For the Macroscopic and Aware stages, I think we will have a tension where we want the day/night cycle to be quick so that the player can experience as many day/night cycles as possible in a single game cycle to allow for the full range of possibilities of organism specialization to be utilized. Like organisms that hunt during the day and have to find a protected area to sleep at night, organisms that make use of their night vision at night, or crepuscular or even more complex organism activities.
On the other hand, we would want the day/night cycle to be longer to allow the game to feel more natural and immersive. A particularly fast day/night cycle can also look especially bad, or even cause disorientation due to the entire sky visibly moving and rotating. I personally already think Minecraft’s 20 minute day/night cycle is already at the limit of how fast the sky and sun can move before it starts to be distracting, and that is on the faster end of games day/night cycles.
Here is a list of random day/night cycles I found from a random reddit post for reference, I have not yet found a 3D game that would have a first or third person perspective on a single character like we would be that has a day/night cycle shorter than Minecraft’s 20 minutes, though I am sure something would exist. (Day/night cycles can be faster for completely detached cameras, but those are typically looking at the ground and does not view the sky, and would be more similar to the strategic view of the later society stages)
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Stardew Valley: 14 minutes. (Not 3D)
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Minecraft: 20 minutes.
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GTA 5, RDR2, Dragon’s Dogma: 48 minutes.
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Elden Ring, Dying Light 2: 60 minutes.
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Final Fantasy XIV: 70 minutes.
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Skyrim, EverQuest: 72 minutes.
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Witcher 3: 96 minutes.
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Guild Wars 2: 120 minutes.
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Cyberpunk: 180 minutes.
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Elder Scrolls Online, Far Cry 2: around 360 minutes.
Actually, after looking further I did find that Grounded 2 uses an approximately 16 minute day-night cycle, which has some similarities to our game’s considerations, and also has reviews like this:
“I think my biggest problem with the day night cycle is how fast the sun moves. The shadows always look like they’re moving at warp speed. I also think there’s more areas that don’t get much sun compared to the first game which definitely contributes to feeling like the day is so short.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/GroundedGame/comments/1mhqpcs/what_do_you_think_of_the_daynight_cycle/
I personally think the shadows are visibly moving in a distractedly fast way in Grounded 2, which Minecraft by default does not have that problem because its shadows are not done that way without shaders, and are instead updated much slower. Also, in Grounded 2 it seems like most of the game occurs under cover, or they also have very dense clouds to occlude the sky so it sort of ‘hides’ the sky.
Here is an example video showing it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6UOG8pvyqs&t=20s
A more complex alternative might be to instead have the gameplay day/night cycle segmented into different sections that are all equal in length, so you could play 5 minutes of day, 5 minutes of dusk, 5 minutes of night, and 5 minutes of dawn, (Or any other allocation of time between the different segments). That way you could have the world rotating/sun moving at a far slower rate, like 40 minutes per rotation, and things would feel more natural visually while still allowing many different important segments of time to be played in quicker succession. And would allow for otherwise too fast timescales like dawn or dusk to be played at a more realistic and usable timescale. This could also be extended into playing across multiple seasons, like you have the 4 day-dusk-night-dawn segments with one season, then you switch to another season and repeat the segments.
Perhaps you could have the kind and amount of segments that a specific game cycle will be scheduled to go through will be dependent on whether your organism would make use of them (would probably be difficult to balance this), or would be dependent on the current biome, like having summer-fall-winter-spring or wet-dry seasons.