin stuff forever" feeling. That feeling is separate from whether stuff runs out or not."

And

"I agree that a lot of the gameplay focuses on "not doing something," which is not very interesting. I never thought of it that way, but "don't pick the non-fruiting milkweed, don't drain the pond, don't drain the well, don't snare the non-family rabbit, don't forget to water the languishing bush" do kind of create a walking on eggshells feeling."

I don't think the solution to this should be to make things regenerate by their own like wells.

I think the right approach should look like this:

The higher the tech, the harder to maintain.
You got X stages of maintenance.

What does it mean? If you take the water mechanic for example.

You got first the pond, no building cost, no maintainance, less output.

Second you got the well, you got small building cost, (should have) some small maintenance, slightly better output.

Maintenance:
First stage:
After X uses the well decays and the output reduces to the amount a pond would give. You can repair it with X stones.

Second stage:
If you wait even longer it collapse and you can gather a few stones from it.

Then you got the deep well, slightly higher building cost, slightly higher maintenance and slightly higher output.

Maintenance:
First stage:
Gets reduced to a well you need a few stones and wood to repair it.

Second stage: output like a pond. You can only repair it to a well and need a new fence kit.

Third stage:
Collapse, you can gather a few stones from it.

Then you have maybe a pump station next.
The pump station is made out of different materials then a well, so it cant downgrade to a well all of the sudden. The pump station would be the first stage again(like the well with 1 maintain step and one break step) and then you have maybe a deep pump station(like the deep well with 2 maintenance steps and one break step).

So each higher tech should increase the building and maintenance cost for a automated water pump you need a lot resources to maintain, but you also get a lot from it.

Since the cost increase for higher tech, you need to get more and more resources for example more iron. With low tech you can't afford to get that much iron, so you need higher tech to get the iron and ofc more resources and more maintainance to get your higher iron output.

You get a warning (visual and output wise) before it is fully destroyed and the higher the tech the better the quality. If you see something broken it is just naturally to fix it.

The limitation of the resources is the regeneration time and the maintaining work you put into it.
The more you advance the more resources you will need and the more likely it is that your resource production can't keep up with the amount of resources you need.
So you got three limitations.

And I think not doing something or destroying something in the nature also belongs to life and the game. The game will sure be easier and relaxter, but wrong picked milkweeded etc leads to a crisis and good stories. People should act responsible with their environment.

With tech and some parts of nature there should be a way to maintain and fix mistakes.

jasonrohrer · 2018-05-22 19:09:34

Yeah, I am trying to work out core principles here that everything will abide by as I add more stuff.

What are the rules by which I add higher tech?

For example, an obvious next step is some kind of pump well, maybe a hand pump, and then maybe a wind pump, eventually a motor pump.

How do these things work, relative to the existing wells and ponds?

I need some kind of design rule that ties everything together. Worst case, I add all these things, and after a few days of role-playing pump-builder, players go back to just using ponds again.

"Everything runs out" is one design rule that works here. If the ponds simply don't refill, players must make wells or die. And if the wells don't refill, players must make pumps or die. The pump wells go dry, players must make wind-pumps or die. Same with motor pumps. Then the petrol runs dry, and players must make solar motors or die.

"Everything runs out" works even if some things really don't run out, but simply are produced too slowly. Wild berry bushes are a great example, since they're currently tuned so that you cannot survive in one place on them for long. Farm or snare or die. So ponds can use the same technique. If you depend on them alone, you won't produce water fast enough.

So, that's great for natural resources. Some run out entirely (iron ore), and others are produced too slowly to sustain you.

But how do man-made resources work?

The problem is that there's no limit on how many of these can be built in one area. If wells produce X water per hour, then 10 wells produce 10X water per hour. It would be hard to make the pump well 10X faster. Even 2X faster is a lot. So you could build 1 pump well or 2 regular wells, and if regular wells are easier to build, which they have to be...

If regular wells last forever, then you will probably have enough of them around from previous generations that you never need to build pump wells.

So, maybe infinite, with rate increases for higher tech, doesn't work.

One of my local design friends thinks this is the way tech should work. The ponds in an area cannot sustain more than 1 person. Build a well, and you can sustain 2 people. Build 2 wells, and you can sustain 4 people, Upgrade a well to a pump well, and you can sustain 8 people, etc.

The problem is that, in practice, anything more than about 8 people in a village is superfluous to the village's long-term survival. Maybe that will change as things get more complicated, and more roles are needed. But it doesn't seem like "sustaining a bigger and bigger population" is really anyone's core goal.

Furthermore, we can't control even how many ponds you have access to, let alone how many wells you build. So you might luck out and find yourself in a natural area that can sustain 8 people right from the start. Or an area with a bunch of loose stones, so you can easily build 3 regular wells and be set forever.

What about finite with increasing capacity? While the natural things regrow over time, albeit slowly, maybe the man-made things do not?

That is the current difference between a carrot farm and a wild berry bush. The berry bush produces food slowly forever, and you have no control over how many you have access to. The carrot farm produces 5 carrots per row, but that's it, and you can have as many rows as you want. After a row is gone, you have to build a new one, which slowly consumes resources over time.

So, this is the version of the well that is like a tank with 50 water in it. Once it's empty, it's empty. Build a new one, or upgrade it to get 100 water. A cistern becomes useless (because a well is essentially a cistern that starts full), though a cistern is still useful for ponds.

The question with higher and higher tech shifts from "how many people can you sustain" to "how long can you last?" This gives us a lot of design flexibility, because we can tweak these numbers a lot without breaking anything. We can easily give some higher tech 100x the capacity of lower tech, which just means it lasts 100x as long. (On the other hand, if we were to give something 100x the production rate, that would support 100x the population, which would effectively mean the resource is unbounded.)

We can also be much more generous with natural sources, if they run out in the same way. If a pond produces X water per hour, our hands are tied, and we have to keep X low, so that higher water tech is worth building. But if a pond simply produces X water total, then X can be whatever we want it to be. No matter how high we make X, it will eventually run out, and people will need to move on to wells.

For carrots, this would mean that putting fertilizer on your carrot row would make the same row grow 10 carrots instead of 5, and using a deep plow first would make the same row produce 20.

The problem is that it kinda feels weird for some resources, and runs contrary to real life expectations. Real wells don't have fixed capacity like this. It does make some sense for the highest tech, because a petrol pump well would eventually run out of fuel and need refilling.

What about temporarily infinite with increasing timespan?

A well could produce infinite water for 5 minutes, and then go dry. A pump well could produce infinite water for 10 minutes. A wind pump for 20 minutes, etc.

During that time, there would be a frenzy of water use, harvest, and storage. Cisterns would be crucial. Then the well would go dry, and there would be drought. Perhaps the well could run on a cycle, 5 minutes water, 30 minutes dry, 5 minutes water. Perhaps the higher tech could make the dry time shorter and shorter.

For carrots, during a brief harvest window, there would be infinite carrots to pick and store.

This would also seem to eliminate the benefit of more than one of any resource-producer. Storage would be king. Though building wells at different times might give you infinite water all the time, as the well cycles would form phase patterns.

This "feast or famine" model is pretty out-there, but it's an interesting corner of the design space to think about.

Then, there are hybrid approaches. Fixed capacity, with some refill time in between. A well with 50 water. Once drained, it takes 30 minutes to recharge. Then you can take another 50 water. Better wells can have greater capacity and/or shorter recharge times.

This is currently how domestic berry bushes work, along with some maintenance.

Another hybrid approach is to have everything recharge VERY slowly, pretty much at the same rate regardless of tech, but modulate starting capacity for higher and higher tech. This again gives us flexibility with ponds, because we can give them higher starting capacity. Essentially, this could be tweaked so that, no matter how many wells you have, you always need to build more eventually, but wells never become totally dry and useless.

YAHG · 2018-05-22 20:54:20

You could also have the buildings interact with each other:

Perhaps wells near other wells influence each others fill rates negatively.
Too many farms of the same plant in an area could give an increasing risk of blight.
Leaving poop near your food or near your Animals could increase risk of ruining it or them dying to disease.
Wormy rows could spread to adjacent hardened rows over time.
Trees can spawn saplings and saplings can grow into trees.

You can have buildings interact with the environment in both directions:

Wells may fill faster in swamps, slower in deserts perhaps not work at all in the arctic.
Wells cold also influence the areas water table, which in turn can change areas from one biome to another.
Perhaps too much water drained too fast could dry up a swamp or turn grass lands to prairies etc.
Building a pump and an irrigation channel might make the desert bloom.
Higher level techs could melt the arctic and turn ice holes into ponds.
Swampland could water plants very slowly, while maybe farming in deserts could need more water.
Crops can have preferred biomes that influence yields and growth times as well as have the chance to spread to the wild.
Perhaps crops even have biome exclusions so no one village can grow everything, giving a natural reason to trade.
Farming carrots over and over in the same area could influence their growth times, perhaps fertilizer could mitigate this?
Perhaps different types of fertilizer could have different risks, for example poop could spread disease.

Kinrany · 2018-05-22 20:56:57

jasonrohrer wrote:

But doesn't an infinite resource mean busy-work with no decisions to make?

I'm not sure if there's any connecting between the resource being infinite (in the "never runs out" sense) and busywork.
Note that if the village's progress is, due to stuff running out, a series of plateaus, each plateau will have it's own unique kind of busywork, but many characters will be born and die on the same plateau and never see anything change.
Resources being finite or infinite is village-scope gameplay, but busywork is character-scope gameplay.

There are a few things that do take time, mostly for thematic reasons. Making charcoal, growing plants and animals. It would be weird and confusing if you planted carrot seeds and instantly got carrots. But maybe this game should work like this. Waiting isn't interesting.

This.
You could also make actions cost food, and make the cost significantly higher than the cost of living. This way there'll be a trade-off between optimizing for food and optimizing for time, and wasting time will mostly harm the character, not the whole village.

That said, waiting can be interesting. The optimal strategy can be multitasking, doing several similar or different things in parallel.
I think it works well when the waiting times are long enough that multitasking makes sense in the first place, and also when the risks of losing progress because of multitasking are not too high. If you're smelting unobtanium, wasting half the time waiting is still better than smelting two batches in parallel and risking to lose one. Multitasking should be more efficient than waiting.

Waiting for a pond/well to refill is even less interesting than waiting for carrots to grow. But I guess I'm having similar thematic trouble here.... is this a world without rain? How can a well never refill?

Right, water isn't something you'd expect to be finite, since nothing actually destroys it. Unless you have a sci-fi reactor that uses it as fuel or something.

There's also something different here, because a well/pond refills over and over, and all without you doing anything. No resources are spent, no decisions are made. Growing carrots also takes time and waiting, but it's not automatic, and it uses resource along the way.

Ponds and wells could randomly become clogged. You'd need to clean them to make them refill, and you'd need better tools to maintain deeper wells.

Morti · 2018-05-22 22:09:06

jasonrohrer wrote:

The problem is that, in practice, anything more than about 8 people in a village is superfluous to the village's long-term survival. Maybe that will change as things get more complicated, and more roles are needed. But it doesn't seem like "sustaining a bigger and bigger population" is really anyone's core goal.

It would be if that was the way you designed the game.

Let's say you reach your goal of 10,000 items in two years. Let's say when you reach that point there are also 10,000 people playing the game and 1,000 or more in the largest city. It could be something like this:

jasonrohrer wrote:

What about temporarily infinite with increasing timespan?

The problem with this, even if you make it 60 seconds infinite, with 60 minute recharge, people will just make 60 wells, or what have you, one per minute.

Life has worked out really well for billions of years, balancing resources, especially the chemistry provided by autotrophs, the primary producers of chemistry at the base of the food/life pyramid. If you really want to get a message out about sustainability, especially when it comes to organisms like ourselves, that are built from the products they provide, their role in all life's sustainability that has afforded increasingly complex beings like us the opportunity to exist, is the foundation of the slope that humanity stands at the pinnacle of. Every life form on Earth that exists in the present stands on top of them.

If we are going to survive long into the future, at least in our present organic states, we are either going to have to make their lives easier by providing for them, or, industrialize the chemical roles they have been filling for the last four billion years, and continue to this very moment.

Sorry, maybe that's all too much for you right now.

All I want to say is, look to reality; look to the history of life, humanity being just a small sliver of that; to ecology, paleontology and anthropology, and in them, you will get a sense of the numbers we would be able to live with as we attempt to rehumanize the world, if, we had to start over in the hypothetical situation you are presenting as the, sort of, plot of this game.

Kinrany · 2018-05-22 22:15:15

I think the "Everything runs out" approach ignores time and doesn't work in practice. In the game, in the real world, or in any other sufficiently similar possible world. It's blind to the fact that, while there's entropy and human civilization is technically doomed, locally all economic systems grow all the time.

They still spend energy to sustain themselves, but they're mostly constrained by their ability to use resources. So the life of an economic system consists of two parts: the first part where it grows by increasing it's ability, and the second part where it dies because there's nothing to do but consume the available resources.

Maybe this is how successful villages should look like. Though the process of dying seems really boring.

It might be better to use something like a resource flow model. There are resources, and there are tools used to convert resources. Natural resources are sources, humans eating food to survive is a sink, and survival depends on the maximum flow between them being sufficiently high.

Except it's not a static network, so Petri nets might be more appropriate. Tools are resources too, flow capacity can be increased by making new tools. This improvement can't be always free though, or any system that is over the survival threshold would grow exponentially.

Using a tool has three costs:

the overhead cost paid once to create the tool
the marginal cost of the resources consumed in the conversion process
the fixed cost paid over time to maintain the tool.

Maintenance means that there are more sinks, and more energy is irreversibly lost over time.

Replacing "don't do X to Y, it's wasteful" rules with "when Y breaks, do X to restore it" could kill two birds with one stone: make in-game education more pleasant and intuitive, and make the economy easier to control.

P. S.
I love economics in multiplayer survival games, so if anyone knows of any places that have high quality discussions on this topic, I'd be really happy to be invited, please feel free to PM me.

Edit: broken link fix

Last edited by Kinrany (2018-05-22 22:58:37)

jasonrohrer · 2018-05-22 22:43:25

YAHG, sounds cool, but that stuff is beyond the scope of this engine, which has A+B crafting, decay timers, and use counts, but no inter-tile interactions. There's no "water" under the ground or anything. Nothing is actually simulated here. It's all just faked with A+B crafting.

Morti:
1000 people in one city is never going to happen for tech reasons.

A stress test before launch of robot clients walking around in the game maxed out at about 300. And that's with nothing in the world besides nature. Network can't handle sending that much data, client can't handle drawing that many objects, etc.

So, the hypothetical 10,000 player future of this game would involve 50-100 separate servers.

Looking at reality is somewhat helpful, but also not that helpful, because of the limitations of my simulation. Why do people eat potatoes and meat instead of just carrots? It's not just caloric practicality (you'd have to eat 100s of carrots a day to survive, and then you'd die of vitamin poisoning), but nutrition, which I'm not simulating. Also, why tomatoes? Mostly for taste, which I'm not simulating.

Why do people dig wells instead of just hauling water from ponds? Contamination of drinking water, which I'm not simulating. Also convenience (well in town center, less walking), which I'm simulating. Pumps and other things are mostly time-savers. Bigger up-front time cost, long-term time savings. But why not just build the farm right next to the pond? Probably land quality, grade, etc, which I'm not simulating.

Maybe the manual wells need to be multi-step somehow.

But the granularity of my simulation kinda papers over that. Almost everything happens instantly, like baking a pie. That makes time-savers hard to simulate.

Deep well could take time to lower the bucket and time to raise it again. But shallow well? The main reason people don't just use those in real life is contamination or maybe location (water table too deep, and I'm not simulating that either).

The point is that many of the real-life reasons for doing things don't apply inside this game. I need to make sure there are reasons that match the granularity of my simulation.

And this has nothing to do with some kind of sustainability "message." It has to do with making an interesting game that's not broken. "Broken" meaning there are major elements of the game that never come into play in practice, or that only novice players would be stupid enough to use.

There will be lots of broken things in the game over time, but I need a lever that I can pull to fix them. I need to make sure that the lever has both granularity and range, so that I don't run out of room to make something even better than the previous tech in a way that actually matters.

Imagine a situation in a given village where nothing but deep wells exist at the top of the tech tree, and you've been getting along for days with just those. Then I introduce pump wells in an update. You've still got all your deep wells around, however, and you were doing fine without pump wells before, so why would you suddenly rush to upgrade? You might do it just out of curiosity, but beyond the novelty, WHY? That is the question that I need to answer here, in general.

Sleeymoon · 2018-05-23 02:26:42

In general, I would say you need to increase the demand for water as you progress up the tech tree.

Say you introduce cattle.
Each cow could have several stages of growth, eg. calf, wiener, heifer, cow. In addition to the food needed for each stage, you would also need to give it water. Once the cow is fully grown you could either milk it, which would require more water, or kill it to get leather. You would then need to tan the leather to make it useful which would use more water. Leather would be essential for other techs further up the tree.

You could also add steam power. each machine would automate a process but would need copious amounts of water to continue operating.

As cities grow the need for sanitation also grows and so people would need more water to wash themselves and their clothes and to dispose of waste to prevent disease. Speaking of disease people could also produce medicine and other chemicals which would also consume water.

As civilization advances beyond the steam age the need for water may diminish but then people would have to replace their water wells with oil wells.

Lily · 2018-05-23 05:51:43

I have a few ideas for wells. You can make a well so it has like X number of uses and refills slowly over time, like ponds do currently. However, if you drain it to zero it permanently runs dry. So it is infinite, unless you abuse it. If you use it too quickly then it is gone forever. You can also add a decay timer, so the well also decays after a set period of time. However, I think instead of collapsing, you should have it turn into an 'old well' or something, and allow people to repair it. Repair it and it is as good as new, neglect it and eventually it collapses.

In this way, if you use the well in moderation and maintain it, it will last forever. If you abuse it and draw out too much water, or you fail to maintain it, eventually you lose it forever. Though you could also make it so that a dry well can be revived by going to the next tech level. So a dry shallow well can still be made into a deep well and it will fill up again. Then a dry deep well can still be made into a pump well or what have you. It makes sense, since your basically digging down deeper for more water.

The more advanced wells, can also have a faster water recovery times, hold more in reserve, or be easier to maintain. It could be all of them, or just one of them, depending on what tech we are talking about. The easier to maintain is a good one, I don't think you consider much. For example if a deep well requires adding plaster every x hours to repair, and the pump well requires a new pump made out of 1 piece of metal every 4X hours, it pays to upgrade even if they are otherwise identical. Forging a pump is likely more intensive than making plaster but it reduces upkeep greatly over the long term.

Personally, I would like to see a deep well have like 50 uses, and a recovery rate of that of a pond currently. In that case, you could build a well and really abuse it for a lot of water in the short term but then lose it, or you can maintain it and it will last forever. Smart people will build more wells or limit their use to prolong it. It also makes it a generational issue. While you can run the well completely out in one life, it is more likely to be an issue that involves future generations and discussing with children and planning things out. Though in this case, there does need to be some kind of warning to get a general idea how when the well is getting low. Ideally a few warnings, when it gets to half, then a quarter, then only a few uses left.

On a side note, when it comes to food, I can tell you now people will have a lot of fun with different type of foods. If you had carrots, tomato and peas and they were all identical state wise, people will farm different crops and it will be fun for them. Just look how many people are sick of carrots in this game. People like variety not just in real life but in games too. Of course I wouldn't make them all identical, but if you tweak the stats a little here and there(growth speed, nutrition, seeding rates, or what have you), and throw in a bunch a new food people will have a lot of fun with it, and it wont take much work.

Sleeymoon · 2018-05-23 06:35:20

That's pretty much how they work now.
People really abuse wells, I built 5 wells and all but one were dry by the time I could build the next.

YAHG · 2018-05-23 07:22:52

jasonrohrer wrote:

no inter-tile interactions

</3... ;(

Some things like plant growth rates or anything based on a timed transformation could be influenced
by terrain through a simplified version of how you are calculating temperature mixed with how you
are doing tool use.

If a carrot has say X intermediate growth stages instead of just one (like how tools have use stages
as objects instead of internal object data to track status) then having a chance to progress either by
checking the tile underneath (or if cheap enough/appropriate, tiles in range through a formula like how
temp seems to work) on each transformation cycle, you can give them an effective 'Mean time to Grow'
that varied based on tile/temp etc.

If it is too expensive to run simulation on that many objects you could sidestep it by having the calculation
done when the player initialized the planting eg. If there are X biomes there are X types of seeded watered
carrot plots who have different cycle times, or if there are Y categories of suitability (like {0-5,6-10} ) there
would be Y types of seeded watered carrot plots.

If you have some way of having objects be variations of other objects it would be a lot easier for you to
mess around with balance on your end as a 'desert' well can have it's chance to refill or its cycle time
etc. modded by some variable somewhere on compile. This could also be useful for clothing out of variable
types of material for example.

It is a bummer for me that tiles can't interact directly with each other nor store data (other than through
the crutch of tile types of different names with the otherwise similar properties), but I am still wondering
if tiles themselves can be changed like from grass to prairie etc? Afiak floors and walls are just objects
on top of the terrain and do not change it.

If tiles themselves can be changed through interactions then things like pasturage can be simulated via
something like a sheep turning a grassland to a prairie etc. Even some sort of pseudo inter tile interaction
can be done via intermediaries.

Sheep is hungry, checks it's tile, tile is food, runs feed algorithm on tile, algorithm outputs transformation
to tile type. This could be either single or multi tile and could be initialized by the timed transformations
as well.

My mind is still hung up on animals needing to eat too <3

Failing tiles being changeable, only pasturage simulation I can think of atm is animals eating something
like a 'grass' plant that grows on tiles. I don't know if objects can spawn other objects in other tiles when
they transition on timers or if it would have to be done like berry bushes with picked/unpicked modeling.
A problem seems to be grass being in the way but lower level flora could have an item class like water
containers seem to and have X+LowFlora=X so you can just drop crap on em if you want the room
(sounds pretty easy to grief is all).

Lily wrote:

On a side note, when it comes to food, I can tell you now people will have a lot of fun with different type of foods. If you had carrots, tomato and peas and they were all identical state wise, people will farm different crops and it will be fun for them. Just look how many people are sick of carrots in this game. People like variety not just in real life but in games too. Of course I wouldn't make them all identical, but if you tweak the stats a little here and there(growth speed, nutrition, seeding rates, or what have you), and throw in a bunch a new food people will have a lot of fun with it, and it wont take much work.

Yeah. Other fun differences might include multiple harvests before needing to be replanted or needing more or less water.

pein · 2018-05-23 10:03:16

I think wells should be on deposits only, than cisterns would see play. Deposits would run out. Weather conditions would refill it time to time, rain, drought. This would add to drama, collect water and mushrooms after rain. Store it in harsh conditions. First natural surroundings could be exploited, then storing and transport made better. The things could be ruined, but not forever. Just it would take exponential time to a pond to refill. Milkweed is fine but soil dependence is hard enough. Make it replaceable with higher tech. Underground water should be detected with an Y rod, then make a well on it, transport home with bigger pouches. People are bad at moving around. That's enough limitation. As for farming,as I said different crops and some chance to find a big carrot, replant it, have better yield. Then different colour with better nutrition value. Swap crops for better result. Each profession a minigame where you can be good. Same for sheep. Bigger sheep, brown, black one. More colours to combine. 3 or 5 steps to everything exponentially making it better. But some new problems along the way. Drought in some parts, insects, wild animals. Keep players busy. Somehow detect a city, by defining it's perimeter from a city center. Maybe if a lot of people walk on a tile, it would allow to build a statue there, the center would show some data about city. Food, people, some form of point system. Each milestone would have a reward and a challenge. 100 points would allow wells. But storms would come. Here comes health bar again. Thirst bar, manage that. While Being thirsty hunger would grow, and vice versa, both down would kill you. Sanitation, making showers and baths, hot tub. Maybe even sanity meter. More low quality building resources, clay mine? People should build huts, tents, rooms to get warmer and be protected. Walls from planks, replant trees. A point system would give better cooperation, if you would need 15 people inside city to make a new invention, babies would be more valued. Define a city somehow. By distance from center, by walls around it, by connected roads. Then you got a flexible limitation. Upkeep could be a thing, if you need to produce currency to pay for upkeep or just repair things over and over. Milestones to advance from camp to city, to metropolis.

i like the drama part too, like a kid feels sorry for destroying your seed row, maybe this makes him more careful next time, it doesnt need to be final mistake, just an unoptimal one, someone needs to fix it and wiat more than normal.

the other thing with wells: to force using upgrades, each level can have unique things, which allow other recipe
for example if you can use a bucket in a deep well but not on pond or shallow well. maybe a bit unrealistic but as gameplay element makes sense. you can then make a family soup in a cauldron with the bucket of water, but not with pouches and bowls, at least one upgraded well would be made. if you limit bucket use on them one an hour, multiple upgrades would be made. the soup would be based on hunger, not a pre proportioned thing, so it would fill hunger bar efficiently, this would be enough reason not to eat the carrots raw

Last edited by pein (2018-05-23 11:00:13)

Christoffer · 2018-05-23 10:54:03

(interesting that while I was composing this post, Pein made a post which also touches on several of the same concepts. Twice the reason to read them then )

jasonrohrer wrote:

The problem is that there's no limit on how many of these can be built in one area. If wells produce X water per hour, then 10 wells produce 10X water per hour. It would be hard to make the pump well 10X faster. Even 2X faster is a lot. So you could build 1 pump well or 2 regular wells, and if regular wells are easier to build, which they have to be...
If regular wells last forever, then you will probably have enough of them around from previous generations that you never need to build pump wells.

This can be solved the same way as you have already done with iron mines. There should be a finite number of spots where you can build a functioning well or pump well. If you need faster production than your finite number of wells can provide, you need to upgrade one or more of them to a pump well. Repeat as needed.

jasonrohrer wrote:

What about temporarily infinite with increasing timespan?
A well could produce infinite water for 5 minutes, and then go dry. A pump well could produce infinite water for 10 minutes. A wind pump for 20 minutes, etc.
During that time, there would be a frenzy of water use, harvest, and storage. Cisterns would be crucial. Then the well would go dry, and there would be drought. Perhaps the well could run on a cycle, 5 minutes water, 30 minutes dry, 5 minutes water. Perhaps the higher tech could make the dry time shorter and shorter.

I happen to believe that this is the right path to take, though replace infinite with abundant.
You like when there are decisions to make, but in a steady state the correct decisions are always the same ones. Power gamers will figure these out and then get mad at newbies doing sub-optimal things, meanwhile they get bored from always repeating the same tasks. The solution is to have the game change environmental conditions on the players at certain intervalls and forcing them to adapt their decisions or die. More on this below.

jasonrohrer wrote:

For carrots, during a brief harvest window, there would be infinite carrots to pick and store.
This would also seem to eliminate the benefit of more than one of any resource-producer. Storage would be king.

No thanks to infinite carrots. Farmed carrots are man made and should never be infinite, but show up as results of our actions. Conditions and resources for growing them could change though, so it makes sense for many players to participate in the farming during certain intervals, but during other intervals it might be fine if only a single person tends the fields, while everyone else is out hunting our gathering iron, etc. Storage should indeed be a crucial cornerstone in long-term survival for a community. But it shouldn't be "stockpile everything", rather "stockpile the things that will become harder to extract or produce in the foreseeable future".

ADAPT AND COLLABORATE OR DIE

This is the main piece of my contribution, and it may require a brief background before I get to the point: I am part of a small independent game developer outfit. We had plans to make a survival game with collaborative play as the main differentiator against other games out there. We were still in the idea stage when I stumbled upon OHOL and realized that Jason had beaten us to the punch, so to speak. Our vision was to pit people against a series of challenges which could not be beaten by one single player acting alone, thereby making smart collaboration the essential ingredient in surviving strategy. In OHOL we found collaboration, but also an interesting concept of one-hour lifespan and survival through descendants (and also cute graphics and aspirations to 10,000 craftable items). We decided to not make our own game from scratch to compete, but try to see where OHOL was leading instead.

One thing that we don't see in OHOL is the series of external challenges that we envisioned: seasonal drought, floods, storms, disease, forest fires, pests and extinction-level events like the Earth being stuck by a comet, or what have you... I am donating this game design idea free of charge, because OHOL is such a great game
There has been a lot of effort spent on making it hard and challenging to survive in OHOL. But maybe the "regular" season in OHOL does not have to be so hard, but could allow more breathing room for building, teaching/learning and planning? Then there would be "disaster seasons", when ponds dry up, when crops fail, when floods whisk your houses and stuff away (unless you have sandbagged the town perimeter), etc? For a town to survive such a period would depend on technology and collaborative preparations. There can also be "abundance seasons" where you stockpile certain resources that are currently easy to come by.

The long-term success in OHOL is a long family line. Those are difficult to achieve in normal play, but easy (tedious?) for power gamers who coordinate through voice chat. Maybe an ebb and flow of difficulty would be more engaging for most players and less tedious for power gamers? Success in a family line would be measured not only in number of generations (which is repetitive and unbound in static conditions), but also in how many (and which) disaster seasons the line/society has successfully survived.

You could add more seasonal difficulties at the same pace that you add new technology. In fact, the next branch of the tech tree under development could be geared towards a certain shortage/abundance/disaster which is also under development.

Tane · 2018-05-23 11:07:29

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, I am trying to work out core principles here that everything will abide by as I add more stuff.

I think to solve this you might need to rethink one of your core ideas "Everything runs out".
IRL if used correctly, everything doesn't run out. Fertile soil CAN be made infertile, but only by incorrect planting or by overplanting certain types of crops (palm oil). The same can be said for hunting which is well represented currently.
What would work is if there were a few more types of tech upgrades which cost ever increasing resources.

We have the bronze/iron age now right?
Why not start making that more definable?
Like add large 80 to 250 copper mines. Bronze tools taking the use cost iron currently is, new ones like spears for hunting bears (make it two spears instead of 4 arrows) or parts to make other, new items which make some things less time consuming. Then you can make it slightly more complicated to make iron, add iron tools, iron band wheels for wagons, and later repeat the process with steel, marble, corn, potatoes ect when you update later versions. Animals would work too. Using wool/leather to make better clothes/backpacks.
Or rare animals and plants which regrow, but once in a generation and unable to spawn near each other.

There's always going to be speed runners, same as griefers, but in saying that with more in the tech tree and items eventually you will make it so no village can make everything. Even after 100 generations. Maybe that would also promote trade in cities and make them more compact.

Potjeh · 2018-05-23 16:03:46

jasonrohrer wrote:

What about finite with increasing capacity? While the natural things regrow over time, albeit slowly, maybe the man-made things do not?
That is the current difference between a carrot farm and a wild berry bush. The berry bush produces food slowly forever, and you have no control over how many you have access to. The carrot farm produces 5 carrots per row, but that's it, and you can have as many rows as you want. After a row is gone, you have to build a new one, which slowly consumes resources over time.
So, this is the version of the well that is like a tank with 50 water in it. Once it's empty, it's empty. Build a new one, or upgrade it to get 100 water. A cistern becomes useless (because a well is essentially a cistern that starts full), though a cistern is still useful for ponds.
The question with higher and higher tech shifts from "how many people can you sustain" to "how long can you last?" This gives us a lot of design flexibility, because we can tweak these numbers a lot without breaking anything. We can easily give some higher tech 100x the capacity of lower tech, which just means it lasts 100x as long. (On the other hand, if we were to give something 100x the production rate, that would support 100x the population, which would effectively mean the resource is unbounded.)
We can also be much more generous with natural sources, if they run out in the same way. If a pond produces X water per hour, our hands are tied, and we have to keep X low, so that higher water tech is worth building. But if a pond simply produces X water total, then X can be whatever we want it to be. No matter how high we make X, it will eventually run out, and people will need to move on to wells.
For carrots, this would mean that putting fertilizer on your carrot row would make the same row grow 10 carrots instead of 5, and using a deep plow first would make the same row produce 20.
The problem is that it kinda feels weird for some resources, and runs contrary to real life expectations. Real wells don't have fixed capacity like this. It does make some sense for the highest tech, because a petrol pump well would eventually run out of fuel and need refilling.

This seems like the most robust and the most fun approach. Wells etc. running out can be justified by collapse of the actual man-made structure instead of the underlying resource.

zed · 2018-05-23 16:16:21

jasonrohrer:
> no inter-tile interactions. There's no "water" under the ground or
> anything.

Right, but it is still possible to make constructed resources be limited by
local natural resources.

Here's a simple way that could work in the case of wells. Make the final step
in well construction be the addition of a "bucket of fresh water". This is
obtained by filling an empty bucket from a pond, which permanently dries up the
pond. The bucket of fresh water decays to stagnant water after a short delay,
and it can't be carried with a vehicle. So the result is that each well
replaces a nearby pond, so the number of wells is limited by the number of
ponds in the vicinity.

This isn't enough on its own, because there should be a way to correct the
mistake of trying to connect a pond to a too-distant well. The simple way
to do that would be to allow dried-out ponds to be replenished by adding a
bucket of stagnant water, but that allows chaining ponds to exceed the
intended distance limit. Maybe that's not too bad; otherwise, an artificial
way to fix it would be to have the bucket be keyed to the pond it's filled
from, using the same random hidden category instance mechanics that keys and
locks use, such that the only pond which can (reliably) be refilled with the
stagnant water is the one the water was taken from. I don't see a better way.

Linking constructed resources to natural ones in this way also opens up
another possible effect for advances in technology: increased rate of
extraction of a fixed finite resource. So a pond could have 1000 uses, but
after each use it can't be used again for 5m; a basic well would have a
maximal number of uses copied from the pond it's linked to, but with a shorter
cool-off period between uses, and then pumps would reduce the cool-off period
further. Variations: allow n short-term uses rather than just 1 (at the cost
of introducing lots of objects); also have slow replenishment of the long-term
uses, representing natural replenishment of groundwater while allowing
unsustainable extraction in the short-term; have more advanced tech also give
a one-off increase to the long-term uses, representing reaching deeper
groundwater.

Higher tech could also allow exploitation of more distant resources.

I don't know if this is a good way to go, but it's a possibility. I do think
it's important to somehow represent ecological constraints on civilisation -
anything else would be boring as well as misleading.

FounderOne · 2018-05-23 16:44:05

The higher the tech goes the higher your water costs will be. So if you want to make that fast and nice car you need to have a gas powered automated whatever well that gives you 10x more water then a pond.
Or you need 100 normal wells.

And since all the stuff needs maintenance you just can't build 100 of this gas powered automated whatever well.
If you do so you need also 50 mining machines and then you need maybe 20 gas rigs. But all needs steady maintenance.

And if you go for the 100 wells, have fun gathering all the stones and maintaining those 100 wells to make one car.

You will be limited by time, manpower, resources and tech. So you can't exploit it.

Lily · 2018-05-23 17:04:01

Sleeymoon wrote:

That's pretty much how they work now.
People really abuse wells, I built 5 wells and all but one were dry by the time I could build the next.

That is because the capacity is so low. If each well had like 50 uses it wouldn't run dry from watering all your carrots once. Wells should run dry if you abuse them, but right now they run dry just from what most would consider normal use. The building of a well, or the collapse of a well should have more dramatic impact. So much larger capacity, but more devastating if the water runs out. Also, there needs to be some way to get a good idea of the water level, so people can at least attempt to take actions if it is getting low.

Joriom · 2018-05-23 19:15:46

Potjeh wrote:

You guys don't get it, you can't build a straight house on crooked foundations.

You can't reinforce house foundations after its built. You can reinforce and even remake from scratch foundations of application - and thats how its done most of the time.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, I am trying to work out core principles here that everything will abide by as I add more stuff.
What are the rules by which I add higher tech?
For example, an obvious next step is some kind of pump well, maybe a hand pump, and then maybe a wind pump, eventually a motor pump.
How do these things work, relative to the existing wells and ponds?
I need some kind of design rule that ties everything together.

I just wonder if those are questions that game developer should be asking post public release after few years of developement...

jasonrohrer · 2018-05-24 03:19:21

I'm an experienced game designer.

But this is one of the most complicated games anyone has ever attempted to design.

I get the feeling that balance will ultimately be impossible, or at least that is a kind of latent fear of mine, as more and more objects are added.

There was always a fundamental problem that I've been struggling with for years: how to handle resource distribution and regeneration in a world where you have no idea how many people will be trying to use those resources in a given area? If it's just right for 50 people, will it be too fat for 1 person and too lean for 100?

A few years ago, this game actually had an infinite berry bush as a wild food source. At one point, something like that seemed necessary. Won't people starve otherwise? A game like Don't Starve has a single player operating in the world, so the berry bushes can be finite and a good distribution can be picked by the designers. But when you have 1, 10, or even 100 people playing, and you're not sure how many, how many berry bushes should there be?

The game was horrible with infinite berry bushes, and got better when I made them finite. I balanced the wild food in the game for one person, and just kinda punted the issue.

I'm not sure, in retrospect, why I was even worried about it, given that all babies come through mothers, so populations are naturally limited. I think back in the day, close-radius Eve placement was also a confounding factor.

But I still wasn't sure if this problem was solved until after launch. I couldn't test what would happen with 100s of players until I had 100s of players.

My original design for the tech tree and how stuff would be added was a kind of hand-wavy content-based approach. People will craft stuff just to craft it, the tech tree will be explored because it's there, etc. Just keep adding stuff, people love content, who cares?

I always had some misgivings about this approach. Pointless content is... pointless... and it's not the way I've ever designed a game in the past.

And players quickly echoed this sentiment after the game launched. No one made pies---why bother, if carrots are infinite?

I haven't seen a dyed hat in the game in a long time...

So then my misgivings came home to roost, and the looming WHY question came sharply into the foreground. There will be a bunch of pointless content in this game (dyed hats, painted walls, etc.). But some of the other content, the spine content, need a solid why associated with it.

I think this game has a chance to actually be a good game, as opposed to just the heap of content that I promised.

My original design for the content of the game broke everything humans ever make down into three categories:

1. Food
2. Shelter
3. Entertainment

Can you eat it? Can it keep you warm?

If not, then you're just making it to make it. Hula hoops and monoliths fireworks and red shirts.

Items in 3 don't need a reason.

But if an item's primary purpose is 1 or 2, it needs a good reason, or else you're not going to make it. I don't want deep wells falling into category 3.

Potjeh · 2018-05-24 12:20:39

A game can't be balanced without testing it, and an MMO can't be properly tested without releasing it. I'm pretty sure every other MMO has had worse balance problems at release. It's just that they have teams instead of single developer so they can do both balance and content simultaneously, but of the two balance is clearly the more important one.

Last edited by Potjeh (2018-05-24 12:20:51)

One Hour One Life Forums

#26 2018-05-22 01:18:32

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#27 2018-05-22 06:54:19

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#28 2018-05-22 07:39:15

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#29 2018-05-22 10:52:08

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#30 2018-05-22 11:36:27

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#31 2018-05-22 19:09:34

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#32 2018-05-22 20:54:20

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#33 2018-05-22 20:56:57

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#34 2018-05-22 22:09:06

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#35 2018-05-22 22:15:15

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#36 2018-05-22 22:43:25

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#37 2018-05-23 02:26:42

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#38 2018-05-23 05:51:43

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#39 2018-05-23 06:35:20

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#40 2018-05-23 07:22:52

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#41 2018-05-23 10:03:16

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#42 2018-05-23 10:54:03

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#43 2018-05-23 11:07:29

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#44 2018-05-23 16:03:46

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#45 2018-05-23 16:16:21

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#46 2018-05-23 16:44:05

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#47 2018-05-23 17:04:01

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#48 2018-05-23 19:15:46

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#49 2018-05-24 03:19:21

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

#50 2018-05-24 12:20:39

Re: "Everything runs out" - maybe it actually should

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