One Hour One Life Forums

New this week, for a belated Thanksgiving:  a feasting table, where you can serve yourself a whole plate of food.  This takes advantage of the recently-added food overflow system, and is the first food source that offers +40 in one gulp, giving you a huge buffer of time before your next meal.

I spent the rest of the week making a dent in the very long list of issues that have piled up.

You now have a separate directional arrow, at the top of the screen, when you hear a distant bell tower ring.  No more needing to dig up your home marker to follow the bell.  A bug in lingering home markers from the last life has also been fixed.  Some glitchiness in biome sickness have been fixed, along with an exploit that allowed you to plant biome-specific things outside of their target biome.

Eves were being spread out too far, because tutorial players and donkeytown players were advancing the next Eve position by accident, so that's been fixed.  This should bring everyone a bit closer together.  I Fixed a few confusing cases of tool learning (like when you're too hungry to use the axe, but learn it anyway).

There was a huge inaccuracy in the way that average lifespans were being computed as part of fitness score calculations.  That has been fixed, which should dramatically reduce fitness score inflation, and all fitness scores have been reset back to 0.

There are still loads of issues left to fix, and I'll be focusing on those next week.  Thanks to all of the people who spent so much time reporting them.  Keep them coming.  If I don't know about them, I can't fix them.

Please report programming-related issues here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues

and content-related issues here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

This week's update focuses on new ways to find each other, in light of the fact that you now need each other for long-term survival.

First, there's a new tool in place for sharing long-distance navigation, and for helping people find your village.  Way stones were inspired by forum member SirCaio's suggestion.  They act like permanent maps that anyone can use simply by touching them.  If you're looking to interact with foreign explorers, you can make your village easier to find by planting way stones in a radius around it.  Just like maps, way stones can have long titles, which means they also can function as informative sign posts.  Way stones can also be used to duplicate maps, but they can also be used in village center to make sure that important destinations are known to future generations---no chance of the map getting lost if it's literally etched in stone.

And now, when you pick up a map or touch a way stone, your character speaks a distance estimate along with the title.  No more wandering in a vague map direction and figuring out that it's actually too far away.

Next, rideable objects, like horses and cars, protect you from the effects of bad biomes.  No more long, circuitous routes.  If you're riding, you can plow right through.

Along with these exploration updates, there have also been huge improvements to wall-building.

First, pine walls now require a lot less resources, and pine floors are possible, making them viable for early-stage camps.  Being indoors adds a huge reduction to your food consumption rate, so building a few primitive buildings might be worth considering as part of your bootstrapping.

Next, all walls now auto-orient, freeing you from the tedium of cycling through the various wall orientations when building.  You can put walls down wherever, and your building will look nicely connected, guaranteed.  Fences also auto-orient, even relative to walls.

Finally, springy doors now open automatically when you pass through, and they don't interfere with path-finding.  Being indoors is no longer a navigation inconvenience.

Beyond those content changes, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, and an exploit in the fitness score system has been cleared up.  Committing suicide when young no longer allows you to reap a score benefit from a long-lived mother.  Your mother and grandmother still count toward your score, but only if you live longer than they do.

Even with this exploit removed, some rather high scores are possible, and such scores make the tool slot limitations irrelevant.  I've updated the mapping formula to a sigmoid, as shown in the following graph:

No matter how high your genetic fitness score goes, you'll never have more than 19 tool slots.

The recent Steam sale brought in a lot of new players.  I'm deeply grateful to the existing players for helping all of these new people to learn the ropes.

There will be one more content update on Monday, and then I'm on vacation for Thanksgiving.

Thank you for your patience during the long-running Arc and Rift experiments, which have shed light on a number of important design issues and improved the core of the game immensely.  The list of Rift-based discoveries is long, but to summarize, we have a better biome map layout, a more balanced birth placement algorithm, a tap-out system to ensure upper-end resource scarcity, a more powerful and intuitive cursing system, and a map system.

It's time to test out these improvements on an infinite map and in a perpetual world, shifting the focus away from community-wide story arcs and back to individual family arcs, happening in parallel.  The full reasoning behind this change is described here:

https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8320

Eves spawn into this boundless world whenever they are needed, when there are too few families or too many babies for the existing mothers to handle.  These conditions occur rarely, so a new Eve will be a special event.  The privilege of being Eve is granted to a player with a relatively high genetic fitness score.  Eves are placed in a zigzag pattern spreading out to the west, which looks like this:

Thus, to find older villages, you can walk to the east, while walking west will take you to the frontier.

Each water well and oil strike taps out ground water and oil in a radius that matches this Eve placement pattern, meaning there can be roughly one water well and one oil well per Eve settlement, though distant resource outposts are possible.

The map has been set to never cull anything, except for during server updates, when areas that haven't been visited in a full seven days are cleared to conserve database space.  Thus, in active areas, perpetual road networks are possible.

Things will obviously end up being more spread out than they were in the Rift, so the plane will become useful again.  To make the plane more reliable, your destination can now be set by looking at a map immediately before taking off---you will land at the closest available landing strip to the map's destination.

With genetic fitness scores mattering more than ever before, the question becomes:  how long can you keep your offspring alive, and what will you have to do in order to keep them alive?  The resources in the immediate area surrounding a family's home base will run out.  Survival beyond that will require quite a bit of planning and coordination.

The wastefulness of high-value food items has been reduced, because adults now have a large overflow store to accommodate the last food item that made them full.  This overflow area starts small and grows along with your stomach size, so young children still have a tense eating game.  This also helps to differentiate low-value food like berries from high-value foods like pies.  Munching four berries is no longer equivalent to eating a piece of pie, because the pie can fill a larger portion of your overflow store.  This graph shows the size of your overflow store, based on your stomach size:

Indoor areas have been buffed by applying a flat time-per-food-pip bonus while indoors.  Being indoors makes you burn food much slower, no matter your heating or clothing situation.  Mousing over your temperature meter now gives you information about your current food burn rate.

When a well or oil strike taps out neighboring areas, gradient markers are now left to the north and south as well as to the east and west, making finding the well easier.

The kill-spam bug has been fixed.  In order to target (or re-target) someone, you must first drop your weapon.

You now have between 8 and 16 tool learning slots in your lifetime, depending on your genetic fitness.  Each tool that you learn consumes one of your slots.  You can't learn everything, so you must chose carefully and coordinate your efforts with those around you.

A more complete explanation of this idea is described here:

http://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=8181

The point of the arcs is to see what happens over the long haul to villages as fundamental resources run out in a finite area.  However, those fundamental resources have been so plentiful in the past that villages died out for other reasons before the experiment got to run to completion.  Oil was one of these primary resources, but taking a quick survey of a sample map, I found 42 tarry spots.  That's a lot of oil in a lot of places.

It's much more interesting if only some of the villages manage to find and monopolized oil.  So in this update, there are now a fixed number of tarry spots---five of them---scattered randomly on the map.  And to make them easier to find, they only occur in the snowy biome.

Oil is primarily needed for pumping water long term, but what about the intermediary water pumps leading up to the diesel pump?  I took another look at those and made them both more reliable and long lasting, which will give a village a bit more breathing room before they need to rush oil exploration.

The hint system has been refined even more since last week.  Now, when you type a filter like /HATCHET, you see a list of step-by-step instructions for making the target object, with blue arrows pointing to the ingredients for each step as you go, and the current step switching automatically whenever you pick up a new ingredient.  For simpler crafting tasks, this system almost works like magic to lead you step by step through the process with blue hint arrows guiding your way.

The posse system has also been adjusted to allow you to join a posse verbally (I JOIN YOU), even if you are unable to right-click on a fast-moving griefer.  You need to be holding something to join a posse, but it doesn't necessarily need to be a deadly weapon.  Your joining adds moral support to the posse and speeds it up.  Setting down whatever you're holding takes you out of the posse, just like before.

You can fly over the rift barrier with a plane again, but you can't have babies outside the rift.  The past few arcs were ended by escapees sucking babies away from the remaining arc families.

The big changes this week focused mostly on griefing and long-term family preservation.  The most recent arc lasted 67 hours, which is much better than before, but we're still not there yet.  Ideally, an arc would last 5-7 days, to the point where we hit an interesting resource-exhaustion situation.  The arc ends when there's only one family left, and families were lasting longer, but still dying out too quickly.

After looking at the data, it became clear that very few people were ever going to Donkeytown, even though there were plenty of curses being doled out.  In fact, the most widely-cursed player had accumulated curses from 104 people, and even that extreme outlier barely went to Donkeytown.  The fixed-radius blocking associated with curses---where someone you cursed is guaranteed to be born far away from you for the next seven days, wasn't working.  Even if many of the living players had an incoming player cursed, their blocking radii wouldn't cover enough of the map.  There could always be a crack for a heavily cursed player to slip through.

And it was clear that some of these griefing players were actively trying to kill off families to bring the arc to a swift end.

Now the blocking radius for a cursed player grows depending on how many living players have that incoming player cursed, growing by 100 tiles for each additional cursing player.  If you try to get born during a time when 10 living players have you cursed, your blocked radius will cover the entire diagonal diameter of the rift, meaning that it's impossible for you to get born there, and you go straight to Donkeytown.  However, as the number of living players who have cursed you rises, it becomes gradually harder and harder for you to get born in the rift, as you are pushed further and further away from more and more people.  Thus, the more you bother people, the more likely you will be to end up far away from people or even in Donkeytown.

As an example, a recent sample showed that 13 living players had cursed that most-cursed player (the one with 104 curses).  That player has gotten to the point where they will almost always be born in Donkeytown.  They've bothered enough people that, day and night, there are always a bunch of bothered people online in the game at the same time.

Next, I took another look at killing, and how it gives lone griefers an advantage as they sneak around and pick people off.  You now get a 3-second warning when someone targets you before they can actually kill you, and their murder-mouth sounds have a visual indicator when they are off-screen.  Your character also shows a SHOCK face while they are targeted. So you can see them coming, with plenty of warning.  Still, depending on how skillfully you move relative to them, they might be able to catch up to you.  Furthermore, a lone griefer, using skilled movements, can often evade a determined group of players.  This never felt right.  The group should have a huge advantage over an individual, and a lone griefer shouldn't be able to get the jump on anyone.

The solution to this problem is the new posse movement system.  If you're trying to kill someone, acting alone, you move slower than normal.  If you join up with a larger and larger group, all targeting the same person, you move faster and faster as a group.

All of these changes make unilateral killing much harder.  Your victim gets plenty of warning, and you can't catch them.  However, a lone individual can still guard a choke-point or area, preventing anyone from passing through.  Lone guards are good.  Lone killers are bad.  On the other hand, it is also much harder for a lone griefer to escape from a determined group, because the group speeds up.  When the whole village decides that you need to go, they should be able to carry out justice without too much mucking around.

But even with these changes in place, I'm still worried about families dying out too quickly.  Maybe flukes of baby distribution are still contributing factors.  I decided to redo the baby algorithm yet again, this time always giving incoming babies to the family with the fewest fertile females after the Eve window closes.  It used to be round-robin, but that kind of even distribution might not be enough to keep a struggling family alive.  And so far, it seems to be working.  Here's the family graph for three hours from the latest arc:

Oh, and one more really cool thing:  you can now build boxes on property fences.  They allow you to store things there, thus conserving space, but they also serve as pass-through channels, allowing you to pass stuff in and out of a fenced area without opening the gate.

Specialized work units are now possible.  Get ready to apply those time and motion studies!

I'm back from PAX West with a bunch of bug fixes and improvements.  The arcs have generally been pretty stable during this time, lasting one to four days before we get down to a single family.  I'm still not fully satisfied, and I'll be putting a lot more effort into making it even better in the future, but this is a good place to turn my attention to other matters, namely the enormous list of user-reported bugs that have built up.  This week, I got through all of the reported and reproducible code bugs.  Next week, I'll be tackling the list of content bugs.

The biggest change this week is the war report feature:  mousing over someone from another family will now tell you if you're currently at war or at peace with that family.  War status changes should also let you know, but what happens if you're born into a war or peace that was declared generations ago?  Now you have a way of finding out.

The road-following code was also overhauled, and it now works perfectly in all situations, including diagonal roads that join other roads, double-backs, and so on.  If there's a viable road ahead, you will follow it.

Other small fixes:

--Parked horse cart no longer overlaps weirdly with the object to the left

--You can paste text into chat with ctrl-v (requested by a player with brain damage who has trouble typing)

--Single-click set-down on surrounded tiles.

--No more ghost monument locations after an apocalypse.

--Fixed a glitch that allowed children to pick up swords and cars via swapping what they're holding.

On the heels of my return from vacation, there will be no gif this week, but there's still an update.

During my vacation, as many of you might recall, the arc wore on an on and on for something like 8 days, and none of the end conditions were triggered.  Meanwhile, the space inside the rift became an over-griefed hell-scape.  I had to kill that arc manually from vacation, and disabled the rift barrier temporarily until I could return home and tweak things.

So, this week, we take what we've learned from the arc runs so far and tweak a bunch of stuff that needs tweaking.  Keep in mind that this game has been live for 18 months at this point, and we just learned about new problems that never mattered too much before.  Bears have been in the game for 18 months, and it never mattered that their caves respawned new bears every 24 hours.  I didn't even recall that it worked that way.  But inside the rift for 8 days, this suddenly mattered.  There were hundreds of roaming bears by the end.

The point here is that an infinite map kinda "solves all problems" magically.  If something is broken, you can always walk away from it.  If something runs out, you can always find more of it further out.  I can't even really answer a question like, "Is there too much oil in the game?"  How much oil is in the game?  An infinite amount.  What if I cut the oil spawning rate in half?  Then there's still an infinite amount.  We have to talk about resource allocation in terms of what's within a reasonable walking distance from a given town.  But towns can move and spread over time, so any distance becomes reasonable, given enough time.

I can find answers to questions about a finite map, however.  I can cut the oil spawn rate in half, and there will be half as much oil.

The biggest thing we're testing this coming week is a new arc failure condition:  when we get down to less than 5 surviving families, the apocalypse happens and a new arc begin.  In conjunction with this failure condition, new Eves only spawn for the first 2 hours of the arc.  After two hours, the families are fixed, and the arc will last as long as at least 5 of those families last.

The great thing about this failure condition is that it puts the arc end squarely in the hands of the players.  Do you want the arc to keep going a bit longer?  Then help that struggling family stay afloat.

The other interesting thing is that the arc end does not kill anyone.  Every living player survives, which means family lines can outlive the arc.  In fact, with these changes, there's nothing stopping a family from living forever.

We're also testing a new curse system.  The old, global-tally Donkey Town has been removed and replaced with a personal cursing system that lets you determine, unilaterally, who you no longer want to play the game near.  Once you curse someone (you get one token per hour), that person will not be born within 50 tiles of you for the next 48 hours.  If someone is cursed by so many people that there's nowhere left for them to get born, then they do go to Donkey Town, but there's no longer a fixed-length sentence there.

Finally, a bunch of little issues that came up during the last long arc have been fixed:

--The default state between families is neutral instead of war.  To use war swords, an elder must declare WAR in the target family's language.  Elders cannot hold swords themselves, though, blocking solo crusading.

--Cross-family curses can now work without saying it in their language.

--The shortcuts CURSE YOU (closest player) and CURSE MY BABY have been added.

--Babies now keep their family name even if adopted.

--A bunch of things that were blocking and unremoveable (Newcommen towers and looms) have been made deconstructable.

--Chopping all trees, including juniper, is now hungry work.

--Fences now orient themselves relative to other fences automatically.  No more ugly fences.

--Wildcard phrases for gate ownership, like MY OFFSPRING OWN THIS (all living children) and MY FAMILY OWNS THIS (all living family).

There will be one more update next week, and then I'm off to show the game at PAX West.

What...a...week!

Thank you all for bearing with me as I continued to adjust and perfect what is now the most massive set of fundamental changes in the history of the game.  Like I said in the last update, we got off to a very rocky start, but by the end of this week, it was almost completely smooth sailing.

Containing all player activity in a bounded area, instead of letting it spread infinitely on the map, revealed all sorts of problems, particularly in terms of resource distribution, settlement locations, and griefing.  On an infinite map, there are always more resources available if you walk far enough in any direction, which is what people used to do to find settlement locations, and you can also easily hide from trouble-makers in the vastness.  A bunch of important features in the game, like fences, were rendered unnecessary by the unbounded map.

So, first up, let's take another look at that now-ancient map generation algorithm.  It placed biomes independently in patches, and there was no structure to that placement.  That meant that the biomes that were useful together, like swamps and grass (a prime settlement location) almost never spawned next to each other.  Finding a prime spot used to require a very long walk.  This also meant that jungles could border the arctic areas.  The independent placement resulted in a lot of map variety, but there were obviously some trade-offs.

The new algorithm uses a more naturalistic topographic layout, with biomes in altitude rings.  This means that each biome always borders the same other two biomes.  Swamps always border grass, for example.  Now prime settlement locations are all over the place.  I also added per-biome likelihood controls, so the really-necessary biomes can be more common---they have wider topographic bands.  Finally, I classified three biomes as "special":  arctic, desert, and jungle.  These aren't needed quite as much as the others--they're only needed for advanced tech---and it's more interesting if they are far-flung on the map.  They don't occur in regular topographic rings, but instead at the centers of each topographic peak.

This one change resulted in a dramatic improvement in the survival rates of settlements on the map.  Suddenly, the bounded arc area became quite livable.  Even better, the old long walks to find a settlement location were gone.

Living close together highlighted a bunch of new problems.  Families often live in the same village for generations, yet are still logically separate due to war swords and inability to curse each other.  After many generations together, they might even speak a common language.  At that point, they really are one village.

Now, if you can curse someone in a language they understand, it will work, whether or not they are in your family.  And elders from two families can declare PEACE to each other, as long as it's in an understood language, thus disabling the war swords.  They can also declare WAR to each other again later if need be.  Note that both these features also work before you learn a common language across generations if you do the work to actually type the other family's language.

Now that people live near each other, fences are everywhere.  This is good.  Towns are more interesting with fences.  However, rogue fences can also be a problem.  The idea with fences is that they homestead unclaimed land with a waiting period to ensure local consensus.  But what about out in the wilderness?  In an infinite map, it's all unclaimed land, but in a finite map, it might need to be used by someone in the future.  A fence bisecting a large wilderness area is a real problem.  The 2-hour decay period for an abandoned fence is too long in this context.  So, I've given you a way to remove a fence, with the help of an elder and a brief waiting period.  The idea here is that you'll only be able to remove abandoned fences, because of the waiting period.  If someone cares about the fence, they will intervene and cancel your removal notice.

And regarding resources, the only non-renewable so far that has been a real problem has been iron.  So I've given you a high tech way to produce more iron by burning oil.  Iron never runs out now, but oil is finite, so there still is an eventual limit.  Those diesel mining outposts are extremely valuable, both in terms of production and the expensive capital improvements that are installed there.

The goal in all of this is to enable a collective challenge:  How long can you all survive together before civilization collapses globally?  The most recent record was 44 hours.  But there's enough oil on the map to support farming for 100 people for at least ten days.  I'm guessing that 44 hours is just the beginning, and you'll all be gradually getting the hang of it over time.

It took a while to come together, but this really does feel like a wholly new and improved game.  There's something going on at any moment in this world now.  There's a story to tell.

Welcome to IMPULSE FOLLY.

And with that I'm off on a two-week vacation with my family.  There will be no updates for the next two weeks.

I'm back from a very interesting and refreshing trip to Taiwan.  Taking time off---and not working on the game at all for a week---is a really important thing to do from time to time.

The variety among the red-headed a black characters has been a little thin for a while.  This update adds two more male characters for each, taking the total up to 22 playable characters, currently in four different skin tones (12 males and 10 females)  The red-heads and black characters are still missing one female each (to bring them up to six each), but those will be added in the near future.

As the character set has grown, I'm facing a larger and larger creative challenge with each new character that I add.  I want them all to look unique, and 22 unique people is already a pretty broad spectrum.  I already have a bearded guy... already have a balding guy... already have a mustache guy.... oh wait, I don't have a totally bald guy yet!

Along with the characters, there are a bunch of fixes.  I'm still working on those reported issues, bit by bit.  Reconnection after a network outtage is now much more robust (before, if the server didn't know you were disconnected, it would block you from reconnecting).  Projectile aiming from acute vertical angles was totally broken (the line algorithm that I was using was missing an important case), but it's working now.  You can now swap items into full clothing containers (like backpacks).  You can't force-break someone's YUM chain by feeding them (getting fed by someone else only helps, but never hurts, your YUM chain).

There's one more big change that I'll describe in a minute, but first a little context.

Over the past few months, I've been tackling several "grand design challenges" in this game.  Most of them have now been solved to my satisfaction, but there's one big one left.  Those design challenges are:

--The possibility of property as a foundation for social structure, trade, inheritance, and inter-village negotiation.

--Bringing villages closer together in an crunchy way (without having everyone just blend together into one bland mega-city).

--Some reason to care about the survival of each and every one of your offspring.

--The civilization-building arc, from Eve up to the diesel water pump, is challenging and reasonably well-paced.  There are many possible failure points along the way, and the challenge is indeed transgenerational.  (The pacing might still need tweaking... but it's close enough for now.)

The reason why these design challenges are so important is that, in solving them, we will enable new kinds of intricate emergent stories inside the game.  As a simple example, if all property is communal, you never have to ask your neighbor if you can borrow a tool.  You just walk up and grab it.  The story where you have to ask first is simply more intricate, by one degree.  Your neighbor might say no.  Then what?  Well, you have a bit of drama, that's what.  The same goes for caring about offspring.  "We were short on food, so my teenage son died.  Shrug."  That's not a very interesting story.  A desperate search for food, to save your teenage son at the last minute, is much more interesting.

The last grand design challenge is this:

--What is the long-term arc of the game?  What happens after you hit the top of the tech tree?  Does the game vary across a week or a month?  Is there a game-wide arc?  Do resources run out on a global scale?

This part of the game is currently handled by an ever-expanding Eve placement spiral that forges endlessly into untouched wilderness.  We have a perpetual churn of brand new civilizations rising and falling in parallel.  But each rise-fall cycle follows the same arc, and happens in relative isolation.  Yes, villages can interact, but interaction is optional.  There are no pinch-points where they must interact.  If you need extra resources, you can always just head into the unexplored hills and find them.  If you really run out of resources in your local area, you can migrate into greener pastures.  On an infinite map, there is an endless supply of greener pastures.

And you can see how optional village interaction reduces story complexity.  "We were out of oil, so we wandered into the hills and found more."  That's way less interesting than, "We were out of oil, and we couldn't find any new deposits, but the neighboring village had control over three productive oil wells."

This is the grander-scale version of asking the neighbor if you can borrow a tool.  Will they give you some oil?  Will they demand something else in trade?  Will they answer "no" with a volley of arrows?  All of these possibilities are grist for the emergent drama mill.

But currently, there really is no long-term arc in the game.  There's a perpetual cycle of parallel civilizations spawning in resource-rich wilderness.

So I'm thinking about changing this.  I'm thinking about long-term, world-wide arcs.  Arcs that take several days to complete.  The most obvious arc is one based on world-wide resources running out.  At the start of the arc, the world is green and rich with resources.  But as people survive longer and longer in that world, the resources get consumed.  Meanwhile, civilizations become more advanced and efficient in their use of the remaining resources.  But pinch points and dramatic texture will emerge when one village runs out of a necessary resource first.

The problem with such an arc, of course, is that it's not sustainable.  The current implementation is sustainable, though bland.  The big question with such an arc is this:  what happens at the end?  Obviously, there will be some kind of reset at the end of the arc, but what happens in the hours before that reset?  Imagine a world where there are almost no resources left, and people are barely surviving.  Imagine that you're a brand new player who plays their very first games in such an environment.

Part of this change may involve a finite map.  An infinite map, though tantalizing conceptually, means infinite resources.

But this week, as a warm-up exercise, I've patched end of the current civilization arc to eliminate a steady-state once you have a diesel water pump:  oil wells now eventually run out.

"We built an oil well, and then had oil forever after that."  That's not such an interesting story.

I'll be tackling this issue on a larger scale next week.

The survival of your offspring, and yourself, now matters.

Before, each life was lived in isolation from the rest of your play history, with no thread tying the lives that you lived together.  This lack of over-arching meaning had a long list of consequences, contributing to long-standing problems like suicide, griefing, and general listlessness.  Furthermore, it tended to undercut some potentially interesting family survival stories.  Why would you go to great lengths to save one of your children if your child didn't really matter to you in the long run?  But such "great lengths" make for great, dramatic stories.

The Precious Life update helped with this somewhat, because lives were no longer lived in complete isolation from each other---they were all part of a pool of limited lives that you were spending.  While this helped to make each individual life you played a bit more tense and precious, it didn't do anything to increase the tension of family survival.

A great deal of discussion has focused on how much players in the game tend to care about the last viable female child born in the village.  She is really treated like royalty, and there's no role-playing necessary.  All the hard work of the living players depends on her survival.  Without her, everything they built will be lost for future generations.

That's great, and it's also kinda magic, because it emerges naturally from other unrelated game mechanics.  There aren't "last surviving girl survival points" that are motivating you to care about her.  On the other hand, you don't care for her in a way that has anything to do with her specifically.  She could be anyone's daughter.  As long as some girl survives, that's all you need.  Which is also not analogous to why you would care for a daughter in real life (be she the last surviving female or not).  Thus, "our work won't be lost" is just as orthogonal a reason to care as points or any other unrelated reason.  It's nice that it's an emergent reason in this case, though.

Why do we care so much about the survival of our family in real life?  It's apparently due to some pretty abstract underlying genetic reasons, and our actual behavior often matches the underlying genetics to a spooky degree.  We would, for example, save a sibling over a cousin, and a sister over a brother, and age would also be factored in (a younger sibling would be saved over an older one), with the results pretty closely approximating genetic relatedness and reproductive potential.  But in real life, we just feel the feelings.  We don't do this genetic math when we make these decisions.

And in the case of this game, those biological feelings will never come into play.  This in-game daughter is not your real daughter, and she never will be.  A longer game might allow for more bonding between players, but it would never be actual kinship bonding.

Games are not real.

Thus, as long as we motivate appropriate player behavior---behavior that is congruent with the thematics of the game, I don't think it matters too much how we motivate that behavior.  Emergent motivations are nice, but when they aren't possible, abstract motivations are fine.

Genes are abstract and exert a weird influence on behavior in real life.

Genes can thus be represented abstractly and allowed to exert a weird influence in the game.  They can be points.  Why not?

And thus, why do you care about the survival of your daughter in the game, even if she's not the last girl in the village?  Because of the genetic points that she represents.

And there's still some interesting emergence lurking.  If you want a high genetic score, the survival of your offspring needs to get pushed to the limit.  And what is the best strategy to achieve that?  What will be the most successful parent and grandparent strategy in the game?  I have no idea!  When push comes to shove, the very best players will figure this out.  And it's a good and thematically appropriate thing to figure out.  They've never had a reason to figure it out, until now.  Furthermore, for players who care about their genetic scores, there is never an unimportant moment.  Even if they are born to a doomed village, standing there and waiting to die won't be a viable strategy.  They will need to ensure their own and their offspring's survival at all costs, even in a doomed village.

That's the underlying design philosophy, but how does it work?

Everyone starts with a genetic score of 0.  Every time you or your offspring live a life that is longer than your current genetic score, you score goes up.  Every time you or your offspring live a shorter life, your score goes down.

Your score represents what we generally expect in terms of longevity for you and your offspring.  If someone dies young, that means our expectation was too high, and vice versa if someone dies older than we expected.

This is somewhat similar to Elo ratings that are used in competitive games like Chess, albeit applied to each player in isolation.  The actual formula is very simple, given an offspring or self that lived Y years:  newScore = oldScore + (Y - oldScore) / 10

For women, offspring are any direct descendants that were born during your lifetime (generally children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren).

For men, offspring are nieces and nephews (and great, and great great variants) that are born during your lifetime.  The so-called "gay uncle hypothesis" is alive and well.

And of course, your own lives count too.  And note that baby suicides don't count to pull their mother's scores down, but do count as short lives for those who live them.  Thus, for those who really care about their genetic score, survival in all situations is necessary.

Finally, is genetic score just a meaningless number?  No, it has a small effect inside the game.  Since it tracks family longevity, it gives you a distinct advantage in old age.  The higher your genetic score, the fewer hunger bars you lose with aging.  With a perfect genetic score of 60, you'll keep your full hunger bar all the way until your last breath.

So if you see a particularly strapping old person running around acting half their age, you'll know what's going on.  They're genetically fit.

The leaderboard can be seen here:

http://onehouronelife.mythiclair.com/fi … eaderboard

Everyone is assigned a randomized name for tracking on the leaderboard.  Your name can be seen on the GENES screen inside the game, along with a recent history showing changes to your genetic fitness over time.

An update like this is long overdue.  Thanks to all of you for reporting everything you reported.  As a result, a pretty long list of issues had built up.  This week, I got through all of the known and reproducible issues affecting the game engine and code.  A few bigger fixes are worth mentioning specifically.  If you've ever seen a "ghost" player standing there, aging, who no one else can see, the source of that problem has finally been found and fixed (it was caused by someone passing through your area, going at least 64 tiles in one go without ever stopping their walk).  The issue with animals and other movable items not respawning when nature reclaims an area has been fixed.  And most importantly, a server message overload that was triggered when you targeted a family member with a sword has been fixed.  That overload was so extreme that it caused nearby clients to get bogged down and disconnect.  A full list of the changes can be seen here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/ … ngeLog.txt

Next week, I'll be focused on fixing all of the known content issues.  Again, a lot have piled up (118, currently).

As always, if you find an issue with the game engine or code, please report it here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLife/issues

And if you find an issue with the game content (like a missing transition, or something not containable that should be), please report it here:

https://github.com/jasonrohrer/OneLifeData7/issues

There have been a lot of huge changes to the structure of the game over the past month, so this is a good place to take a step back and let the game breath a bit with these big changes while I focus on fixing reported issues.