A lot has happened during a short time span. The interest in the game has been really great (especially in Japan) and we have seen the player number go above 1,000 during part of the day every day this week.
Our team has had to spend a larger portion of our time on operations and maintenance, but we also want to continue to develop the features we have planned. The weekly events are also something we want to continue with.
So, we have decided to add more people to the development team to have enough time to do a bit of everything, and now that we have run four different events, we will alternate between old ones and coming up with brand new ones. For all new players it will of course not make any difference, but those of you who have played in all events from the beginning will start to see re-runs as well as completely new event types.
We will also shortly be launching a new feature (or game mode really) which will actually be unlocked through in-app purchase. It’s something we have been working on for quite some time and we think it will be very interesting to some people, but perhaps not to everyone.
We call this feature the Observer Mode, and through it you will be able to pick a living person in your family tree (for example your grandchild) and see what that person is doing in the game world, after you yourself have died. You can also choose to pick one whole game world (a server) and observe anyone of all the active players on that server. In the future we also have plans to add a chat for all observers on a server, so you can talk to each other and discuss what’s happening. We think this will be particularly enjoyable when there are events running with different teams competing. (we are not working on any chat now though - it’s just an idea for now).
People will have opinions on in-app purchases, we get that. Our opinion is that $5 for this game is actually very cheap, but on the other hand we like to see many players being able to afford it with no problems. The Observer Mode has huge potential, but it is not required for the game to be good - it already is. We want to invest in the development of the feature though, so there will be a choice for everyone whether they want to pay for using it or skip it.
You will get to try out an early version of the Observer Mode during one of our weekly events soon (not this week though) so you can see if it’s something that’s interesting to you.
This weekend, we will be doing a re-run of this event:
https://forum.onehouronelife.app/t/event-2-1/2025