First, you need to find your game folder on Steam.

Right-click the game in your Library to pull up the context menu, and look for Properties at the bottom of that menu. On the Properties screen, you will see a LOCAL FILES tab at the top.

In that tab, you will see a button that says BROWSE LOCAL FILES. Click that button to open your game folder.

Mods for One Hour One Life package a collection of sprites, sounds, objects, and animations into a single .OXZ file. Managing mods is thus as simple as managing these OXZ files.

OXZ mod files are named with the following convention:


For example, the sample mod has the following file name:


It contains 6 objects (a replacement for each of 6 people). The hash is based on the IDs of the objects that are being changed. Thus, if two OXZ files modify the same objects, they will have the same hash.

The nameTag portion of the file name cannot contain spaces or the _ character.

To upload a new mod to Steam Workshop, copy the OXZ file into following folder inside your game folder:


You also need to create a JPG image preview for your mod. It seems like the native display size for these on Steam is 635x356, but this might also vary according to display resolution. Making sure your preview image is in a 16:9 aspect ratio should be sufficient (for example, 1280x720).

Your JPG file must be named like this, matching your OXZ file's nameTag:


For example, the sample mod has a preview JPG file named like this:


Copy your JPG preview file into the steamModUploads folder.

Once those two files are in place, launch the game client through Steam. It will walk through the process of uploading your mod to Steam Workshop through a series of message boxes.

After your upload completes, you will be redirected to your Item Page on Steam Workshop, where you can edit your Item's title and description, along with posting additional images or videos. You will also need to mark your Item as Visible before other people can subscribe to it.

Note that each time you launch the game client, at most ONE mod from your steamModUploads folder is uploaded. Since you need to update titles/descriptions/visibility for each one, there is no batch mode. Quit the game client and launch it again if you need to upload additional mods.

When you upload mods via your steamModUploads folder, you will notice that nameTag_steam.txt files are created for each of your mods. These keep track of the Item IDs that you have uploaded.

To update one of your existing mods, delete the old OXZ file from steamModUploads folder, and copy the new file into steamModUploads.

Your new OXZ file MUST have the same nameTag as the old file, though the number of objects and the hash can be different.

Do NOT delete your mod's nameTag_steam.txt file.

You can also update your nameTag.jpg preview file if you want.

The next time you launch the game client through Steam, it will notice that your mod has changed and upload the updated content and image.

The One Hour One Life Editor is a feature-rich and complex piece of software. Full editing instructions are beyond the scope of this Guide. However, I did post a few videos of myself adding content using the editor, which you can watch here:



To make a mod, in the Editor, use the Objects tab to edit various objects. Be sure to use the "Replace" button when saving them inside the Editor. You can also use the Anim tab to edit animations. You should also be able to record new sounds for both objects and animations.

If you want to add new sprites, you can import them using the Sprites tab. Note that you will need to change settings/editorImportPath.ini to the location of the sprite sheet that you want to import. Sprites should be on white backgrounds with black outlines. You can also overlay transparent line work using the Lines Import button. More details about this are in the Art Style section below.

I draw the sprites in the game on paper and scan them in, and my scanner puts the scanned page in default.png in my home directory, so that's why the import path is set the way that it is by default.

After you get your objects looking the way that you want them to look (remembering to Replace existing objects, not add new ones---your edited objects should appear mixed into the list on the Object Picker, not at the top of the list), you're ready to export them as a bundle. Use the Export tab to pick a set of objects. Give your export a nameTag, then press the Export button to save the bundle. Look in your exports folder for your exported OXZ bundles.

nameTags should be unique, at least among your own personal set of mod creations. While name collisions with other people's mods are unlikely, if two mods have exactly the same nameTag and exactly the same collection of objects, they will have the same file name and thus interfere with each other if they are installed simultaneously by one user. So picking sufficiently unique name tags for your mods is a good idea.

Note that any mods installed in your mods folder (either automatically through Steam Workshop subscriptions, or manually by you) will be loaded into the editor for further editing and exporting. You actually need to open each modded object in the Editor and press Replace at least once before trying to export them. Whatever is actually saved on disk is what's exported (the live RAM-only data is only temporary, and not saved on disk by default).

However, whatever changes you actually make while creating mods are permanent in your game data folder. It's usually a good idea to make a working copy of the game data when modding. Just copy your OneLife folder somewhere else, and run EditOneLife from inside that copied folder. You don't need necessarily need to run the Editor through Steam.

All the mods that you export will be in your exports folder, but they won't be uploaded to Steam Workshop until you follow the Uploading instructions above.

All sprites in One Hour One Life were drawn by hand on paper and then scanned in at 72 dpi.

I used Sulphite Drawing Paper from ♥♥♥♥ Blick. It comes in big 18x24 inch sheets, but I had them chopped in half twice with a guillotine cutter at a copy shop, which gave me 2000 9x12 inch sheets.

https://www.dickblick.com/items/blick-sulphite-drawing-papers-18-x-24-white-500-sheets-80-lb/




Every sprite was drawn using a Uni-ball Vision pen, with black ink and the Micro tip size (0.5mm). Note that this is not an "Vision Elite" pen, but just the regular Vision. These pens have the best performance of any off-the-shelf ballpoint, liquid-ink pen I have tested. They are quite water proof and very fade proof.




However, even this mighty pen is not completely impervious to a little smearing if you rub over your pen lines with a colored brush marker. Thus, the sprites are always made in two layers to avoid this issue.

The Editor auto-trims sprites from the scanned page based on each sprite having a solid black outline. This requirement might limit the art style quite severely (no sketchy, fuzzy edges?), but the two-layer technique also solvers this problem.

Let's say you have some drawings for parts of a tree that look like this:






We have two problems here:

First, these drawings don't have clear, solid black outlines, so the editor can't automatically trim them from the paper for us.

Second, how are we going to color these with brush markers without smearing those crisp pen lines?

So we throw these on the tracing table (light box) and trace some simple outlines for the "colored areas" of these sprites, and then color in those outlines like so:






These colored areas are imported with "Sprite Import" in the editor, while the original line drawings are imported with "Lines Import". Imported lines are blended multiplicatively with the underlying colored areas, resulting in something that looks like this:




This leverages a perceptual trick, which is that our eyes are much more sensitive to detail information in lines than they are to details in color.

All the coloring in the game is done with Tombow Dual Tip Brush Pens. The following 33 colors are used:



Most of these were acquired through the following sets:






However, note that Tombow has changed which colors are included in the Landscape set over time.

There are also around six additional colors that were bought as loose pens, to complement these sets.

These brush pens have amazing longevity. I've colored 2400 sprites with them, and the original set is still going strong 5+ years later.