One Hour One Life Forums

This graph shows the average life expectancy of everyone who died younger than 14 in the game---all the players who did not make it through childhood.

This is a more interesting dataset than the overall life expectancy, because the presence of Eves in that data, who spawn at age 14 and therefore at least live 14 years, muddies the water.  At some point, I will run a more complicated analysis that removes Eves from the data, but that will take a bit of extra scripting on my part.

The above graph is a good indicator of the prevalence of baby abandonment and baby suicide.  You can see how dire this situation had become before the lineage ban, and it looks like the lineage ban has had a positive impact.

There are signs.  But what good are signs without letters?  Think you can just type out your message with your computer keyboard?  What keyboard?  You're in the wilderness, friend.  Letters don't just grow on trees.

When I was a kid, my father had one of those black plastic sign boards with removable white letters in the lobby of his business.  When he wasn't looking, I re-arranged the letters to make the sign say something much more interesting.

Actually, this happened when I was an adult, not when I was a kid....

But how long do you really think your precious little message is going to last, knowing the kids these days?  My father was not thrilled, and you will not be thrilled either.

So you gotta lock that sign.  My father never thought of that.  Apparently, in 35 years of running his business, he never fathomed that a bad seed like me would come waltzing through his lobby.

But there are no bad seeds in this game, so you probably don't have to worry about it.  Try putting a second sign next to your first sign that says, "Please do not change the sign."  Or was that "Inspect Neonatal Hedgehogs"?

Yeah, so, lock your sign, daddy-o.

And hey, since signs are containers, that means we can lock some other containers now too.

The way Eves are placed has  a substantial impact on the feeling of the game.  Whenever a player joins the server when there is no suitable mother for that player, that player spawns as a full-grown Eve instead of as a baby.  Eve serves as the potential root of a new family tree, and her placement determines the opportunities that are available to that family.

Originally, Eves were placed at random inside an arbitrary radius around the world location (0,0).

This worked fine for a while, until that area began to fill up with civilization.  Eve is supposed to feel like a fresh start, with maybe a small chance of stumbling into the ruins of a past civilization, or eventually bumping up against a living, neighboring civilization.  As the center of the map got full, Eve was always just a stone's throw away from a village.  Furthermore, with everyone so close together, there was no danger of losing a village if it died out.  Thus, keeping a village alive meant nothing.  We could always find our way back to revive the ghost town tomorrow.  Even worse, as these areas got ravaged by human activities, the resources that a new Eve needs to bootstrap became more and more scarce.  Eve does need a somewhat green pasture to found a new civilization.

The next Eve placement algorithm involved a random walk across the map, looking at the last Eve location and making a random jump 2000 tiles away to place the next Eve.  There can be some randomly-occurring back-tracking with this method, which means that Eve can sometimes end up near the ruins of old civilizations, but we expect such a random walk to eventually explore the entire map, so we will also get farther and farther from center over time.  And with many Eves dying without founding new civilizations, and also perhaps due to biases in the random coordinate generator, we quickly walked our way from (0,0) out into the 50,000's.  This meant that villages were generally too far apart to interact with each other.  Still, Eve was usually in an untouched area full of natural resources.

The next Eve placement algorithm was radial, placing Eves randomly at a radius of 1000 from a fixed center point.  This put all villages within trading distance of each other, and offered plenty of untouched space for Eve---for a while.  But soon, the "rim" of the wheel filled up with civilization, and we were back to where we started---Eves placed in a crowded area that was stripped bare of natural resources.

The latest Eve placement algorithm was suggested a long ago by Joriom and maybe a few other people, and involves an ever-growing spiral around a fixed center point.  This guarantees that Eve is always in an untouched area, but also that she is never too far from some recent civilizations, so trade can happen.

While a server is running, the placements look like this:

You can see the three initial Eve placements at the center, which the server permits at startup to ensure that the first few Eves can have a chance to bootstrap a village in that spot.  After that, the spiral ensues, and would keep going as long as the server was running.

What happens when a server shuts down though, as it does every week during updates?

First, the death location of the longest-lineage person during shutdown is remembered.  This is used as the "center" of the spiral at the next startup, and after startup, the first three Eves are placed near there.  After that, a new spiral grows around that new center point, like this:

As this new spiral grows, it will cross through the previous spiral like so:

That is okay, because any of the other civilizations that were active at shutdown will potentially be rediscovered by Eves, which makes for an interesting Eve variation.  Still, future Eves will not be trapped in these already-developed areas, as the spiral will continue further out into untouched areas again.

Also, some of the older, long forgotten villages in the old spiral will be wiped when the server restarts due to the 24-hour abandonment cut-off.  Thus, the new spiral will cross through many now-wild areas, even as it overlaps the old spiral.

As the new spiral grows bigger, it will eventually engulf the old spiral and move beyond it, but the overlapping area will always be substantially less than half of the new spiral.  Thus, even if 100% of the old spiral contained active villages that were not wiped, more than half of the Eves in the new spiral will be placed in untouched wilderness.

If you build it...

We crossed one million lives lived inside the game this week.  It's kind of mind boggling.  And a group of well-coordinated players also trounced the previous lineage record of 32 generations, making it all the way up to 111 generations with the Lee family.  I've posted the 111 names from the matriarch chain here.

I've tied all these trends together in this update, which includes a monument, along with quite a few other changes.

In light of the recent server performance updates, the per-server player cap has been raised.

The experience of being murdered has been dramatically improved.  (Yes, that is a peculiar sentence.)  It has never actually happened to me in game yet, and I hope it will never happen to you.  But if it does, you'll have a small bit of time to get your affairs in order...

Long term food sustainability has been made much harder.  Getting up to 30+ generations in one spot should be a pretty substantial challenge, and you won't be able to do it on carrots alone.  The top has been hardened.

Short term food availability has been made a bit easier, with the addition of two more edible wild plants.  But they don't grow back, and they can't be domesticated, so they don't affect the long term challenge.  Being an Eve in the wilderness should be a little bit less stressful.  The bottom has been softened.

And there may be one little tiny surprise in there too... the idea came to me while I was falling asleep last night... I just had to put it in.

Also, monument logging is in place server-side, but the processing and display of those logs is just a counter for now.  A better monument roster will be implemented next week, assuming that it's needed.  And yes, that is supposed to be a challenge.

Most important:  Main website down at 10pm PST tonight (Wednesday) for maintenance.

I've finally been able to find and fix that troublesome "read-only game folder" issue on Windows.  If you're having problems with this, downloading v65b for Windows from your original download link will fix it.

The problem in v65 is triggered whenever the update process includes two binary updates to the client EXE.  This can happen if you take a break from the game and return to a backlog of updates.  Thus, just because the update process always worked for you in the past does not mean it won't fail for you in the future.  This is why the bug was so hard to find and confirm, amid thousands of "hey, it works for me," reports.

So if you ever run into a read-only issue during a future update, installing fresh from v65b should fix it for you.

Next issue:  Scheduled down-time, 10pm PST today (Wednesday)

My server provider Linode has been working to patch the recently discovered Spectre vulnerability in modern CPUs.  The patch requires a reboot of each server.

For the most part, this is fine for this game, because I'm running 15 game servers anyway, and I can easily take them down in batches while people continue to play.

However, the main web server, onehouronelife.com, needs to be rebooted too.  Unfortunately, the home page, forums, purchase system, and client reflector are all hosted on this server.  The reflector is the most mission-critical part of all this, because it's what clients talk to first to find out what game server they should go to.

And this important piece needs to go down so Linode can install the update.

The game servers will keep running, and your current lives won't be disrupted, but if you try to get reborn, you won't be able to find a new server to connect to.  You can work around this outage temporarily with the "customServerAddress.ini" setting.  Take a look in the forums or ask in Discord for help with this.

I plan to trigger the down-time at 10pm PST today.  I'm not sure how long the patch process will take, but it could be up to two hours.

Game purchase will be unavailable during the downtime.

Hopefully, it will be way shorter than two hours.

Thanks for understanding!
Jason

The end is coming.

Or maybe it's not coming.

It's up to you.

Long term carrot farming has a limit now.  A few content fixes (you can't wear saddles as big fuzzy shoes anymore, sorry).

A bunch of little client fixes.  The client will now complain if its version mismatches with the server (to help customServer folks notice that an update is available).  Speech no longer disappears off the top of the screen.  Mac fullscreen mode should be working (try it and see... let me know if it works).

An update just went live on the client and the server that does several important things.

First of all, there is a new naming system.  If you are Eve, you get to pick a last name (family name) that will be used by all of your future descendants.  You can't pick your first name though---you're Eve.  If you are a mother, you get to pick a first name for your baby.

Names are set by saying "I am _______" if you are Eve and "You are _______" if you are a mother, when you are holding your baby.  You can only name your own baby, and you must be holding it.

For those of you with a mischievous twinkle in your eye, don't worry, I thought of that.  The names that you pick are vetted on the server against a list of real first and last names, and the closest match is chosen if you don't pick a real name.  You can check out the lists here (careful, they are huge lists):

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jason … tNames.txt
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jason … tNames.txt

And once you set a name, that's it.  It never changes.  So chose wisely.

The names are being logged server-side too, and I will likely do something interesting with those logs in the future, like show the name chain in the longest family line, or generate family trees, etc.

Next, a few "bouncing forever" stalled action bugs have been fixed, and a work-around has been put in place so that you'll hopefully never be stuck and die from this bug in the future (a 4-second timeout has been added to the client).  Also, extra server logging has been added so that I can catch and fix the remaining cause of this bug.

And one invisible-self-as-baby bug was fixed.  There are still likely some invisible-person bugs lingering, however.

Summary:  It worked.

Profiling has long shown that map reads consume the majority of CPU resources on the server, especially in areas of the map that have a lot of full containers (each container acts as a multiplier on the amount of information that needs to be fetched for a given tile).  As people walk around the map, they look at big chunks of the map all at once, and this produces dramatically more load than map writes (which only happen when a player does something).  A player usually changes (writes) about one tile per second on average, but as they walk around, they might be looking at hundreds of tiles every few seconds.

I added a hash table for caching recently-read tiles from the map to make reads much less expensive.  Since writes are way less frequent, they can still be expensive:  changed tiles are both written to the hash table and instantly pushed into the disk-based database.  Thus, the map on the disk never lags behind reality.

Additional profiling also found a few more places where I could squeeze out a few redundancies.  For example, substantial load was coming from checking whether each item in a container had decayed.  But most things in most containers currently don't decay at all.  Might as well remember whether a container holds any decaying items or not, so we don't have to keep checking every item every time we look at the container.

The impact on CPU load can be seen above, with the whole graph representing 40 concurrent players on a cluttered map.

A friend of mine summed up a design theory for this game as "evolve or die."

Essentially, there should be no steady state, where you finally break free from the survival struggle and can be fat, dumb, and happy for the rest of your life.  The garden of Eden can never be returned to.  No living off the fat of the land.  The land is too thin for that.

On a larger scale, the same is true for a village.  Maybe it can start to feel like a steady state for a few generations, but in reality, those generations are making a grave mistake by living that way.  If they're not developing the next level of survival technology, they are dooming their village in the future.

The graph of progress should look like saw teeth, with catastrophes every so often when we realize that what we thought we figured out isn't working long-term.

As I was playtesting yesterday, testing some server fixes, I was noticing how infinite anything makes that particular thing robotic and uninteresting.  I don't need to care about it or think about it or consider it or spend it wisely.  I just go to the known spot and get more of it, as needed.  I was keeping a fire going, and like a robot, every so often I'd walk back to the branchy trees, pick a new branch (respawn time for branches is something like 60 seconds, and yew branches are infinite), chop it into kindling, and feed my fire.  It was tedious.  The computer might as well have done this action for me, each time my fire ran out.  I never had to make a decision.  Should I use this wood for fuel?

So.... what if each tree only has one branch to give?  Each yew tree only one yew branch?  What if the clay node only gives 4 clay before running out?  What if the fertile soil node only gives 4 tilled rows before running out?  What if each tule reed patch can only be harvested once?  What if the ponds run dry (and geese leave) after enough water trips?  What if rabbits don't respawn after snaring?

As Eve, you are literally plopped down in Eden, with all of these wild resources in their best possible, full state.  Every tree has a dead branch waiting.  Fertile soil nodes just brimming.  Berry bushes full.

It could even "feel" easy at first, but that feeling is an illusion.  You won't make it past age 30 unless you kick it into gear and carefully shepherd these actually-limited resources toward better survival tech before they run out.

And, this pattern should continue, all the way up the tech tree.  You are planting berries and carrots, which helps you survive when the wild bushes and rabbits run out, but eventually you run out of water.  You are developing the steel ax to harvest more firewood and building wood after the branches run out, but you eventually run out of trees.  You develop a pump to pull water out of the ground, but eventually you run out of fuel for the pump.  You are developing fertilizer that lets you make your own fertile soil, but eventually you run out of the base ingredients for the fertilizer.

It seems like all of this engenders difficult decisions every step of the way.  If I have a bit of grain, do I plant more wheat with it, feed it to my horse so I can travel distances, or feed it to my cows so they produce milk?  If I have a bit of fuel, do I put it in the plow to till some rows, put it in the pump to get some more water, or put it in the mill to grind some grain into usable flour?

One question that arises:  when I say, "run out," do I really mean it?  I'm not sure.  Like, if one population strips the wild world bare in some radius, and then time passes before a new Eve, she could actually be stuck with no means to re-bootstrap if nothing comes back, ever.  If branches and berries are permanently exhaustible, there's no starting over, for anyone, without moving elsewhere.  And wandering around looking for greener pastures isn't very interesting.  Salvaging progress from the last failed civilization is much more interesting.

So, I'm currently thinking that everything is "lifetime exhaustible."  As far as a player is concerned, each tree only gives a branch once.  Each berry bush can be emptied once.  But they replentish every hour, so the next Eve has a chance.  Wild stuff is always there, slowly building in the background, as a possibility if needed, but it can't be depended on for more than a short bootstrapping phase.  After you've got a farm or whatever, a trip out into the forest to pick berries can still happen from time to time.

But some things are perma-exhaustible.  Like if you chop down a tree and don't plant a new one, that's it.  If you dig a wild carrot up, that's it.  And a few trivial things, like tinder and leaves, are still infinite, because it would feel too weird to make them limited.

I do worry that this encourages an Eve strategy of "quit playing and come back in an hour."  Like if the wilderness feels too lean, or you mess up too much, waiting an hour will bring it all back and give you a new start.

I could also refresh everything on each new Eve, but again, that seems to make Eve suicide a viable strategy.

If it refreshes on Eve, but only if she's different than the last Eve, then it encourages multiple accounts.

The only way around this seems to be to make everything perma-exhaustible.  There's no timing trick that you can use to work around it.  If you, or the person before you, exhausted the wild resources, your only choice is to find greener pastures to re-bootstrap.  You can find you way back to the old city later.

This reminds me of the book Ishmael.  There's an analogy in there about civilizations being like flying contraptions, and it's easy to confuse falling with flying for a while, when we jump off the cliff with our flapping wing suit or whatever.  The ground seems to be getting closer, so we flap the wings harder.  We look down on the ground below and see an array of other crashed flying contraptions.  Why did they crash?  We'll never know.  But we're not going to crash like them!  We have it figured out.

Like every time we find the ruins of an abandoned civilization, we scratch our heads.  Why would they ever leave all of THIS?  Well, we're never leaving ours, that's for sure.

Just to prevent the map from forever expanding into greener pastures, maybe wild resources could respawn on some kind of glacial time scale.... like every 24 hours, or every week, or something.

One Hour One Life is about growing a new civilization from scratch, starting naked in the wilderness, across many human generations.  You start the game by being born as a baby, and obviously you are born naked.  People can make clothing over time and put it on, but they can also take it off.

The question:  how should nudity be depicted in the game?

My creative partner Tom and I parted ways about 3 months ago.  Before that, we were all-in on the depiction of nudity in the game, with a character style that looked like this:

I thought it looked interesting and funny.  But the detailed nudity seemed like the elephant in the living room for a lot of people.  It had the potential to overshadow everything else, and recurrently popped up in discussions about the game (Kotaku comments).  For me, an anti-Victorian stance is part of my makeup, and I do want that to shine through my work.  But it's not really what this game is about (it's not a statement on nudity).  And then there are commercial issues as well.  Nudity could make or break the game either way.  I could stir up interest and boost sales, or it could turn off the vast majority of people.

I've re-done all the drawings myself since Tom left the project, and I made an early decision in the new character design to keep the nudity totally abstract.  After all, these characters don't even have noses or ears, so why show nipples or genitals?  They're cartoons.  But they're still obviously naked, because they're flesh colored, and they can put on clothing and take it off.  (This is just a sample... there will be 100 different characters from a full spectrum of skin tones.)

But is this too tame?  Some of my local game design friends say that I'm chickening out.  They also say that I'm cutting out something that will make people curious about the game.

And we have Naked and Afraid on the Discovery Channel as a hit show, albeit censored.  But people are interested in that premise.

And of course Rust.  Maybe there's a difference with 3D vs 2D nudity, though.  2D leaves more room for the imagination (see Scott McCloud), making it more salacious?  3D nudity looks like mannequins, and we can distance ourselves from them a bit.

On the other hand, Rust had nothing but naked MEN for years, and they only recently added women, amid great controversy.  Maybe depicting naked men is funny and okay, but not naked women.  Like the game Icycle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u357mY1c2o8

My wife's reaction to Tom's characters was always that they were "creepy" and that they made her feel uncomfortable in they way that they depicted female nudity.  Maybe too R. Crumb-ish or something.

So is there some middle ground?  Some kind of more abstract nudity that would be less creepy without chickening out?

Someone pointed out the manga character Shin Chan:

And there's the classic "inverted black triangle" for women, though even that has a somewhat creepy history, like the Playboy Femlin cartoon character (NSFW):

Obviously, the Femlin is meant to be erotic, but is there a way to depict cartoon female nudity without that effect?  We have so few examples to reference.

A Google search for "cartoon nudity" results in quite an eyeful.  So people are right to associate cartoon depictions of female nudity with salacious intent, given the history of dirty cartoons.  Maybe there's no way to transcend that association.

Still, I want there to be absolutely no doubt that these characters are naked when they're not wearing clothing.  That idea is very important to the heart of the game, while the specific way that nudity is represented is not.

The development process for this game is intricate with a lot of moving parts. That's been true for some of my other games in the past, but keeping people up to date on what's going on with development has always been a manual, tedious process.

I've been doing a lot of scripting work on the website to turn it into an automated information hub for documenting our development process. The latest news---like this post---is pulled out of the forums automatically and displayed here. There's a log of concept art, and a very straight-forward scanner-to-website pipeline, so we can keep the flow of website visuals coming. And the Update Log automatically catalogs the new objects in each game update. We plan for hundreds of updates, and thousands of objects, over the next few years---there's no way we were going to be posting manual updates about all of that stuff.

Finally, the homepage automatically presents a sampling of the latest information from each source.