Beginning and Ending of the Multicellular Stage

[Deus]

@hhyyrylainen

Having an upgrade that costs 80 MP (? or so, it needs to be low enough that hard mode doesn’t lock it completely) to unlock colonies of size 4 or above, could be an easy way to limit it. If we need this kind of somewhat arbitrary slow down.

I support this, but I think having the upgrade increase the max cap by one instead of such a big jump would be smoother for progression. We can reduce the number of needed bound cells from, I don’t know, 5 to 4 if it’s too grindy. But we really do need to limit the pace of progression here. There needs to be a hurdle that the player jumps through for two reasons:

1. Proving proficiency in beating the Microbe Stage’s challenges. You’ve adequately solved the challenge without skipping over too much of the first stage’s experiences.
2. Normalizing pace. If players can just progress through the stage with no real limitation except for 30 seconds of trying to collect other organisms, it will be really hard for us to balance for playthroughs where the player could jump to the Multicellular Stage either within 5 minutes of placing the eukaryote or an hour after.

And, one other little thing - I think it would be ideal for the transition to Multicellularity happen once you reproduce successfully with your organism after clicking that button instead of how it works now, where clicking the button just jettisons you to the editor even 20 seconds after exiting the Microbe Stage editor for the last time.

@hhyyrylainen

I don’t see a major need to modify the condition of the player demonstrating they know how to use the binding agent to go to the next stage.

The condition of progressing through something as significant as a stage shouldn’t be understanding how to use individual parts, but instead demonstrating competency and success against the primary challenges of the stage imo (similar to your point immediately after where you mention proving mastery over tissue differentiation). We can have a really shallow sense of progression and progress for the player if we go with the former.

@Rathalos

To expand a bit on this, rather than only having specific organelles that need to be placed down, you need to have whole specific cell types. Those would of course be decided by specific placed organelles, but ones that are mutually exclusive with other functions. It distinguishes from Microbe Stage in some way because you need different cell types to complete this objective.

I think you bring up a good point. I’ve also heard that one important measure for more complex macroscopic organisms is to eliminate the chance for “free-loaders” who don’t do much for the colony as a whole, and that macroscopic organisms solve this by having some sort of bottleneck. This is one really important reason for something like a zygote - the body-plan knows it has something like a “control” cell it can trust, so that more “selfish” cells can’t just reproduce throughout the body plan for their own success.

Making the player complete some broad goals with their body structure could be a good means of pacing progression.