Jason's misunderstanding

Spoonwood · 2020-02-27 21:49:35

DestinyCall wrote:

I feel like you can't decide if OHOL is supposed to be a fun computer game about parenting and village-building or an artsy social experiment about water scarcity and masochism

I don't know why you would believe it supposed to be a fun game about parenting. Were it supposed to be fun in that respect, consent would have relevance to how parenting happens in game and there would exist some sort of reliable control there for players to prevent parenting. Also, the conflict of whether to feed children or not feel children wouldn't exist anywhere close to how much it has, and there would have been more food resources early to make it more likely that Eves would feed children without question (leaving a child to die isn't fun if thinking of their self as a parent). Also, baby bones wouldn't exist for children who /die. And there would exist some way to disown children. And there would exist some sort of choice screen for players instead of the /die option so that mothers weren't bothered by children who use /die as much.

There's a whole lot involved in in-game parenting which isn't well-defined also (what the hell will the baby do? when will a baby appear?), making such not fun according to Jason's definition, and a whole lot that plenty of people don't find fun in the game, but either put up with for other things which they don't find fun or don't play because of it.

Also, the baby cries and falls on the ground. The recognition of such crying isn't supposed to be fun, is it?

Edit: Also a baby sling would have gotten worked on seriously A LONG time ago if the game were supposed to be a fun game about parenting.

Last edited by Spoonwood (2020-02-27 21:52:07)

Mekkie · 2020-02-27 22:57:30

jasonrohrer wrote:

My current task is fixing all 140 of these player-submitted issues:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues
Since players reported them, I'm assuming that they want them to be fixed.

So if we all submit racial restrictions as a bug.. then maybe it will get fixed?

sigmen4020 · 2020-02-27 23:31:54

Mekkie wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
My current task is fixing all 140 of these player-submitted issues:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues
Since players reported them, I'm assuming that they want them to be fixed.

So if we all submit racial restrictions as a bug.. then maybe it will get fixed?

That’s a big brain move.

DestinyCall · 2020-02-28 01:29:21

sigmen4020 wrote:

Mekkie wrote:
jasonrohrer wrote:
My current task is fixing all 140 of these player-submitted issues:
https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues
Since players reported them, I'm assuming that they want them to be fixed.

So if we all submit racial restrictions as a bug.. then maybe it will get fixed?
That’s a big brain move.

But that would require me to learn how to submit bug reports on Github ...

Coconut Fruit · 2020-02-28 02:28:48

"Bug: race restrictions sux"

jasonrohrer · 2020-02-28 03:19:28

Destiny, you do have my number there.

I don't see the point in making a game that is mostly like something else that already exists. Why bother? I could just go play that game instead.

That doesn't mean that I never look for design solutions in other games. However, I was specifically addressing your proposal for more avenues for solo play. Sure, lots of people don't like multiplayer games at all and refuse to play them (too much pressure, too awkward, etc.) But there are plenty of solo crafting games out there already. Without the multiplayer, trans-generational component, how is OHOL that much different than Don't Starve?

I imagine that most of the people who want 2D solo crafting are playing Don't Starve already.

The only reason that OHOL has been a success is because it offers something different. For the people who want something different than the solo crafting that a a game like Don't Starve offers (or the flat, private multiplayer crafting of Don't Starve Together).

So it's not just an artistic strategy, but also a business strategy. A blue ocean strategy.

Think of all those gobs of youtube videos where the streamer is running around as a helpless baby. The world had never seen anything like that before.

At first glance, it looked a bit like Don't Starve, but then people instantly can tell you how it's different... "No wait, in this game, you get born as a helpless baby to another player who is your mother!" You can't mention such a premise in an elevator without people begging to hear more about it.

And yeah, as many players have suggested, I could offer a buffet-style game, where there's a Solo variant, and a group variant, and a battle royal variant, etc. Think Minecraft Survival vs Creative mode.

However, if I had done that, the game would have been watered down in its about-ness. How many of those YouTubers would have played the solo version by accident and NOT found a crazy, unique, and streamable game?

That's why I'm so nervous about the tutorial.... it's not really what the game is about, and it gives the wrong first impression. I want to dump you right into the crazy uniqueness.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-28 04:06:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

For the people who want something different than the solo crafting that a a game like Don't Starve offers (or the flat, private multiplayer crafting of Don't Starve Together).

Just from a cursory glance, Don't Starve Together is much more popular on Twitch than OHOL. Jason's game is almost surely the one that's flat in comparison.

jasonrohrer wrote:

Think of all those gobs of youtube videos where the streamer is running around as a helpless baby.

That isn't what attracts people to the game. And having watched some of those videos the streamers do NOT do much running around as a helpless baby. They can communicate and get picked up. Were they running around like a helpless baby *when they could run around*, they would be like the early children of Eve Volek at best.

jasonrohrer wrote:

And yeah, as many players have suggested, I could offer a buffet-style game, where there's a Solo variant, and a group variant, and a battle royal variant, etc. Think Minecraft Survival vs Creative mode.
However, if I had done that, the game would have been watered down in its about-ness.

The game simply did NOT start from what people had seen from others on YouTube. It started from the first player. And unless the trailer is wrong, the first player was an Eve. Thus, the game WAS and still IS watered down in terms of what it's theme is according to the reasoning that Jason has used to try to persuade Destiny here.

On top of that, there could have existed some sort of direct button for different modes of the game, as there does for everyone since there's a 'login' button and a 'tutorial' button, and a custom server option in 'settings'.

jasonrohrer wrote:

That's why I'm so nervous about the tutorial.... it's not really what the game is about, and it gives the wrong first impression. I want to dump you right into the crazy uniqueness.

Oh, so the trailer doesn't show what the game is about where the first player is an Eve and thus gives people the wrong impression, since that first player wasn't dumped right into a dependent state?

Oh... and also last year when Jason made it so that everyone spawned as an Eve from the same starting spot, it follows that he was deliberately giving players the wrong impression also?

Spoonwood · 2020-02-28 04:46:20

jasonrohrer wrote:

Without the multiplayer, trans-generational component, how is OHOL that much different than Don't Starve?

From the very little I've seen of it, I'm pretty sure that the obstacles and challenges in Don't Starve are somewhat sophisticated while also engaging, the number of systems in Don't Starve is more sophisticated, Don't Starve has seasons, and Don't Starve is whimisical and humorous in many ways with respect to non-human entities. There's probably a lot more, which someone far more acquainted with Don't Starve could tell us about it, and well, they may as well go ahead and do so.

Gogo · 2020-02-28 07:54:21

140 issues? Players, please stop reporting bugs for some time!… I want that car from trailer.

Last edited by Gogo (2020-02-28 07:55:07)

pein · 2020-02-28 08:29:41

Multiplayer games are fun because of the community. Even worse graphics work cause the games are more fun when played with others. So instead of focusing on visuals, it can be focused on mechanics. That's why browser games were and still are popular. 2d is better for strategical games, a lot of strategy games failed with their 3d versions, like Stronghold or Age of Empires, or Desperados were clearly worse when forcing the looks over the mechanics. Age of empires actually released two remakes of the old Age 2 and now they even do esports, lately is very popular.

I think that OHOL is hard, I remember that I was playing tons of hours at the start and i was bad. And we learned it together with others, and i needed around 200 hours and a lot of forum posts to become better. And that's something that not everyone will do. Struggle for perfection. But the people who like that kind of hardcore learning process can stick around a while longer. But then it becomes boring because the things you imagine more complex like travelling or grand scheme strategy are non-existent or plain boring.

I don't think that the game needs a tutorial, maybe some small sandbox where people can do some quests, most of the times I was surviving alone and struggled to keep myself alive, keep others alive. When I perfected my eve or pseudo eve runs, I became much better. Its more like a mentality issue, it's kind of a roguelike, you will die a lot, it's goofy. I always thought OHOL deaths are funny, even my deaths. I never really bothered, i just started a new life. Some people don't like to fail.

Jason, the forum has quite a lot of smart players, who care. I understand that you cant just go with the popular vote on each case but you could listen to them sometimes.
It seems that you really just wanna go against the flow.

I don't think you are lazy but more like you lost the motivation to do small things for the community. We loved small content updates where we got corn or tree planting or jungles. Shaking up the meta. Stop trying to modify things and nerf them, there aren't too many combinations anyway.
Maybe if you would play your own game you would see. You said you want a random situation generator.

Just because you are using some mechanics from other games, it won't make the game less unique. And just because something is unique, doesn't mean that its fun or enjoyable.
That's why they say you are lazy, cause you nerfed the mechanics over and over, slowing down the veterans to reach the top. Instead of adding harder and bigger structures or tech.
And you try to force it on people and build on them when it's clearly not working. Fences, swords, races and tool slots.

Surviving Mars has an interesting concept with research: 4 out of 5 tech lines are the same, the 5th is breakthroughs. Those are powerful upgrades to items, but they are harder to get, harder to research and you don't know what you get. They are powerful in combination with other things, making tech tree elements completely useless or very powerful. It creates replayability because each time you play, you get different combinations.

You could do some new materials and randomize the recipes of them. That would keep veterans challenged. It would only work if the server has a win condition or a time limit. Add new techs instead of limiting the old ones. Link families and cities to the tech paths, instead of blocking them by race. It should be a way to achieve the next step, but maybe it would be different from how others do it.
In surviving mars, you can build moisture vaporators. They give small amount of water for energy. They can be placed anywhere. Or you can build a system to bring and store water from underground deposits. Later you can drill deeper for more. Based on upgrades, the moisture vaporators can be good again cause power and upkeep is not an issue anymore, and convenience worth more. Also, it can receive 1-2 upgrades which can make it more effective.
Instead of making interlocked family trees, make it parallel. Gingers can't get water from the well but can melt the ice for example.
Make trading viable: people can buy the resources on a marketplace but they got to work harder to get it that way. Maybe allow people to travel to a destination if they meet some conditions (made money that life, age limit etc).
The basic tech tree should be there for everybody but require massive resources. Gaining these resources would require more work. The parallel tech trees would work with race specializations. Melting snow would be tedious at first but building bigger and better machines would allow a bit o water income in the meantime. If you just kill water, newbies cant even farm which is the very basic job in a city.

Maybe family quest or unique quests, wondering traders. Timed limit to certain tasks to get special resources. Produce 50 pies to get 15 buckets of water. That's a hard task for a city.

Maybe tower defense style, the nearby animals attack the city.

Collect resources for a buff: more babies are born there.

Limit tech by population. Until the city doesn't have enough people you can't progress forward.
Team jobs. Instead of tool slots, you would need people to help in jobs which require 2 or more people to craft the items.

We need rewards to do tasks, logical game elements that make certain tasks worth doing.

Right now we don't have enough jobs to do, its a constant resource depletion until we die out. The map is the same everywhere, no reason to be one place instead of the other. No town, family identity. No feeling of belonging.

People who like the game will play until they get good. You are losing players who ran out of the content and challange. And instead of giving them more things to do, you give the same things to do just slower or cockblocking them with slots and races.

Mekkie · 2020-02-28 15:15:01

Jason, from your post it seems you think we are asking for a single player variant.. we aren't. We are simply asking you to stop using "it would just be single player if these restrictions weren't here" as an excuse to further try and pigeonhole us all into a singular play style that you believe we will find fun. You claim to want a blue ocean game, yet continually add restrictions that contradict that. "Here's the ocean guys! Oh.. but you can only play in the great barrier reef. If you want to visit the bermuda triangle, you have to be black."

Also, you think that by removing restrictions, people will just suddenly stop talking to each-other? Was this a single player game before those restrictions came out? Just because some of the more experienced players may turn into hermits, you punish the rest of us?

Look.. If i have a big project, i'll ask for help for it. If i don't know a thing, I'll ask someone how. Removing restrictions will not remove the social aspect of the game... you will still be born as a helpless baby. You will still meet interesting people. You will still cultivate in-game friendships and relationships that are memorable. Just because someone has the option to play as a hermit, doesn't mean that everyone will. The universe will not implode if some people choose to work alone.

As far as I can tell, removing racial barriers can only be a good thing. People can build more towns, rather than being stuck in the same rotation of 2-3 towns that managed to survive the first day. People who enjoy the Eve phase of a town over the "maintaining the bell town" phase will actually be able to enjoy the game again (people like me).

Yes, sometimes I like to be born in a bell town so i can roleplay or dink around and do whatever i want.. but it gets stale fast when that's my only option.

jasonrohrer · 2020-02-28 16:40:24

Destiny was specifically asking for a single-player variant. I was responding directly to her.

DestinyCall wrote:

I'd also like to see more support for "solo-play". This is something that I personally wished this game offered when I first started and something that I hear requested by many new players.

DestinyCall · 2020-02-28 17:00:10

jasonrohrer wrote:

Destiny was specifically asking for a single-player variant. I was responding directly to him.
DestinyCall wrote:
I'd also like to see more support for "solo-play". This is something that I personally wished this game offered when I first started and something that I hear requested by many new players.

*her

jasonrohrer · 2020-02-28 17:09:59

Sorry, fixed that.

DestinyCall · 2020-02-28 17:17:30

jasonrohrer wrote:

Sorry, fixed that.

No worries. I do the same thing.

Spoonwood · 2020-02-28 22:40:55

jasonrohrer wrote:

Yeah, you caught me, the laziest developer on the planet!
93 updates.... the output of an absolute sloth.

Absent technical issues (such as needing some sort of network to host multiple people playing), it's easier to make something that relies on inter-pesonal interactions heavily to people than something that doesn't rely as heavily on inter-personal interactions. Only a few things need set up and then people can entertain each other. And people are complex and sophisticated. So that something interesting occurs for some people seems likely.

But, to make something that doesn't rely on inter-personal interactions heavily means that the content itself needs to be interesting. And in-game objects and content of any game are orders of magnitude less complex and sophisticated than people. Players need to end up interested in *the things themselves* instead of people when inter-personal interactions don't have such a high priority. For most people, if not everyone, it's easier to develop maintain interest in people than it is to develop and maintain interest in things. Thus, that something interesting occurs for some people seems less likely for a game that relies less on inter-personal interactions.

And if you still think the above incorrect, I ask you, how many people would rather interact with a computer itself than interact with people doing something on that computer?

Jason's merely talks about numbers in the above. But, since his approach to development is built on people entertaining each other, his whole approach screams a certain sort of preference for trying to take the easier approach to things, if not the lazier approach also.

rraa · 2020-02-29 02:23:02

jasonrohrer wrote:

Oh, there's one other huge problem. I set out to make the most comprehensive crafting game of all time. A small slice of the gaming populace loves huge crafting trees, but most people don't. It gives them the, "I'm never going to learn all of this, and why would I bother?" feeling.
I can improve the crafting hints or whatever, but the fundamental problem stands. Most people are not interested in learning the 25 steps it takes to make a fire. Most people aren't interested in learning to make 3000 (or 10,000, eventually) objects.

jasonrohrer wrote:

I believe there is something fundamentally unsatisfying about this game, baked into its very structure. This is the thing that makes the game unique, and makes people want to try the game in the first place, but it also makes them eventually want to stop playing. You only live one hour. It's right there in the title.
For the games that people get really hooked on, for the games that they play all night by accident, you don't usually play for only one hour.

I think I might just be the average player, I played just 8 hours and I'm really wondering what is there left in the game for me. My opinion might just be worthwhile.

I cannot speak for everyone, but I can tell you why I won't play it for much longer, possibly never again. I consider myself a casual gamer: I've played Stronghold, Tropico and Zeus as a kid, and just recently played Factorio and ONI. All those games have something in common, you build something to last. When I was building a town in Zeus I was building it to perfection, as if those save files were going to stay with me forever. There is something about the human brain that wants to have a goal to achieve, get to perfection an keep hold on to it. There is a reason all city building and crafting games are about gathering resources and ordering them. Humans like that. There is a reason the most addictive games on mobile are about tap, tap, tap, collect, collect, collect. The mobile developers skipped the challenging part and went straight to the "fun" part, which is collecting and sprawling buildings, or decorations or whatever.

OHOL is fundamentally different. And that is why I like it. It is refreshing.

But after you play it 10 times, there is little reason to go back.

There are ways of addressing that. Some are against the game core philosophy, but some are not.

The family trees and leaderboard are a step in the right direction, but I think you are missing the point. I don't really care of my lineage, it means nothing to me, I don't care about the name and I don't care about how long my mother and daughter are living. Most of the time they are living as long as they want and if they don't go all the way to 60, they die of suicide.

I do care about what I craft and I care about the city I helped build. The way cities are build right now I might even spawn twice in the same city and never know it. My solution is to give cities an identity, make each city have a central stone or building that once named will stay there forever. Make a leaderboard of cities. Make cities searchable when outside the game. Make a list of important players for each city. Give players a list of cities they have lived in. Give players a list of things they accomplished in every city. Give players some medals or prizes that they can see on their profile. Make it worth playing over and over again. Make it easier in game to find the city you want to travel to, not in speed or time but in direction, make a map or give players a compass. If someone can at least travel to the city they want to play in they might want to return.

In general I want to play OHOL one hour at a time because that's what makes it special. I like the "kindness" of the game. I like the crafting tree that pushes me into collaboration.

But at odds with playing OHOL one hour at a time, I also want a part of it to be permanent. I want to be able to go back and see what I did, I want to go back and look at the cities I helped build. That's the human nature. We don't like death in real life and we don't like death in games either. And a death in OHOL is more profound than a death in any other game. But if I die in game, I want at least my city to live forever.

Hope the perspective of an average player on the edge of quitting helps. I don't claim to know how to build games and I don't claim to know what makes a great game be great.

I am just thankful to find OHOL and enjoy an unique gameplay.

Thank you

One Hour One Life Forums

#76 2020-02-27 21:49:35

Re: Jason's misunderstanding

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