Published On Apr 22, 2024
You can buy One Hour One Life Here:
https://onehouronelife.com/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/59...
Additional footage from
Twisted - HoneyBunnyGames
• How to Survive and Become a GREAT Pla...
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OHOL taught me the true horror of being born female. But seriously there’s nothing worse running through a forest naked only to be saddled with a real life baby player.
OHOL is a multiplayer society survival simulator which is primarily centered around building a small fraction of a functional society over your lifetime of one hour. Or if you’re new to the game, 5 minutes.
The game has been developed over eight years by Jason Rohrer a solo dev who’s about as unorthodox as the game itself.
The main mechanic of interaction is putting shit on the ground next to other shit to make a thing, starting at sticks and string all the way up to a rocket ship that sends a single player to an entirely different game hidden on Steam where they can have full access privileges to the codebase. Peter Molyneux is calling, he wants his balls back.
Building a functional society is an insane prospect, about as hard as it would be in real life. You can’t reach through the tech tree in a single life, you won’t be soloing this game. To properly pull it off you need multiple players handing over a base over multiple lifetimes. you aren't even building for yourself, you're doing it to make the life of whoever lives there next just a little easier.
Players are born to pre-existing players as a baby where they’re normally immediately left in the forest to starve or get eaten by wolves. That isn’t even a joke that’s just what half of your lives are gonna be like.
Their health gauge is tiny and they can only type a single character at birth. Usually just F for food. Your typable word count grows with age and elegantly simulates learning to speak. The mother uses up a bit of their life bar to feed the baby, and if they’re heroically trying solo parenting they’re going to have a tough time surviving. If there are no available parents you can spawn as a young Eve or Adam. Being born Adam is easy street and being born eve is, if ratwife is to be believed, just about as stressful as the real deal.
When you are truly taken care of by another player you grow a natural allegiance and loyalty to them in a way I’ve never ever seen a game manage before. I once watched as an elder player, now a grandfather said his last goodbyes in a long speech, as is his ability as an elder. He divied his possessions out to the tribe as it was the last useful thing he could contribute, and asked that when he died his bones be placed with the others. It was genuinely emotional. He mistimed his speech though and spent the next five minutes running around making a melodramatic pest of himself. It was a relief when he died.
Being born into a functional high tech production society is a godsend, and having clothes and plenty of food assures survival and maybe the chance of making a meaningful small contribution toward the societies future.
The developer, who I believe practised subsistence farming with his own family recently sent an email blast out to everyone letting them know he's spinning up a new game on the same architecture called Another Hour, Another Planet. The only way to reach it is by building the last piece in the tech tree, a spacecraft. Players who have reached the new planet have the ability to vote for who the content leader is, and this person will be automatically granted full commit privileges on github to change the game at their will. Content submitted will be tracked so you can see what portion of the content each member has contributed. Eventually the game will go live on Steam in a couple years you can just buy it and play it. The revenue will get split to all contributing members
It’s an ambitious and out there idea, from an passionate developer who has spent almost a decade developing the original game. This version will be the one going on into the future to keep the community topped up with fresh content as he moves onto other things.
I can tell you now, you have never experienced a game like this before, and this new project he’s work on is a beautiful idea, one that thinks the best of people, much like the original game does. I hope the furries get to it first.