Jason Rohrer talks about the launch of One Hour One Life, including thoughts on steam and how games spread through youtube videos and word of mouth.
“I realized today that in just over a week, One Hour One Life has brought in nearly as much as what The Castle Doctrine brought in over 44 weeks. And The Castle Doctrine’s graphs, both on and off Steam, always had the classic exponential fall-off after the launch spike.”
The game itself is kind of interesting. I was an early tester. It’s a brutally hard survival game, one which I thought players would bounce off of very hard. But to my surprise, people are really into this game. You live your entire in-game life in one hour at most. The main draw seems to be the emergent stories that happen. Some of the youtube videos have comical emotional moments like a grandpa passing down the knowledge of how to farm carrots to the next generation.
Everyone is mostly working together so you get a unique experience where people are contributing to keep everything alive. Entire massive cities can be ruined by just a couple of loafers who eat all the food, or all the skilled people will die out,and the new generation fails to upkeep the village.
Even your first moments in the game require communication and care by both sides. When you're born as a baby to another player, you can starve very quickly. The mother can feed you by picking you up, but it drains some of her food supply. So you need to communicate with your mother (in one letter sentences, because you only get the ability to use longer sentences when you get older) in order to be efficient.
Anyway, I’ll stop spamming about this game :) I’m just really into it , and if the upward trend continues and a few high profile youtubers pick it up, I think this game could really explode.
SYNTHETIK is coming to Steam soon, but you can get a free look at the beta now by putting a working email address in at their official site.
They mail a key to you right away and the beta is on Steam.
It’s a one-life shooty roguelite thingy, where you get dropped into a random level and must make your way across it to an exit. You don’t have to fight anything along the way, but the second you step on the exit every mob on the level is alerted to your presence and the exit has to warm up before teleporting you to the next level.
There are different classes and you unlock items and abilities as you play a class more, allowing you choose different builds before you start a run and you’ll also find equipment and add-ons in game that’ll change the way you play on the fly. Finding the missile add-on to your main weapon will make you a play a little differently to if you find the bouncing blades add-on.
In game there’s a reload system that seems sort of needlessly tricky at first and I initially didn’t like it. You have to “E” eject your current magazine and then “R” (or space) to reload and then try to stop the reload bar in a small coloured section to get an instant reload plus a damage boost. You can turn this off in the options, but it’s grown on me a lot as I’ve played, even though I’m not very good at moving and reloading yet. After struggling with it for a few rounds I actually turned on the difficulty setting that makes the coloured bar appear in different random parts of the reload bar, for a bit more damage boost when you get it right.
I’m playing with mouse and keyboard. Controller support has been added recently, but I don’t think it’s meant to be that hot yet - I haven’t tried it.
Just be careful how far you upgrade your flashbangs.
Once you get a few unlocks on a particular class then it becomes much more rewarding and you start to feel like a real badass, jumping into the middle of a group of enemies and glitching around while reloading on the fly and leaving bodies behind.
I’d definitely suggest trying all the different classes a couple times - I liked the Rogue a lot for their special power that pierces through multiple enemies when charged, but I’d probably suggest switching to the Commando early on. He’s very offensively focused, which means your play style is mostly “W+pew”, but he has a strong heal, (on a long cool down), and a built in melee which can be useful for buying you the time to get behind cover and reload.
Playing as the Rogue really showed me that the game isn’t about mashing the LMB, even though that was the strong impression I got at first. Standing still for shots and waiting for the recoil has a significant benefit to accuracy and being more methodical really pays off. It’s just hard to notice that at first when everything’s happening at once and the whole world appears to be exploding.
It’s really growing on me. Especially for touches like this…
So many of the stations are positive that you can fall into the trap of just mindlessly pressing “Y” to get a free cookie. Then this one pops up.
You play the leader of an Eastern Block country navigating your way through the fall of Communism. Starting Jan 1, 1989, the goal is to remain in power until 1992, balancing things like your relationship with the USSR and NATO, the people’s happiness, cohesion of your faction, quality of life, and “Westalgia” (the desire of your people to get out of Dodge. You do this by research, building various structures, but mostly responding to historical events around the world You can play as a hard-liner, reformer, or something in between.
The game has a number of issues - not everything is clearly explained (I’m still not sure exactly what trade does for the economy), the English translation is sketchy at best, and right now the only playable countries are the GDR, Romania, and Bulgaria (although the developers promise more if enough copies are sold).
Still, it’s only $6, which makes it worth a buy if it sounds like your cup of meat.
Not sure if this is the right place for this, but this game is going into beta today on Steam:
Looks interesting, but its not really the type of game I would normally play. I have a beta code for this from my PC Gamer subscription. The first person who posts expressing interest, Ill pm them the code.
Has there not been any discussion here of Thumper??
I’ve had my eye on it for a long time, and it’s on sale this week, so I finally grabbed it.
It’s a game about… uh… a beetle? Seems like a very angry beetle. It rockets along this long track surrounded by surreal symmetrical tentacles and geometry. And there’s loud music, and you have to hit buttons and turn at the right times our you blow up in a violent burst of red light. And sometimes there’s a goofy looking giant head you’re attacking.
So it’s a rhythm game, is what I’m trying to say.
There’s not necessarily a lot to the game, but the presentation is pretty remarkable. Particularly the feeling of speed and impact, which is really what the game is all about. Or to collapse it down to one word, it’s about “intensity.” The game is intense. The music isn’t pleasant–it’s harsh and clangy. Your little beetle certainly isn’t cute. It doesn’t have any personality. It just flies along the track, vibrating, and slamming into walls. And occasionally flying over things.
I think @tomchick compared Thumper disfavorably to Aaero. And Aaero definitely has a lot more variety of things to see, hear, and shoot. But somehow Thumper has gripped me a lot more than Aaero did. I didn’t care for Aaero’s music, and never did get the hang of shooting things (despite my Rez bona fides).
Thumper is one of those rhythm games where you sometimes hit a flow state and find yourself doing these amazing combinations of moves without even thinking about it. That’s really satisfying. And I think the tone of almost-horror the game gives off is really unique and extraordinary given how little there is that goes into it.
I believe there was some talk about Thumper in one of the VR threads but I could be wrong. It’s a really fun game in VR, though the gameplay is exactly the same.
I’ve put off playing this for months because setting up my VR rig is annoying and I want to play this in VR. Then I set up my VR rig and play Superhypercube for hours instead. Though I am worried that my reflexes aren’t up to task for this game anyways.
There was a racing game on the Dreamcast that used to do that to me. I’d get all tense and really pull hard on the right trigger to accelerate all the time.
