Was working on something in the background for a bit, and I wanted to share an example which - I believe - demonstrates a benefit of the approach embodied by the macroscopic concept editor.
“Cascading Diversity”
I described an approach in the concept editor which I self-importantly termed as cascading diversity in the comprehensive editor concept. The gist of cascading diversity is a top-down approach to representing organisms/capabilities in the editor.
There are three general parts to this:
- The mechanics we implement will be oriented in a way that is as widely applicable to the entirety of the animal kingdom as is possible. Mechanics will be dynamic, intending to address the most fundamental layers of structure and design principles in the animal kingdom.
- The diversity of lifeforms and body plan designs in Thrive will be primarily a result of the adaptations and mechanics we implemented synergizing with each other rather than individual, handpicked systems being applied depending on the structure of the organism.
- We add additional layers of detail if and only if the overarching mechanics we implement fail to represent a certain phenomena or body plan in the animal kingdom that we deem a priority to represent. The first two bullet points apply to this additional layer of detail.
Ultimately: we don’t represent a specific organism by implementing a specific feature to represent that organism - we represent that organism by fitting it into the dynamic, overarching mechanics we have established. And we start not by looking at the individual organism, but instead a larger clade that the organism belongs to, slowly diving into more nested clades until we believe we reach a sufficient level of representation.
A while ago, I shared a flow-chart on the developer discord that I was maintaining which was my effort to map out a general cladogram of metazoans. This is what it’s at right now (and there’s more to come):
(hard to read - if a developer wants access to any of these, do ping me in Discord).
This is an intimidating photo, because this is technically what we are tasking the macroscopic editor to represent - every macroscopic organism that has ever lived. But I think taking a top-down approach can really help us simplify this to pick up on what exactly we should represent in Thrive, and what it takes to represent those items at a baseline level.
From this large flow-chart, I created a less-populated chart which basically groups up various clades into really simple, overly-generalized groups. Not everything is included yet - I think echinoderms and other groups of animals don’t fit in well to anything, and I need to find a way to accommodate them - but the point of this chart is being as reductive as possible:
From here, we can focus on each individual group more in depth, allowing us to populate the “catalogue” of extremities, constraint effects, etc. which might be present in Thrive. I made a “feature map” for “Jellies” which is the first branching item from the left on the bottom, and one of three “paths” I identified as important to represent in the Macroscopic Stage.
Below is the feature map. Note that the hierarchy of items demonstrates how important each feature is to represent in my opinion - so mesoglea is more important to include than the unique extremities, and unique extremities are more important to represent in a vallum. Bioluminiscience is on the side because it’s not really specific to the clade. A sample of notes for “Mesoglea” is also screenshotted - again, I’m sure it’s hard to read, but if anyone wishes to dive deeper, do let me know on the developer discord.
The idea is that we tie all these parts to larger constraints, and the hope is that the constraint system in itself will provide a natural sort of diversity to the play experience. So beyond just these
But hey - 7 features, and we represent this circled portion of the animal kingdom:
Not too bad when we put it like that, with the mechanics established in the macroscopic editor concept, huh?