I haven’t had time to thoroughly pick apart this writing, but I want you to know that witnessing the extensiveness and thorough detail of this document makes pride swell in my heart. Deus and Rathalos you are both wonderful to behold.
Anyway I don’t have the energy to really dig into the meat of this document at this time,
but I will say that I fully support the concept of parts in Thrive, throughout all stages.
It is the best option for ease of understanding, implementation, and functionality in the case of AI/Autoevo.
This feeling is supported by my studies in marine biology. As I’ve continued to learn of the incredible diversity of life, patterns begin to emerge. As it turns out, life really does like to repeatedly produce analogous structures and body plans. It’ll have different names and anatomy, but the function will be just about the same no matter how distantly related.
The real diversity of organs is not the function, but in how the function is achieved by overcoming constraints in a body plan. A lot of the craziest adaptations arise because the ancestor organism made things difficult for itself by evolving things like an exoskeleton. “Haha, this hard layer of chitin allows me to retain homeostasis from the environment! Wait, I can’t breathe?! I can’t sense anything outside of my own body?! Oh no I can’t even grow bigger anymore! How am I supposed to reproduce like this?!”
Thus I believe that not only should we have defined parts, but a means to adapt those parts into other forms at any time. The ideal would be to ensure players always have options of adapting to changes in their environment at their disposal by essentially reusing the parts they have, while also inspiring a sense of discovery in what they can do. A leg can easily become a gill, a pincer, a mandible, a sensory organ, a filtering organ, and more. Cilia can become chemoreceptors, something analogous to legs or even buccal cirri (Hardened cilia essentially used as teeth, not to be confused with the lancelet organ of the same name). I want players to look at their options and say “Wait, I can do that with this? That’s huge.” I want players to create problems when finding solutions and find solutions to those problems, because that is the way of life.
My advice from here would be to consolidate this document into stages of implementation. What’s the most basic form of this system you would like to see implemented? I mean the bare minimum, the easiest to do. Identify the absolute necessities and from there, create a plan on how you foresee the extra details being built on. Think of it as developing DLC addons to a base system, as you want to avoid drastically changing the underlying structure at that stage.
Not only will this be comprehensive for our programmers to understand, but it will allow you to more easily grasp what you might want to cut out or what is absolutely essential to the game. Remember; There is elegance in simplicity.