One Hour One Life Forums

That quote was from almost 2yrs ago so hopefully could rethink that. I think it's just really hard pressed to make steel feel special when it's what every single thing is made out of.

Also rather than doubling up the charcoal add coal from the mines and boom. Also that would reflect that early steel was made with charcoal but later steel was made using coal.

As Destiny pointed out its Iron or bust at the moment. This is because iron/steel was infinitely foraged, and it removed mining tech from the game. Engines were not created or added to mines because there was no reason to. Developing further tech into mining was also pointless because it was easily sidestepped. The approach to fix that was to radically change how iron was gathered, which hit both the top end and the bottom end. There is now more pressure to get oil and engines going because you need an engine to tap muddy sites to secure more beyond your homesite mines. There is now a timer essentially added into any village that starts, you need to have an engine and oil before you use up too much of your home iron or you are screwed.

On the flipside if there was say the ability to make the starting tools (Shovel, Axe, Pick and Hoe) out of copper, you could make steel tools special and luxury item. You could add in more advanced forging techs without breaking early game to pieces on top of that.

For sure, we've asked about copper/bronze/iron tools for a long time. It's a concept used so much in games that it's incredibly intuitive and would add a lot of depth and really slow down village progression. I'd take a Metallurgy Update in a heartbeat no matter how hard it was to do the late game metals.

The thing I think is funny about that... In the past Jason seemed adamant about not doing certain QoL changes because it would be confusing to newcomers. That taking away freedoms and actions would be confusing and frustrating...

My mother when I was younger taught me that is better to want/desire someone (in regards to relationships) than it is to need someone. I realized when I got older that principle related to almost all aspects of life. I wan't money, I don't need money. I want nice things, but I don't need those things. I want to make others in my life to be happy, I don't need to do it.

The thing is, people act differently when something is deemed an absolute necessity. They lie and they cheat. They manipulate others and systems, they ignore empathy and often lack trust in others. They freely give up parts of their humanity to fulfill their greed, and rationalize it behind false sense of necessity.

Jason hinges very hard on every single thing being a necessary part to survival. At it's root, the game does need a challenge to function, but where you draw the lines in the sand is the big discussion. At some point, actions done out desire should be able to replace some of the actions of necessity. Recently dyed clothes came up, that they at first were everywhere but now are barely made. I don't think that it's because its a meh thing to do, just that there is so much necessity forced into the gameplay, that no one desires to make them. Photos, paint, fruit trees, rose gardens... They are so hard to accomplish because of resource requirements or specializations locks in order to keep that necessity machine turning.

For one, I don't know how you can so horribly quote someone when what they wrote is right above you...

To summarize, trying to stay ahead of a living playerbase with the tech tree is like trying to stop rain using your hands. It's an impossible task, and you will look silly trying to do so.

The main point, is that towns are not limited by water/food/oil, but simply player attention. Once a town reaches a certain point, there is so little to do that FEELS meaningful that players abandon the town through SIDS.

To this I completely agree. I loved this game, I put a lot of time into this game, I can't play this game at moment.

Wrote this on the discord last night after trying to get a couple lives in and getting discouraged and playing a different game.

"Suggestions on tasks to tackle? Coming back to the game after a long break, I am always put into a settlement that has all or most of the groundwork done, its rather confusing to what needs attention. Often its dealing with water, but it's not "hey we need an engine" its we need diesel, and we can't even run those machines (race restrictions ftw). I am finding it hard to find a groove that I am down to do for an hour. Back in the day, finding good sources of iron, making decent bakeries, enlarging and managing pens were actual things needed. Now it feels like thats all done and I am lost. I mean I have had a couple lives that I tried to clean up a pen and cycle sheep for mutton and got told to stop because we didn't have water for berry/carrot bowls... wtf, what happened"

This to me is the end result of trying to "slow" down the progression. As Jason wrote, putting time gates on everything wouldn't really be enjoyable, but we really need some sort of time/resource sink. Something that takes a couple days of communal work to achieve, that allows us to start the next level of thing that takes even more days to complete. The hard part though is something of that level (pyramid is a good example) should require a ton of resources, but at no point are we allowed to upscale our gathering methods. Rope and stone are two great examples. There is no way to gather either of these resources differently as tech level moves up. Sure you might be making planes and cars, but if you need some rope, you gotta plant some milkweed like they did in the old days. You might be sticking engines on wells and mines, but if you want to build a few walls, break out the horse cart and a shovel and ride out like your great-great-great-great-Grandad did. Having some of those resources come super cheap later would essentially break the early game, much like being able to make wells on ponds broke water a year ago, but at some point you have to give in. Pretty sure I am sitting in my house on a computer with a fridge full of food (well sort of hehe) because humans have broken the survival game and have moved on to bigger problems.

There is a fine line between not making a 2D minecraft, and removing freedoms to create anything because everyone is struggling over water and attention spans.

I have pondered this extensively over the past 6-8 months or more, ever since the spring update, when you could build wells in mountains and savanna. The idea of seeing mountain villages that built with stone and focused on sheep, swamp towns that built with adobe and raised pigs/geese, and grasslanders that built with pine and heavily farmed etc sounded amazing. The huge problem with that is where does the failure element come in, and now you have to balance that on a per biome basis.

Perhaps the problem lies with the failure condition? At the moment it feels like burning a candle at both ends. If you do not succeed in getting a pump running, everything comes to grinding halt and everyone's flame is snuffed out very quickly. Its a race between extinction and immortality. There is never a time when you can look at a town and say, if they do not advance they will stop growing, only being able to support a handful of people, or will die out. It's purely, advance or disappear, which leads to the problem Destiny pointed out so well. Everything that is unattended should eventually have to decay, but at which rate should it do so is the head scratcher. Maybe small villages, in whatever biome they are in, can get by a bit longer before burning out. Loosen up on the severe necessity of growing into a town that has it all going on. Give the smaller villages a little more value, because they often just feel like a sinking ship and your best tool to bail it out is a water glass.

It's so complex though, and even now I waver between what could work and what does. Maybe it comes down to the fact that the restrictions are put onto the players rather than the biomes themselves. A crop you pull from a savanna can just be planted and grown in the snow. An animal taken from a mountain can be domesticated in the desert. If that ease of access was limited, say sheep are slower to produce young and wool outside of home biome, crops take longer to grow or yield less, maybe it would feel better. Make the races just have perks to being in their home biome such as temperature or rate of food loss. Heck maybe it would lead to inter village sharing/trade. Savanna would have excess clothes to give away, mountaineers would have excess mutton and iron, farmers would have ample branches and rope.

Facing an obstacle for the first time or for a small few times = interesting and engaging.

Facing an obstacle every time you play the game = Frustration

A year ago it felt rewarding to rise above the challenge and simply just know what needed to be done communally to get past the obstacle. What it sounds like now is, you can see and understand the obstacle in the way, but are limited in your interactions to address the problem. That limitation can very well breed interactions that are the holy grail of online gaming, but if its only hitting a small percentage of the general lives lived, its no longer interesting and engaging, but just down right frustrating.

What I have always felt is that Jason wants a quilt of interesting unique stories to be stitched together inside of the engine he built. It's not a far out thing with the structure of the game, but its so hard from a user standpoint to even achieve because of how many limitations are there. With everyone so limited in what they can do, if you are at the level that you know all the steps to everything, you inevitably get put into a mono task job because others either don't know how to do, or can not do because of slots and racial barriers.

I really enjoyed the lives that I had that I would look around and say, I can spend my whole 60 minutes and just build a cool bakery. I enjoyed the lives that I got all the parts for a newcomen well assembled ready to go right before the well went dry. I enjoyed the lives that I was a servant essentially. Fed the nursery fire and gathered firewood, made charcoal for the smith, did a couple cycles of compost and stood in as shepherd on the sheep. Made a couple big batches of pies before doing a cycle of rabbits for packs, right before gathering an extra horse for the town.

After all I have gone through and learned, I really loved being the swiss army knife to a village to get them to a town. Being shoehorned into specifics KILLED my growth as a player and therefore took away a lot of enjoyment from learning the game. When I look at it now, I ask out loud, why in the world would anyone attempt to learn all these steps if it came down to RNG if you could even do them or not.

It's even more maddening because months ago Jason skirted around specializations because he did not want to isolate players from not being able to do things if they "knew" how to do them. Well we are now in that boat and there is absolutely no choice or actions you can go through to get around it. If you have used your slots, the best you can do to help the smith is pile branches. If your town really needs a pump, the best you can do is leave town and use up most of your hour finding someone and convincing them to join you in the desperate hope of mutual survival.

There is much less you can offer as an experienced player these days that matters. From ash to ash, from dust to dust. Lets think about that a little bit. When starting the game you are faced with an learning curve that takes a little bit of work to become self sufficient. It then steepens on your first couple in depth tasks, requiring knowledge of accumulating end products from other curves. It then steepens even more when you know what interactions are needed to even begin your own progress, and if someone is even going through said steps. You are suddenly now faced with a difficult and rewarding choice - do I push past this and make an end product that will be needed 30-120+ minutes after I die, or do I try to stave off extinction in the moment. That choice was something that motivated people to desire to learn the game well enough to be in that group of players.

Obviously there was a huge difference between having a 6 person startup town of players that were near the top versus 6 players that were new. Some eve camps struggled with having a fire going all the time, and some eve camps were already cultivating sheep and making compost (My personal definition of Eve camp is a new camp, and either the founder is alive or died within 45-60 minutes of the current time) Thats a huge difference in levels of advancement. The attempt to manipulate that curve seemed to attempt to take power away from the know-it-all users and push them back down into the collective of players. It might have achieved its end goal slightly, but also created a new problem... Why are you motivated to succeed at the game as a player (gotta have that realplay) if you can not use that success regularly. Who in the fucking world thinks S.O.L (Shit outta luck) mechanics create interesting gameplay, that only works the first time and when you can see through hindsight that you put yourself there with the chance to course correct apparent.

The more I see the more I am reminded of DnD DMs on powertrips that every turn try to one-up players of their game constantly. Every tweak to keep this constant struggle, a stranglehold on the playerbase. Rather than backing off and seeing what happens in a time of prosperity, let it run its course and see how far it can go before finite resources run out, and what is done during that process, people are now desperately searching for wells to stave off starvation. This is starting to just sound sick man. I literally don't even know what the approach is anymore. I don't understand what intellectual data can be gathered from this, I just see people desperately trying to hang onto hope, pointing out random silver linings as the storm clouds roll in. Like wtf really.

More than ever this feels like a kid with a magnifying glass on an anthill.

The sids was never to get back somewhere, it was just to not be in a big town and in a starter village. Bigger towns at the point I played a lot had little to be done and often were filled with drama. Tons of murders and lots of people standing around doing nothing having high school locker room conversations. Not my cup of tea.

The second account was used maybe 5 or 6 times, as it was about coming back to a certain family that I wanted not as much the town or what I was working on. I wanted to do more for them, to give them a fighting chance to live through the night and then said goodbye for good, almost never seeing them or the town again.

See the thing is, having lives so short and the way death is setup for me, makes lives so meaningless. It makes the goodbyes feel like nothing because there wasn't really time to make a connection. With the overlaps in age, you usually spend maybe 30ish minutes around someone. Maybe have said just a few sentences to them. You probably never worked on anything together or shared many or any moments with them. Then suddenly you are supposed to care if they die?

If living to old age triggered the respawn, we would take care of our elders. Seeing some greybeard forget to eat when teaching someone smithing would be jarring and sad. Seeing a teen get bit by a wolf when there's no thread around would be a tragedy. Someone logging off for the night would be an actual goodbye. 36hr to 72hr lineage/area ban, respawn to same family if death is from old age. Too many people screw up then within a short time the village is blocked off to the server and will perish.

I am sorry for being so agressive. I honestly can tell you that have put way more time in than that. 8.2hrs was done in a single day. My steam review was because I was upset, mostly at what life has handed me, and for you candor. But I also trust that you are not harmed by the counter actions of said candor. I wish that you could see into my mind and see what I saw in your game. The thing that lead me to losing sleep, something I was obsessed about. I have shed tears seeing people live and care about what I have built. I have spent 10+hrs in day living past the code, the family blockouts of 1.5hrs to make something. My imgur account was made specifically to save images from your game. I want these interactions that you do to, I just feel as a player, a veteran player, to be harder to give because its a fight on so many levels. Most would call me an egotist, but give me mutton and a barrel full of wheat and I would feed generations, and I am down to make that sacrifice. I know you want us to live a life and step away, and think about it, but you can't always control that. There is a special magic in you thousands lines of codes that not many dare to enter into. I will always fight to give power to those that believe in that, so we can pass that onto our children.

Side note= Second account was only made to break past the lineage ban. What tools you have to track us is flawed. I have lived WAY more than 42 lives in your game. WAAAAY more. Shit in a vacation time at my height of playing the game I regretably spent at least 30hrs in 3-4 days. Not trying to counter you for effs sake, just that you are missing data.

I would love to see my total hours played on [email protected] created through steam on your end. I used a modded client not long after being a part of the community. I am slightly appalled that you tried to even call me out on that, when I recall multiple 8-12hr days when I was not working logged into your game. By my count I am at least a few hundred hours logged, which is a good amount, for a 20$ game. A 20$ game that I bought a second account for, simply to come back to a town that gave a shit and I liked, to give them a nudge and to support you because I thought you deserved more that 20$ per entry. I have probably used the second account for less than a dozen hours, because it was rare that I felt like I needed to bypass the system. For the most part I was happy, and just kept living random lives doing what was needed. I enjoyed your water update because it got me off my ass and made me learn how to make an engine. Completed only one live though, because people either turned my rods into swords or just straight stabbed me because I was productive and a ginger.

To counter your possible sarcasm, yes it would have. One small thing to make my life as a baker and bakery builder would have made me play more. I knew you made a game that sometimes you have to just be a cog, and I ALWAYS took up the mantle as the main food producer of the town. I tried doing that in other ways, such as the town lumberjack, gathering damn near a hundred logs in a life, but I doubt it went far because that town died out. Still happy doing it. I would be happy as a motherfucking clam taking the shit jobs for hours on end, if it went somewhere. The rift got us slightly closer as if you know what you are doing, you can get back to somewhere if you aren't killed first. Not a great barrier to entry, but at least it's finally there. What happens beyond that milestone (multi-day town) is in your hands, and I hope you play those cards well.
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To sum this up, for one, I actually want to know the hours I put into your game under my email/identity. I want to know what you consider as meager. Because I remember countless days of my roommates saying "playing One hour again eh?" and I remember telling everyone I knew liked games about it. I want that back good sir, I really do. These days getting 30-40hrs out of a game for 60$ is decent, anything over 100 is nutso, if I really am that delusional, please let me know. If spending hours logged, hours in discord, hours on the forums is considered meager by todays standards, then I am hanging up my controller/keyboard and giving up a passion I have had since I was 3yrs old running DOS games with my mother over my shoulder teaching me command prompts to run them.

This entire thread is incredibly heartbreaking and sad. There is so much cherrypicking on both sides that it leaves a sour taste that is hard to wash away. Jason - you should have never taken the bait, and I don't think there are many, including myself, that care what satire you were attempting to grasp. You have been rude and very selective to what you have responded to. This approach, will win the hearts of few, piss off a couple, but largely will just make the majority not care. You have outcasted your biggest community voices, waiting on the sidelines until they were frustrated, and then tried to make examples of them afterwards to why you don't budge. Rather than being eloquent with your words and feelings, you have made yourself seem incredibly immature with attacks on certain users, while also ignoring honest complaints from others.

Mentioning your profits was incredibly stupid, and amazingly juvenile. What did you honestly think can happen from doing that?  How in the flying fuck are we supposed to feel and respond to that? Congratulations, you make more money than me, and more than I may ever make in a month. You have successfully proved that money is a measure of success, great role model.

I am not saying add whatever some random joe mentions into the game, but to spit in the face of people that have fought for QoL changes or minor additions to make a life slightly more enjoyable? You want these emergent stories to come out, but seem to not have a grasp on that we want that too, but to be forced to do so kills the enjoyment of it. You are trying so hard to squeeze that out of a rather small playerbase, instead of giving us air and fuel to grow into a wonderful fire. Just because we like to spend a good deal of our free time playing games, and to escape to a world of another's design, does not mean we want to be puppets in some experiment.

All around us, we have seen the industry change, with big companies and producers with big budgets prey on a creative industry. Creating game loops that are only good at sucking people in, only to spit them out afterwards, tempting them to stay with promises of "We'll make it better, we care about our players" Bullshit. You want to say you like to do things in a realmaking way, but last I checked we are still throwing our piles of grain all over the ground next to our piles of shit. Advanced enough to make a diesel engine to pull water out of the ground, can't figure out how to make a barrel to store grain... Makes sense.