Coming Soon: Family Specialization

DestinyCall · 2019-11-14 17:25:53

Wait ... isn't a real game SUPPOSED to be fun to play? Why must "real play" be so painful, frustrating and unenjoyable?

Many of these recent changes just constantly remind me that I am "playing a game", rather than allowing me to settle into my role as a villager and enjoy the game world from within. I don't see the value of prioritizing inconveince over pleasure.

Novelty content is short-lived, but truely rewarding content is valuable. Done right, it retains that value, rather than losing it, once the novelty wears off.

...

And you would see a lot more people breeding dogs if they weren't broken content. It is not just that they are useless. Dogs are detrimental to village survival, due to pitbulls, old age, and over-crowding. If your dog was harmless, could be named, and followed you around without getting in everyone's way, plenty of people would have a dog in OHOL, because they are cute and fun. If they actually did something useful, that would be a nice bonus ... and quite realistic considering the valuable role played by dogs in the days of early man.

Last edited by DestinyCall (2019-11-14 17:36:33)

Keyin · 2019-11-14 17:30:12

jasonrohrer wrote:

Ilka, I'm not so interested in people trading for pleasure. Real play, not role play.
People only do something "for pleasure" in a game once. After they've done it, they're done with. Then they get back to playing the game, whatever that is. When was the last time you saw a dachshund or chihuahua dog in the game? They are very cute! Certainly they bring players "pleasure." But you never see them in the game, because there is no "point" to them. Which means, essentially, "they are not necessary or helpful for survival," survival being the core challenge of the game.

My question is, why did you chose survival to be determined solely by food? Food is the only need for survival. Everything comes back to food.

We need oil. why do we need oil? so we can get water. why do we need water? so we can grow food. why do we need food? we will starve without food

we need sulfur. why do we need sulfur? so we can get rubber. why do we need rubber? so we can get water. why do we need water? so we can grow food. why do we need food? we will starve without food

My point is I don't think acquiring food should be the only thing determining whether you live or die. How about hypothermia, heat stroke, thirst, insanity/depression?

In real life we will work for things for pleasure, but in game we wont because they don't help survival. Why not make some trade goods that improve happiness and thus improve health? Maybe if your character is very unhappy they are prone to deadly disease, while the person with many luxuries is blessed with perfect health?

Then it becomes "I trade for pleasure, so I can improve my odds of not dying randomly from sadness/disease"

Amon · 2019-11-14 17:36:13

People don't dye their clothes only once and never again.
People continue to dye clothes. Just because it's aesthetic doesn't mean it's repeated only once.
People didn't just do a garden once in their playthrough and never before, they keep doing it.

It's also not role play, but real play. The pleasure to have fun and comfort.

Kaveh · 2019-11-14 17:39:57

jasonrohrer wrote:

When was the last time you saw a dachshund or chihuahua dog in the game? They are very cute! Certainly they bring players "pleasure." But you never see them in the game, because there is no "point" to them. Which means, essentially, "they are not necessary or helpful for survival," survival being the core challenge of the game.

Not that I disagree, but, yesterday (old chihuahua struttin around the kitchen).

Dogs do lose appeal because they're high effort and give pleasure for a very limited amount of time compared to anything else. That doesn't mean nobody does it anymore. There's always people who haven't done it yet and want to try it out, or people who will breed some dogs just because they haven't seen them in a while. They're still special.

Other stuff that's also 'not necessary/helpful for survival' is different clothes. Something like a wolf hat doesn't really have any use beyond looking AWESOME, and it's never stopped doing that. Newborns will often move towards a certain piece of clothing they'd rather wear, even if it isn't necessarily better. They like wearing different colours for shirt/shorts/hat, or an all rabbit fur outfit, or a special type of hat.

I mentioned before that I really like the idea of only one family being able to dye clothes, so Ilka saying families should have their own specific products makes sense to me. In ancient civilizations people traded things like feathers and beads, not because they're useful, but because they're pretty. Stuff like that can be valuable.

Last edited by Kaveh (2019-11-14 17:41:46)

Guppy · 2019-11-14 17:57:02

Ilka wrote:

Your idea is racist.

Is this sarcasm

Kaveh · 2019-11-14 17:57:12

An interesting thing about trade is that afaik in ancient civs people didn't generally offer to trade anything that was vital to them. It was about either luxury items or something that they had a surplus of and the other not enough. Why trade stuff away if you don't have enough of it to begin with? You'll eventually need it yourself.

Trading away oil is the one that makes the least sense there. Yes, you need rubber, but your oil runs out fast enough without another family using it. There's way more rubber trees/palms/sulfur spots/iron mines than tarry spots, and that doesn't even factor in the amount of effort it takes to actually get that oil out of the ground. Oil is much much more precious than the other things, meaning they might be able to get the rubber they need, but they have no reason to give their oil away after that. And those people get the gold too!

Kaveh · 2019-11-14 18:15:38

How about trade not being necessary for water (which is a bit unrealistic anyway, people are more likely to move in search of water than trade), but for different types of food? Seeds would be a cool AND realistic thing.

HARD VERSION
- Only person w/ certain skin colour can pick the seed off of a certain wild food
- When that seed is planted by a person with a diff skin colour, it grows, but has a chance of not yielding any new seeds- meaning you can run out and have to trade again
- Each skin coour gets a seed that is vital for progression (i.e. wheat, carrot, berry), but can survive without it although it may be a bit more of a struggle

To combine points 2 & 3 domestic berry bushes should perhaps die (meaning you need to plant new ones like w/ carrots and wheat)

You get the bread bakers, carrot crunchers and berry bellies. If anyone wants sheep, pies or compost, they better trade some seeds. However, surviving without sheep/pies/compost is possible through some hardship.

EASY VERSION
Same but the seeds aren't vital, just for yum things

Edit: Be aware that people can still get the wild food, just not the wild seeds. This allows them to scavenge some stuff together, but eventually resources die out and they gotta find people to trade with

Last edited by Kaveh (2019-11-14 18:28:31)

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-14 18:19:49

Destiny, what is "fun"? How do you define it? Where does it come from? Why do some games have it and others don't?

I have pretty solid answers to these questions myself, after many years of making games, thinking about these issues, reading many books about these issues, giving industry talks about these issues, writing articles about these issues, being interviewed about these issues, etc.

"Sheesh, Jason, who do you think you are, man?"

But this is my life and my life's work and my career and my livelihood, though, right? I've devoted 15 years of night-and-day thought to these problems. I take it all really seriously. This is the mountain that I've chosen to climb.

But even so, my answers are just my own opinions.

However, most people toss around the word "fun" without having really thought about it and nailed it down. They know it when they see it (or should be, "know it when they play it"). They often see what they think are hallmarks of fun---features that were present in fun games that they played---and try to generalize those features as sufficient ingredients. Boss fights are fun, for example. Upgrades are fun. Bombs are fun.

But if you make a game with upgrades, boss fights, and bombs, it won't necessarily be fun.

I've even heard professional game developers---colleagues of mine---saying they scrapped a game in progress because "we just couldn't find the fun".

Finally, I will point out something we don't really have a name for yet, which might be called pseudo-fun. Having a dog follow you around, or wearing a Halloween costume in-game, is an example of this. It actually might be more "funny" than fun, especially if you keep doing it once you've done it once. But it looks and smells like fun, and actually IS real fun the first time, for a reason that I will explain below. We're also getting a bit mixed up here, because Halloween is "fun" in real life, but not game-fun. A roller-coaster is fun, but not game-fun. So, maybe instead of calling these things psuedo-fun, we need a new word for "game-fun".

So what is game-fun?

Game-fun is precisely the process of learning and improving in a controlled, well-defined context. The more room there is for learning and improving, and the clearer the path forward for more learning and improvement, the more fun the game is. Some people call this the "flow" state, which is the fine line between boredom and frustration. The thing gets harder in a way that is precisely paced with your improvement. It's always slightly too hard, but only slightly. When you fail, it is 100% clear to you why you failed, and you know exactly what you need to do next time to do better. Each failure results in incremental skill acquisition.

You can see from this explanation that it's not at all about ingredients, game structure, themes, or anything else. That's why we can have 1000s of completely different games that are all fun. We can have Tetris and Quake and Lemmings and LOL and Pac Man and Poker. These are all fun games, but the only thing they have in common is the aforementioned properties.

Candy Land is not fun, and that's precisely because you can't get better at it. Tic Tac Toe is fun up until you're about 7 years old.

And returning to in-game Halloween costumes, I said before that they ARE real fun the first time. That's because making one the first time is a skill you don't have yet, a challenge that you haven't overcome. There's a chance of failure (getting born in a town with no loom, and just not pulling it together before you run out of time, so no ghost for you). If it's hard enough and varied enough, perhaps making a Halloween costume yourself is fun every time. But having your mother slap a pre-made costume on your when you're born is "fun" but not "game-fun."

So returning to your question:

Why must "real play" be so painful, frustrating and unenjoyable?

You can't have challenge without some kind of pain. There has to be a problem to solve, or else there is no joy in overcoming a problem. The very best challenges are just slightly beyond your current capabilities, but tantalizingly close to do-able. You're going to fail, and it's going to hurt a bit.... but then you're going to succeed, and it's going to be so fun. And then the next just-out-of-reach thing beckons.

You can't have a real "HOLY CRAP, YES!" without a healthy dose of "NOOOOO!"s along the way.

All that said, in a game like OHOL, creating reliable "game-fun" is difficult. The context isn't very controlled or well-defined. The progression to harder and harder challenges isn't clear. The ramp up is uneven. The challenges are clear here and there. Living to 60 is the first challenge, and it's reasonably well-defined, and the feedback is clear. An Eve camp is similarly a well-defined and controlled context. And wow, is that fun or what?

But beyond that, and beyond basic survival in each life, where do the additional challenges come from? Some are player-defined. I want to make _______ difficult thing before I die. But some players aren't all that motivated to define their own challenges. They might munch berries for a few lives and then quit the game, saying it's boring. It's actually not the player's job to define challenges. That's my job.

Genetic score is one example of this. Resources running out in advanced civs is another. Inter-family trade and cooperation on the way up toward an advanced civ is a new one that I'm working on.

Twisted · 2019-11-14 18:49:22

jasonrohrer wrote:

People only do something "for pleasure" in a game once. After they've done it, they're done with. Then they get back to playing the game, whatever that is. When was the last time you saw a dachshund or chihuahua dog in the game? They are very cute! Certainly they bring players "pleasure." But you never see them in the game, because there is no "point" to them. Which means, essentially, "they are not necessary or helpful for survival," survival being the core challenge of the game.

The problem with dogs is that they are actively detrimental to a town since they occupy tiles and move around on their own. People make dogs, and then they realize they make it super hard to do anything since they always get in the way, and then they never make them again.

There's no points to blue skirts or red walls or signs or yellow top hats yet you see them all the time. If top hats actively prevented you from doing stuff in the game I guarantee you that they'd be a rare sight.

Last edited by Twisted (2019-11-14 18:49:31)

DestinyCall · 2019-11-14 18:50:28

Fun is indeed a nebulous concept and it means different things to different people.

For me, I found the introduction of languages to the game was "fun", but the addition of war swords was "not fun". It was neat to try to communicate with another family using emotes or by learning their language and it added a layer of interesting depth to the game. It was not enjoyable to get stabbed by sword-wielding warmongers and it was not fun to form cramped xenophobic walled towns to keep out the random attackers.

Likewise, I found the Rift to be a mixed blessing. The ability to use the rift walls as navigation markers was useful and the ability to return to past towns was also fun, because you could finish larger projects, like building gardens and making a sweet-ass bakery. But the constant resource drain and fast pace of water depletion was NOT fun. It stress me out to constantly hard-scrabble to stay alive and feel like every village is falling apart no matter how hard I work to keep it together. Making more and more critical resources even more limited just makes this problem worse and reduces the "fun".

Having played back before the temperature update, I remember the slower pace of life when we had warmer towns and more water. I miss that feeling of freedom and relaxation. It was fun to spend some lives just doing nothing but chatting with other villagers. Maybe even role-playing a little (*GASP*) instead of being 100% focused on moment-to-moment survival of your lineage. Because you only needed a few people working to keep the village going, you ended up with plenty of people just standing around eating berries and doing very little, of course. People complained about the berry munchers and hated their carefree lives. But it wasn't the end of the world if your village had a lot of new players who didn't know the game yet. You could handle a lot of "dead weight" since there was a decent amount of buffer between survival and disaster. It gave the whole game a very different feel from the current terror-driven dash for oil.

Your mileage might vary, but the current direction the game is headed in feels like the complete opposite of fun game-play to me. I'd much rather have a peaceful village that grows and develops slowly over many generations as we overcome difficulties together. Some people might find that boring. I find it deeply rewarding and enjoyable.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-14 18:52:18

Yea... so this is as racist as much as a computer game can be racist.

It's not players having the ability to do more (which 'need content' suggests as desired).

I also don't know who has wanted these changes or why you believe that these changes would appeal to people Jason.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Ilka, I'm not so interested in people trading for pleasure. Real play, not role play.

So what? You're not someone who will be purchasing the game or has purchased the game. Thus, your interests are NOT relevant with respect to how the game will sell.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-14 19:03:20

Also, I have to ask... how will this affect players Eve-chaining on low population servers?

Because I have a feeling it might make it impossible for someone to build a town on their own, or they might have to keep playing 60 minute lives until they get born with a certain skin color.

In what world can someone NOT work an oil rig AT ALL, because he is black? A racist one, that's for sure.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Players need to be able to easily recognize trading partners for various resources, so appearance consistency is necessary, and there's no sense in deviating from real world expectation about skin tone (gingers do better in colder climates, etc.)

Your change has people not able to do things entirely, which differs from "gingers do better in colder climates".

And no, I do expect that black people can work an oil rig. And that caucasian gingers can pick bananas. And that white French can tame horses. Hello... Napoleon rode a horse and so have plenty of other white generals! So, NO, this change won't be consistent with expectations. Not for anyone who thinks about how things work.

fug · 2019-11-14 19:11:58

jasonrohrer wrote:

People only do something "for pleasure" in a game once. After they've done it, they're done with. Then they get back to playing the game, whatever that is. When was the last time you saw a dachshund or chihuahua dog in the game? They are very cute! Certainly they bring players "pleasure." But you never see them in the game, because there is no "point" to them. Which means, essentially, "they are not necessary or helpful for survival," survival being the core challenge of the game.

As Twisted and others have pointed out you don't see dogs because they're a novelty at best and a detriment to the town at worst. Having one breed of dog that is a ticking time bomb (pitbulls don't age like other dogs and will only get old after becoming mean which WILL happen either through time or abuse.) Since no dogs have use besides the wolf puppy the only one worth breeding are the wolves for hats and even that isn't good enough to be a staple of towns.

Things either need to be good or fun to the players for players to do it. It doesn't make sense to expect people to do content that they deem bad/useless. Dyeing clothing is fun hence why you see players do this with the loom clothing as it allows players to express themselves further by making sure they stick out. Hunting turkeys is good (and maybe fun) which leads to turkey broth and turkeys still being prepared even after nearly a year of the update being out. Fishing/Shrimping is fun for people but is generally bad for effort put in to produce food. Players will actively choose to do unproductive or less productive activities if they generally enjoy them.

Making pork tacos is both unfun and bad due to how many steps it takes which feels unrewarding for effort put into making them. Dogs are potentially fun but are very very bad which leads to people not breeding dogs or threatening people who breed them. Rail carts are bad due to the constraints which leads to people not using them.

Basically asking why peoples won't play with broken/useless content is silly. Things don't have to be good to be done by players but its just plain silly to expect to see stuff like dogs be done in game as a normal activity. On a brighter note You Are Hope ended up making dogs useful and I bet they'll actually be seeing dogs in game unlike us.

Gogo · 2019-11-14 19:17:43

Make dogs useful. Dog can live in pen and guard the sheeps. You need to gain his respect (time + giving him foods ) in order to enter pen and then to kill sheeps.

jasonrohrer · 2019-11-14 19:27:56

Sorry, folks, you're really going to hate me for this...

But I think that "dropsy" is the most clear and consistent implementation of specialty biomes. You get sick when you step in there. You get better when you step back out.

Walking around in the map just now, specialty biomes are rare enough that this won't interfere with basic transportation.

For roads, to allow them to be straight through specialty biomes, you won't get dropsy when you're on a road. A road essentially turns the ground into a non-specialty biome. Though you will need a specialist to build a road there in the first place.

Dodge · 2019-11-14 19:32:41

So being on a horse "drops" it?

fug · 2019-11-14 19:33:42

Dodge wrote:

So being on a horse "drops" it?

Well yeah you're holding a horse aren't you.

Sneeze so hard you fly out of your still moving car!

Spoonwood · 2019-11-14 19:34:19

jasonrohrer wrote:

I'm not trying to make the most popular game in the world (Minecraft), I'm trying to make the greatest game in the world.

There isn't a difference.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Minecraft was revolutionary in a whole bunch of ways 10 years ago, which is why it was enormously popular, but it also pandered to people who don't even want to play games (creative mode). I'm making a game, not a toy.

Oh 'pandered'. Nope. Sorry. You're an elitist who has a lack of respect for people. You look down on those with other tastes and think that such was 'pandering' when such actually provided a service to people... after all money got exchanged.

Spoonwood · 2019-11-14 19:35:43

Dodge wrote:

Right...
Only black people can get horses, so how will other people find other "race" villages on an infinite map?

I think for once Dodge and I agree on an idea as flawed.

miskas · 2019-11-14 19:39:56

will we be able to grab things back from the edges?

Spoonwood · 2019-11-14 19:49:46

jasonrohrer wrote:

Playing games is about solving problems.

No they are not. They are about what the person playing them sees them as. There is no universal meaning to games, only the meaning that individual players choose for them.

jasonrohrer wrote:

My job is to make the problems present in the game as interesting as possible. I've come to the conclusion that Solution A just isn't interesting enough.

This makes no sense. You can't think for other people Jason, so you can't come to such a conclusion validly.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Piling on more content that is just another variation of Solution A is not going to make the game much more interesting.

How would you know what other people want when you won't even listen to what they have to say and try to argue with their desires on many occassions?

DiscardedSlinky · 2019-11-14 19:56:47

This is a huge mistake please. I don't want to have to fight the game just to get home.

There are tons of unclear mechanics why impliment such an annoying insane restriction on us just moving? You're trying to promote us exploring and finding other people and being so HOSTILE about it too.

We accidentally auto walk in 1 tile of desert and our horse goes running into it with us having no way to grab it. We just have to wait and wait for it to go out of it. This isn't intuitive gameplay and I guarantee it's going to lead to more confusion than anything.

It can't be that hard just to give us an emote when we enter a bad place, or just restrict us interacting with specific items. Anything is better than us dropping everything. That's so ridiculous.

jcwilk · 2019-11-14 20:03:27

Legs wrote:

Yeah true, if you cheat with mods it would be really easy to /die a few times and have the coordinates of each type of settlement. Would be really easy to cooperate with a couple people through discord to congregate at one too. The problem of finding and trading with other families becomes trivial when you introduce cheats and third party communication. A lot of these sickos actually like playing eve in the wilderness so I'm sure they'd be happy to start their very own mixed town somewhere too.

I wonder if it would be possible to mask the coordinates from the client? Like set the spawn point to 0,0 client-side and then the server secretly translates between the client coords (personal) and the server coords (global). It seems really broken to allow players to know exactly where they are in the world by looking at underlying client data.

DestinyCall · 2019-11-14 20:14:31

Spoonwood wrote:

Dodge wrote:
Right...
Only black people can get horses, so how will other people find other "race" villages on an infinite map?
I think for once Dodge and I agree on an idea as flawed.

Oh shit. Isn't that one of the three signs of the Apocolypse?

StrongForce · 2019-11-14 20:14:55

#spoonwood

One Hour One Life Forums

#76 2019-11-14 17:25:53

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#77 2019-11-14 17:30:12

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#78 2019-11-14 17:36:13

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#79 2019-11-14 17:39:57

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#80 2019-11-14 17:57:02

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#81 2019-11-14 17:57:12

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#82 2019-11-14 18:15:38

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#83 2019-11-14 18:19:49

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#84 2019-11-14 18:49:22

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#85 2019-11-14 18:50:28

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#86 2019-11-14 18:52:18

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#87 2019-11-14 19:03:20

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#88 2019-11-14 19:11:58

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#89 2019-11-14 19:17:43

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#90 2019-11-14 19:27:56

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#91 2019-11-14 19:32:41

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#92 2019-11-14 19:33:42

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#93 2019-11-14 19:34:19

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#94 2019-11-14 19:35:43

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#95 2019-11-14 19:39:56

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#96 2019-11-14 19:49:46

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

#97 2019-11-14 19:56:47

Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

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Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

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Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

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Re: Coming Soon: Family Specialization

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