Somewhat famous indie dev, Jason Rohrer's new game:

The only flaw I see before buying:

- $20 is way too high
- It may end up with Ultima Online level griefing times a billion

But it's almost like... a sociological experiment. Will people actually work together? Will they work for things beyond their own character? (Since you die every hour!)

He made The Castle Doctrine and a couple other games. I bought Castle awhile back which was fun until everyone stopped playing.

I think it's a really clever game idea. Being "born" as a baby and requiring your "parent" players to take care of you is particularly interesting. That said, if your whole life only lasts an hour I imagine they really only need to look at you 3 times and you'll be able to fend for yourself. I think there will be a mix of serious players and trolls. It could certainly work.

Side note: his shorts look like an ass to me.

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Append:

I bought it because:

• It's only $20 (well, $26 to me).

• Open source (libre software)!

• Cross-platform (Linux supported)!

• Lifetime updates too!

• Lifetime server account on primary server.

• Hopefully helping an indie dev survive.

I honestly probably won't play it very much so the $26 is probably a waste to me, but hopefully it helps the dev succeed. And if I manage to get 5 or 10 hours of gameplay then it paid for itself. If I happen to get more that's just a bonus.

Append:

Played my first game. Pretty sure I was born a girl. And immediately I thought, oh god, once the SJW's get wind of there being binary genders in this game it's going to get a shitstorm of hate.

I was also wrong about the parents only needing to look at you. My "mother" carried me around about 8 times, but it wasn't enough. Eventually the player got sick of carrying me around, asked if I was able to help yet (and you can't type a full sentence at that age, clever) and then abandoned me. I then starved to death.

Append:

I think the game lacks adult men so far. Not sure. Haven't seen one. It turns out I originally spawned as a boy. It's that hard to tell. . Anyway, I have not yet figured out how to eat on my own. Sometimes I am "born" as a teenaged girl. Others, as either gender of baby. I can survive a few years as a baby if there is a mother there to feed me regularly, but I can't figure out how to eat on my own. The game shows really impressive promise, but right now I just feel like a burden to every other player because they spend time trying to keep me alive and I starve anyway.

Append:

The way I do the math, at $20 per license, it would only take 50000 licenses to afford the developer 20 years of a $50000 salary per year (if there's fees cut from the payment then maybe a hair more). Of course, that assumes the developer can survive on $50000/year. Nevertheless, that's not too insane of a number. There has to be at least 50000 people willing to contribute USD$20 to indie or open source developers. He'd likely get most of the money up front though and have to save it and budget to avoid spending it all in the first 5 years. If the game becomes good enough he could probably reach even higher numbers and either increase his yearly "income" or increase the number of years developing the game. It makes me very jealous of his skills and drive to do this. It's certainly possible to make a healthy living from art such as game development. It just requires the determination and skills. I'd quit my job in a New York minute if I had those.

Append:

Holy fuck.

Basically this appears to be the ultimate in free software (albeit, if you choose to exploit it, be prepared to fight it in court). I wondered what license the dev was using so I search the source code. In the aforementioned path I found this notice. It sounds like he's literally giving the client all away for free in every sense of the word. Technically I should be able to upload a zip of the source code for you all and you could download and run it for free. Presumably, you'd need to find a third-party server though because I'm uncertain if the source includes the server, and to connect to the main server you need to have a license key.

Append:

It looks like the server is included in the "do anything you want" license too. So it appears legal to share the entire thing without restriction. I won't do that because I think this man should be paid for his work, and I'll leave it up to him to decide when he has been sufficiently compensated to give it away to everybody else without a pay-wall. But if you do buy it, it looks like you get a LOT more than you get from most games.

That would be fun! On the other hand, I imagine it going like this.

Steam chat: Hey, that's me!
Steam chat: Fuck, save me! I'm starving!
Steam chat: Awwww.

Don't get too excited. There's no animation for it. It seemingly happens automatically when a woman picks up a baby (and presumably has the resources to do so).

As opposed to sucking the fun out of women!