Beginning Concepts on The Multicellular Stage

Gameplay
1

I think it’s a good idea to have some sort of baseline discussion related to the Multicellular Stage before we dive headfirst into it after 1.0. I want to note that there are many other threads related to the Multicellular Stage:

These are older, and were also started before we had the dedicated Multicellular-Macroscopic switch instead of the legacy Early/Late Multicellular dynamic. They also generally started with the assumption of a smooth transition between the microscopic and macroscopic stages, and have many ideas scattered all over the place, so I think it’s fair to start a new, centralized thread in wake of the upcoming completion of the Microbe Stage.

The Premise

You’ve weathered the climate instability, found a viable base for your metabolism, and fought off other simple lifeforms. Successfully passing the Microbe Stage shows that you have proved your ability to succeed in this young, alien world, through all its swings, hitches, and competition. Your planet has reached some sort of equilibrium, and those wild swings have calmed.

But now, you must contend with another threat - multicellular lifeforms. Weird lifeforms, with bizarre shapes and eccentric abilities have shown up, proving to offer completely different capabilities. They grow back portions of themselves, spray out immense barrages of toxin warfare, have spikes all over them, and all-in-all, are difficult to handle.

Fending off competition isn’t so simple anymore. In this strange new world with organisms armed to the teeth, how do you keep yourself alive?

Progression, Differences, and Themes Between the Microbe and Multicellular Stages

The challenge of the Microbe Stage is keeping your organism away from extinction in the face of a rapidly-shifting, young, and immature planet. With oxygenation, glaciation, and the shifting of important compounds, players are generally trying to stay afloat in the face of some sort of volatility. They also face off with other organisms for the first time, who are also trying to establish a niche.

In the Multicellular Stage, the emphasis shifts from surviving through massive planetary shifts, to surviving against intense competition from other lifeforms. You will naturally have settled on the niche that keeps you alive, and will have found that your planet is generally much more established now, with oxygen stable, resource diffusion generally rounding out, and some sort of defense against early lifeforms.

However, facing off with multicellular organisms offers different challenges, for two fundamental reasons in game right now without any need for dedicated Multicellular mechanics:

Many cells will be somewhat similar in size as you, so engulfment is much less powerful. In most cases, you can’t just button-click your competition away.
Killing one cell doesn’t mean you’ve dealt with the threat - there are other cells you must kill, deter, or evade.

So combat is much different now - instead of combatting a single cell, you must combat multiple. And instead of keeping a single cell alive, you need to take care of multiple.

Think of the Microbe Stage as sailing a raft during a storm with pirates - also in rafts - around you. Your primary focus is making sure your raft doesn’t sink; sure, you don’t want to bump into a pirate, but you’re not sure if you’ll even be floating by the time you bump into one, and they’re worried about sinking too.

The Multicellular Stage is what happens after the storm calms down. The water is tranquil, so you’re not worried about your boat capsizing; however, no one else is either. And they’re hungry for your cargo.

Analogy aside - we should be cognizant of this new baseline when designing the Multicellular Stage.

Multicellular Stage Expectations

Embrace the Goofiness

Let’s be real - the Multicellular Stage is probably going to be really, really weird. Just as the microscopic patch map abstractly represents an early planet to a microscopic organism, the Multicellular Stage will be a pretty abstract representation of a stretch of evolutionary time that we don’t know too much about.

Beyond the theory however, we’ll be transforming a stage that for approximately ten concrete years of development has been built around a unicellular experience into a stage where you place multiple cells and figure things out. There are bound to be slightly overpowered strategies, physically outlandish interactions, and pretty funny moments. There’s going to be giant blobs bumping into each other, piluses colliding awkwardly, toxins bombarding the screen, chunks of multicellular organisms popping with organelles and goop scattering everywhere, and general carnage.

Instead of minimizing that and running in two directions with our game design, I think we embrace it. We think of the Multicellular Stage as the player pushing our game mechanics to their creative limits, we create new mechanics to encourage this creativity and reign in undesired behavior, and we make sure nothing crashes, breaks, or causes a physics implosion. We treat this stage like the developers of Besieged, Robocraft, or KSP treat their games - we give them tools in an arms race that constantly feels unbalanced, and challenge our players to make sense of things.

Making a Monster

Get that Microbe risk-adverse crap out of here, you’re making a monster! In the Microbe Stage, controlling one organism forces us to really make it so that the player is wary of putting their system out of balance. Fine-tuning your metabolism, ensuring that energy costs are maintained, and making sure you won’t starve the next generation dominate your strategy.

In the Multicellular Stage, you’ve proven you’re up for that task; now, with that established, make your stats pop!

To reflect the more advanced capabilities multicellular organisms have via cell differentiation, Multicellular Stage mechanics will focus on optimization. We want it so that players can make cells that generate tons of toxins, generate tons of speed, resist a lot of damage, generate a huge energy surplus, etc. Introduced mechanics will focus on dynamic ways to boost stats in the editor, cognizant of the fact that you are controlling a general body plan over a unicellular organism.

Of course, we must be wary that players completely avert the possibility of being killed, starving, or otherwise are able to become so bloated that they are unchallenged. We should think of a good constraint that limits unchecked progression, and of course, tradeoffs are wonderful tools. But, all things being equal, the Multicellular Stage will demonstrate the capacity for more extreme stats than the Microbe Stage.

Gimme Gimme Gimme

In the Microbe Stage, player objectives should generally center ensuring that you are able to adapt to whatever swing is coming in your direction, whether that’s an environmental event, a change in the environment, a dying out of your preferred prey item, or the introduction of a new ability. Those dynamics should be present in the Multicellular Stage of course - they are universal concerns in evolution.

But another objective should also appear, reflecting the greater emphasis on sandbox principles in the Multicellular Stage: the desire for more. More speed, more energy, more damage, more resilience, etc. Players should be constantly pushing the envelope with their build, and should generally have a greater appetite for abilities and capabilities than they do in the Microbe Stage.

A Microscopic Crescendo

I’m sure I’ve said this multiple times, but it’s still valid now: the Multicellular Stage is a sending off of Microbe Stage mechanics. As such, an aspect of this crescendo is providing some sort of boosted abilities. In our concept of Multicellular Stage, there should be room for additional abilities.

General Roadmap

This isn’t a road map that defines Thrive’s scope, like hhyyrylainen’s Microbe Stage roadmap - we’re not there yet. But this is generally what I expect development on the Multicellular Stage to look like in the creation of a healthy stage.

  • Initial Framework & Brainstorming - I anticipate implementation here to be somewhat limited, primarily focused on things like refining the binding agent progression, defining how players unlock multicellularity, and providing a constraint on progression for adding more cells. Also fundamental things like figuring out how metabolism and compound-sharing will work, as well as how stats are generally calculated.
  • Centering Key Mechanics - We start figuring out the direction we want to take here, what works and doesn’t work, and iron out core mechanics. Then, we ensure general balancing polish. This is around where we can make a roadmap discussing scope.
  • Synergizing Microbe and Multicellular Stage - It would be wise to briefly tweak Microbe Stage pacing and progression to reflect the new dimensions of gameplay introduced by the Multicellular Stage. Emphasizing swings in the Microbe Stage, and stability and competition in the Multicellular Stage, will result in a well-paced Microscopic portion of Thrive’s gameplay. This gives us a great base game as we move onto Macroscopic development.

I would like to note that the last bullet point does not justify big balancing swings for current Microbe Stage development. Making the Microbe Stage more volatile for the sake of a stage not currently implemented hampers our current game (the game entirely being the Microbe Stage). I do otherwise advocate for more volatility in the Microbe Stage, but currently, for the sake of improving the stage itself, not the future Multicellular Stage.

Concept Proposals

Body Plan Statistics Revamp

We’ll have to treat statistics differently to emphasize different capabilities offered by becoming Multicellular. Multicellular organism stat mechanics will have to emphasize the capability of energy sharing between cells in a way that reflects an emphasis on holistic performance overcoming individual shortcomings on cells.

Holistic Energy Balance: Instead of a cell’s individual balance determining whether or not it has enough ATP to survive, in the Multicellular Stage, the balance of the body plan as a whole is much more important. As long as you have the machinery in your energy-generating cells to support it, a cell with a negative balance, like one overtly dedicated towards flagellum, toxins, or more, can persist.

Multicellular organisms allow the budgeting of energy in a way that allows for differentiated mechanics. Cells that would otherwise starve or be defenseless as independent organisms can be incredibly important to the performance of a multicellular organism. Implementing this holistic energy balance mechanic would proximate this effect, leading to greater potential for specialization, experimentation, and build diversity.

Beyond that, looking at stats based on the holistic shape of your multicellular organism is a good idea. Things like surface area compared to volume, a streamline measure, mass, etc. affecting certain stats.

Adjacency Bonus

Implementing some sort of mechanic to provide a parametric layer of depth when it comes to cell layout would be great. There are implicit dimensions in Thrive already which already kind of encourage this - mobility cells near the back, engulfing cells near the front, durable cells on the outside, etc. - but many internal parts are omitted.

An adjacency bonus mechanic, where certain stats are boosted depending on how cells are linked together, would be a solid baseline concept to look at. For cells that are different types, certain parts provide different stat boosts dynamically - for example, vacuoles next to a toxin part provides a greater boost to toxin storage, mitochondria next to a flagella/cilia provide greater speed/mobility, cilia next to lysosomes provide greater digestion stats, etc. The more of a specific part there is in a cell, the more that adjacency bonus increases, encouraging specialization.

We would have to carefully map these relationships out in order not to overwhelm the player, or to not have a barrage of numbers even if players don’t intentionally build for them in mind. But such a mechanic would be great for replayability, giving a new dimension of building your perfect organism to more experienced players.

Combat Abilities

It would be great to introduce new and unique combat abilities to the Multicellular Stage, but there are a great deal of combat mechanics we can implement to juice up the arms race in this stage.

We can make it so that if your initial cell dies, your entire colony dies. Keeping this core cell alive is of the utmost importance. This provides a consistent strategy in combat, and gives some depth to combating other species - figuring out your competition’s “heart” can be an interesting dynamic of evolution. Orienting your tools to get to this vital cell, and orienting your own body plan to protect your vital cell would also add another layer of decisionmaking in the editor.

Life Cycles?

One thing I will draw attention to however is the fact that there is an inherent representation of life cycles in the Multicellular Stage; even in the prototype, your organism will drastically change throughout its life as it grows more cells.

This is probably the easiest stage in Thrive to implement the frequently-requested phenomena of “life phases”, so it might be worth considering giving players options as to how individual cells can change throughout time as we conceptualize this stage. I think at the very least, making it so that your initial, starting cell (your core cell, perhaps) has some ability to lose parts that are more important at the early stages of life, like flagellum/cilia, as its role in your organism’s body changes.

Concluding Questions

Finally, I think it would be useful to make sure we are all on the same page about the general bounds of the Multicellular Stage. Again, this stage has gone through scope creeps and shrinkage, so it can be a bit confusing discussing it. With the time jump between the Multicellular and Macroscopic stages, we should firmly state what we intent to represent in this stage, and what is beyond our ambition.

I have some starting questions…

  • Do we think we have room to represent 2D organisms which almost seem to be acquiring a shape where cells start to blend together? We obviously can’t make the player place down hundreds of cells, but is there a way to simplify a representation of that many cells in this 2D world? And is that something we desire? I personally can imagine something like that is feasible if we represent cells with general metaballs, but I think that would introduce very specialized mechanics that would only be used for a very short stretch of time in a Thrive playthrough.
  • How many cells do we expect players to place down at the most? The more the merrier, to a certain extent; too many cells will tank performance, and will be pretty unruly to manage. Progression to the next stage should work in a way that is more than just “get X number of cells in your body”, so I’m not saying we should place a hard cap on it; but we can introduce mechanics to make scaling up inefficiently harder, like a binding cost that increases non-linearly the most cells you have on you. Do we make it so that players generally work with around 10 cells at the “climax” of the Multicellular Stage? More? Less?
  • How long will an average life take? There’s an fresh spawn phase, a growing phase, and a fully grown phase we want to include. We should probably make sure that the player gets to experience their fully grown organism for around 2 minutes, plus or minus some time depending on how good at gathering ammonia or phosphate they are. But we also want to include those other parts of a simple Multicellular organism’s life. Perhaps around 3 minutes for the smallest/most simple multicellular organisms, to around 5 minutes for the larger ones?
  • How long should the Multicellular Stage take? In my mind, the microscopic stages of Thrive should take an average of four hours, plus or minus an hour if you want to rush through/play optimally or experiment in/struggle a bit more. Should the Multicellular be shorter than the Microbe Stage, or longer? We don’t really have to set forth with crafting this stage with an exact time in mind, as we can balance growth and metabolic rates down the road if we get feedback about pacing; it’s just good to keep in mind a rough estimate as we develop.
2 Likes
2

I’m wondering if this is actually the case. I got the feeling like you are sort of describing macroscopic more than multicellular, because in multicellular there’s still going to be plenty of single-celled species around you can eat. I imagine we will balance auto-evo around total biomass that gained energy supports, thus multicellular species would have much lower populations than microbes.

I like this characterization of the multicellular stage.

Again, I think it it’s been discussed many times that sharing ATP between cells is an extremely rare thing on Earth. And as a result in Thrive it is not possible currently to share ATP between cells. And I’d like to keep the primary way like that for realism purposes. So even in multicellular the player has to make sure that each cell type has a positive ATP balance.

This is actually how it already works both in the microbe and multicellular stages.

That’s kind of the crutch of the issue, we’d need to work backwards from macroscopic by making a basically variant of macroscopic that looks more like individual cells (for performance reasons the limit to going macroscopic is 20 cells in a colony). I personally don’t see this as reasonable use of our limited resources as it would require extreme amount of work to make this stage transition fully smooth. Thus I think that we can just keep this as rough it is as the smoothness increase related to the effort put in I don’t think is worth it.

  1. Or maybe with the new improvements to performance, 25. But we don’t have other multicellular species in the game yet. Those are also going to demand quite a lot of performance when the player is not the only multicellular species spawning in the environment. We really don’t have much of performance budget to allocate for allowing bigger player body plans at this stage of the game.

So far we haven’t really planned that much new content so my feelings right now is that microbe stage (when not intentionally taking it slow or not advancing) should take at most like 2 hours. And multicellular stage shouldn’t be much longer or maybe even shorter (if we don’t have a lot of new mechanics to keep it interesting). Macroscopic is what we need to reserve quite a bit of playtime for in the longer term plans.

1 Like
3

Personally I’ve always considered the multicellular stage to be very similar to the microbe stage but with the focus of the colony, which also introduces players to working with different cell types which the macroscopic stages will expand upon. Also with what Deus mentioned regarding the central cell, we could incentivize protecting one’s central cell by having it be the only cell that can create new cells for the colony. That way one could try and survive after losing that cell, but would be unable to enter the editor. Plus tutorial wise the introduction of cell differentiation should likely happen after the player has already played through the multicellular stage for one generation (This would also be a good way to mention the importance of the central cell.)

1 Like
4

I think this is just a slower way of losing, so not really interesting for the average person.

Right now the game considers you dead if the lead colony cell dies and then respawns the player. That is already what is being suggested, which is fine enough by me as I don’t need to do anything as the game is already like that.

2 Likes
5

Good point, completely slipped my mind. I agree with sticking with realism; we obviously take deviations for gameplay purposes in some areas, but that would be a fundamental inaccuracy to the stage which would really screw with a lot.

Considering that, I think stat-focused gameplay would focus a lot on optimization, such as through adjacency and features like that, as opposed to a holistic energy bar or something like that. We would need to probably display stats focused on overall body plan productivity if we incorporate colonial stat bonuses, but only in specific contexts.

While I do agree with you on the presence of unicellular organisms, I was particularly focused on multicellular-on-multicellular interactions. I agree that multicellular organisms should be less common than unicellular organisms, but I still do think other multicellular organisms should present to a point that a solid amount of the stage involves competing with other weird colonial entities.

I think a unique aspect of the multicellular stage and its combat is that killing one entity doesn’t necessarily mean that the organism as a whole is gone (unless you target it’s “heart”). Even with the macroscopic, killing the organism gets rid of it - in the multicellular, killing a few cells won’t necessarily mean the organism as a whole isn’t a threat anymore.

1 Like
6

Here is an initial concept proposal on how adjacency bonuses can benefit Thrive.

Adjacency Bonuses: General Principles

Adjacency bonuses are a pretty gamified representation of real life phenomena for simple multicellular organisms. Though ATP isn’t often shared between cells, the ability to share resources, create signaling loops, and coordinate physical movements can enable for some pretty unique adaptations and phenomena which isn’t possible for unicellular organisms. Some examples of this include choanoflagellate coordination to create vortexes, Volvox flagellum enhancing nutrient circulation, and slime molds creating complex extracellular structures during their multicellular life phase.

Adjacency concepts here are meant to represent various aspects of multicellular body plans unique to this stage of Thrive, but to say each individual concept is an incredibly demonstrated phenomena in the real world would be a stretch. Sure, some of them do have basis in reality, but as a whole, this concept is a pretty strong abstraction of rather complicated adaptations which require a lot of nuance and expert-level understanding to properly dissect.

I think we are absolutely allowed some abstraction room for this stage for two big reasons:

  • We are much more limited in this stage in terms of resources, to the point that larger multicellular microscopic life will be omitted from our jump between stages. We have to represent our organisms with, at the most, 20 cells. Many structures in certain multicellular organisms do not conveniently fit with our existing editor mechanics and constraints.
  • Many fundamental phenomena in multicellular lifeforms, such as gradients, communications, and signalling, are so complex, that introducing them in the multicellular stage would result in even more abstraction and an immense amount of feature bloat.

Potential Methods

I think adjacency bonuses would be a pretty good idea because it inherently encourages specialization and is a pretty well-founded mechanic in other games which creates a strategy behind placement.

There are two ideas floating around in my head…

  • Adjacency bonuses apply from the parts already in the game. Certain parts start to have unique adjacency effects in the Multicellular Stage. This makes things pretty smooth and probably requires less work, but leads to a lot of questions on balancing and gameplay effects.
  • Adjacency bonuses apply from new Multicellular parts we implement. This isn’t as smooth as the prior option, but it gives us a lot of discretion implementing new effects in an ideal manner without baggage; players will immediately associate new parts with a new mechanic. We’d probably have to make it so that a multicellular part has both an effect on the immediate cell, and an adjacency effect on other cells to give a plus and minus for that part being more frequent across the body or used more for adjaceny.
  • Both of the above. It gives us the most flexibility, but we’d need to ensure that the organelles already in Thrive which provide adjacency effects are clearly identified as having that property. It would be confusing otherwise to the player if both new parts and old parts provide the effect.

I am favoring option three for two big reasons. First, it keeps a nice integration of the Microbe Stage into the Multicellular Stage. Second, it allows us the option not to cram adjacency effects into already established parts which have their own function. And third, it’s honestly kind of difficult to cram a bunch of concepts onto the original part selection.

Here is an initial concept on mechanics which can result from adjacency bonuses…

Membrane Type and Rigidity Affecting Adjacency Strength

Along with their already implicit effects, membrane rigidity in Multicellular organisms will influence how drastically adjacency bonuses scale. If membranes are less rigid, adjacency bonuses will be stronger; if membranes are more rigid, adjacency bonuses will be weaker. Certain membrane types will also be more or less effective to reflect how permeable membranes are.

Along with general build diversity, this will incentivize internal cells to be more fluid and porous - implicitly representing internal parts being more delicate, and incentivizing the development of harder exteriors to protect more delicate internal parts.

Vacuoles

Vacuoles provide storage gains to compounds utilized by parts in neighboring cells. The more vacuoles within, the more adjacent cell storage also benefits. Does not apply if there are vacuoles in adjacent cells.

Nitroplast

Nitroplasts reduce the total amount of compounds needed for neighboring cells to reproduce. The more nitroplasts within a cell, the more neighboring cells have reduced costs. Does not apply if there are nitroplasts within adjacent cells.

Mitochondria

Cells densely populated with mitochondria boost the capabilities of all adjacent external parts except pili, and reduce associated energy costs of the parts in adjacent cells. The latter is to enable ability-focused cells the ability to strip down just to the bare essentials of said ability, increasing the number of external parts placed and streamlining the cell.

  • For flagellum, maximum sprint speed is increased.
  • For cilia, engulfment strength or rotation speed is increased.
  • For slime jets, force applied upon expulsion is increased.
  • For toxin vacuoles, toxin generation speed is increased.

Post Note: Another Argument for Size-Related Costs?

I did think beforehand that size-related costs would be beneficial to Thrive, but I was wondering how necessary they would be considering everything that the Microbe Stage could task the player to deal with - especially if volatility is increased.

Thinking about the Multicellular Stage however, I do think there is a pretty strong argument for size-related costs: if you can just add more of a part without much of a penalty, what reason is there for specialization? Why worry about adjacency bonuses or cell-on-cell interactions if adding parts to individual cell types will always be an option? Every cell can have nearly every ability if the player so wishes. For example, in the above concept focused on nitroplasts, why would a player just not spam nitroplasts on every cell instead of specializing?

This isn’t me saying “see, size-related costs should be tied to 1.0!” especially if it requires a large amount of development time. But I do think size-related costs makes sense for the microscopic stage which we could implement once we start developing the Multicellular Stage.

7

After getting bullied by the flagship monster of the Monster Hunter series on the community forums (/s) - who pointed out that it would probably be more realistic if specialization encouraged the development of tissue layers with similar anatomical structure - I will say that I think this current adjacency bonus concept needs some work. I do think the holistic stat approach, which involves introducing stats derived from your overall multicellular shape as opposed to your individual cells, is still a good idea that deserves more conceptualization.

1 Like
8

No bullying intended, I swear!

Background
I view the Multicellular Stage as having two major trends:

  1. Cell specialisation: Moving towards each cell type having one specific function
  2. Tissue formation: Placing cell types together to cooperate (these areas will then be converted into tissue blobs in macroscopic)

For today, I would like to look at number 1.

Cell specialisation has been mentioned quite often as a “given” for this stage, but I don’t recall seeing a lot of speculation on how and why a player would actually want to specialize their cells. In fact, I’ve for example seen streamers skip the concept entirely, and you can make it out of the current prototype perfectly fine without worrying about it.

Some things are easy to imagine. For example, a pilus isn’t going to do anything on a cell that is entirely surrounded by your own other cells. Might as well save the bit of osmoregulation and reproduction cost, right? But if we look at real life organisms, cells are usually extremely specialised, even when there are multiple functions they could perform in their location. For example, each cell in our skin could in theory easily make its own melanin. But instead, we have specialised melanocyte cells that only make melaninin-containing melanosomes, and then deliver them into other cells. Quite a bizarre arrangement, when you think about it.

While I would love to hear the opinions of the Theory team on this, as far as I can tell, the exact reason are still unclear. As King apparently put it:

The transition to multicellularity that launched the evolution of animals from protozoa marks one of the most pivotal, and poorly understood, events in life’s history.

From there in combination with some other sources, the best I can conclude is something along the lines of “doing less things in one cell is more efficient”, whether that be from not having as much of the DNA exposed to damage, or not having to rewire and remodel the cell every time you have to do something else.

The Suggestion
How I would like to model this efficiency is then deceptively simple:

Give a numerical performance bonus to each cell part, based on the percentage of the cell’s hexes that are taken up by this cell part.

As an example, having a cell that is 50% just spikes gets a 50% reduction in spike osmoregulation cost. (balance numbers… pending)

There are than two general effects I can imagine for this bonus:

  1. Osmoregulation cost reduction for everything.
  2. A different bonus selected for each cell part.

Personally I favour option 2, because I find it more interesting from a gameplay perspective.
Some examples for this option:

  • A cell that is 50% vacuoles: 25% more storage per vacuole.
  • A cell that is all flagella and mitochondria to power those flagella: Lots of speed, and the mitochondria get increased process speed to keep up with the increased energy demands of the flagella.

I think this mechanic would work very well to encourage players to specialise their cells (as long as it is made obvious to them), and since there are very significant numerical effects, I am hoping it will be relatively easy to make auto-evo aware as well. We also don’t have to be too careful with not making the bonuses too strong, because we want there to be a very strong incentive to heavily specialise cells, as seen in nature.

Some other random related points:

  • I would exclude the Nucleus (and maybe the Binding Agent) from the “hex usage”% calculation, because it takes up a lot of hexes and is in every cell without choice. It would essentially just dilute the effects of the system.
  • This does not necessarily have to be limited to just the multicellular stage, it could apply to microbes as well, giving some bonuses for specialisation in lifestyle. Though in this case, since it is much easier to have a prokaryote with just one type of organelle, I would make the bonus initially weaker, and only become stronger when you place a Nucleus and/or Binding Agents.

If people like the general idea, I can draw up a list of potential effects for each current cell part we have.

Edit: There’s also an alternative, more extreme version I thought of:
Instead of looking at hex usage, we look purely at the number of different types of organelles.

The benefit is that it strongly encourages total specialisation, with no one thylakoid left somewhere that you don’t need. (Also might be more realistic in that way, the cell not having to spare any effort on something at all is far bigger than doing something less)
The downside is that there’s no clear benefit to gradual specialisation if you don’t remove whole types of organelles from a cell type at once.

Of course, a combination is also possible: One bonus for proportion of hexes dedicated to one thing, and a separate final bonus for reducing the number of different organelles in a cell. But that might be layering on too many mechanics.

(Again, would also help make specialised microbes a bit stronger.

So, that list for potential effects for each organelle. (If we indeed go for unique effects instead of a generic bonus that is the same for each).

Firstly, we have a category that is still simply an osmoregulation cost reduction. Either because there are no other numerical values to act on, or because there are numbers, but they don’t make sense to act on:

  • Chemoreceptor (numbers like detection range are something you want to have control over. Boosting them makes no sense.
  • Perforator Pilus (I don’t think upping the damage of individual pili based on their proportion makes logical sense).

For most cell parts, it is actually quite simple. The category “just increase Bioprocess Speed”:

  • Chemoplast
  • Chloroplast
  • Ferroplast
  • Hydrogenase
  • Hydrogenosome
  • Melanosome
  • Metabolosomes
  • Mitochondrion
  • Nitroplast
  • Rusticyanin
  • Thermoplast
  • Thermosynthase

I think for some of the prokaryotic cell parts it makes sense to focus on just their primary objective, instead of the incidental ATP production. The category “Increase Bioprocess Speed, like above, but ignore Glycolysis”:

  • Chemosynthesizing Protein
  • Nitrogenase
  • Thylakoids

Now for the slightly more complicated and perhaps more unique cases:

  • Bioluminescent Vacuole: Increase Bioprocess Speed, so more ATP into more… light. Which sounds wasteful for now, but I would also boost the bonus it gives to oxygen resistance.
  • Cilia: Increased bonus to rotation speed.
  • Cillia (Pulling): Increased range and/or strength of pull while engulfing.
  • Cytoplasm: Actually quite interesting. According to the previous pattern, could just give this a Bioprocess Speed upgrade. But, this is more commonly used (I think) to quickly get to a larger size (and sometimes get storage). So I could see a combined Osmoregulation cost reduction/Bioprocess Speed/Storage increase bonus here, or focus on just Osmoregulation cost reduction (with or without storage).
  • Flagellum: Increased speed, equally increased ATP usage.
  • Lysosome: Increased contribution to Digestion Speed and Efficiency.
  • Slime Jet: Increased Bioprocess Speed, but also equally shoots out mucilage faster for more speed.
  • Slime Jet (Mucocyst): Increased Bioprocess Speed. I think doing anything like to further enhance its defensive abilities might move balance in the wrong direction.
  • Toxin Vacuole: Increased Bioprocess Speed, but perhaps also further increased fire rate that each organelle gives.
  • Toxisome: Like above, but explicitly don’t boost the glycolysis.
  • Vacuole: Increased storage.

The exempted:

  • Binding Agent: Obviously you have one in every cell in multicellular. I would just ignore its hex in the “percentage of hexes dedicated to each organelle type” calculation. It could also increase the bonuses from this whole system (if the system is present pre-multicellular).
  • Nucleus: Like above, but even more strongly because the large number of hexes is a big distortion on the system.
  • Signalling Agent: Really, the only difference with the Binding Agent is that it can be removed. So, its hex could be included in the calculation so that you only keep it in one cell. It could even get the Osmoregulation cost reduction. This way, it could be worth it to make one cell somewhere of a cell type that only has the signalling agent and just enough energy to keep it going.

I think the above should be pretty decisive in enforcing the “cell specialisation” trend of the multicellular stage. That leaves the other trend: the formation of tissues of one or a few cell types in concentrated locations.

But since it is relevant to both that and the earlier discussed part, I first have an intermezzo:

The Beginning point of The Multicellular Stage

The trends I named have a lot of bearing on where the stage could end at. But of course, the start is relevant to how they function as well.

“Start with one cell and add differentiated cells gradually afterwards (both in the first time you enter the editor, and every time you leave the editor” has served very well for the prototype up until now, but I don’t think it fits as a definitive solution for the final product.

Firstly, from a theory perspective, there are several different hypotheses on the origin of multicellularity. For example, free-swimming cells coming together to form colonies, and cells failing to fully separate after division have both been proposed. (Both also have observational evidence in species living today) And this is Thrive, so we’re technically not locked to what “really happened” on earth. However, from what I can tell universally, complex multicellularity (with cell differentiation) arose from simpler colonies.

Secondly, there’s a similar situation going on in our microbe stage build-up to multicellular right now: First you add the binding agent, form colonies, and then you become multicellular (currently requiring a certain colony size). And as far as I remember, the plan was to add more steps to colony gameplay before you get to the multicellular editor.

All that is to say that I think it’s not fitting for a player/species to go from playing in a colony, to go back to being a solitary cell (that can’t even form colonies anymore), until you add in cells yourself. Instead, at least for the fully mature members of the species (like in the editor), you should start off with an organism made up of several (initially identical) cells.

For example in a layout similar to choanoflagellate colonies (extremely likely to be what the precursor to IRL animals looked like):

afbeelding
afbeelding815×781 89.6 KB

afbeelding
afbeelding671×557 60.7 KB

Those who are familiar, might also be reminded here of the blastula, one of the earliest stages in animal embryo development.

Or, if we don’t want to start with a central gap:

afbeelding
afbeelding572×452 36.3 KB

afbeelding
afbeelding591×567 54.2 KB

afbeelding
afbeelding634×558 77.8 KB

Of course, we can also have different starting layouts, I am thinking possibly based on cell walls. For example if the above is for normal membranes, this could be for cellulose:

afbeelding
afbeelding409×732 59.9 KB

afbeelding
afbeelding222×591 23.7 KB

(Though that’s probably violating my own rule of “don’t force a connection between two biological traits just because they are in the same creature on earth”. So it’s better if we find another way to determine that choice of starting layout.)

If we don’t want any pre-determined structure, a chaotic blob of randomly smashed together cells would actually also be fine. The important part is that you start with an organism that’s an unspecialised colony of cells, not going back to a single cell.

I think this will help place the player’s focus where it should be: you’re not going to “add more cells until you reach the size requirement to go to macroscopic”. You’re going to reshape your undifferentiated blob and specialise its parts (the two trends I mentioned before) until you arrive at a more complex organism that can grow to macroscopic scales.

This directly relates to the cell specialisation bonuses mentioned above: You start out with a bunch of unspecialised cells, and you can immediately start specialising by deleting unneeded organelles from certain cells that don’t need them. But, as you may have guessed, this works best with some changes to the editor as well.

The Multicellular editor

The core of the multicellular editor, editing cell types derived from other cell types and then making an organism out of those cells, is in my opinion solid. In relation to the previous section though, I think it would be ideal to have some added functionality to it.

Cell replacement

In particular, a way to specialise cells that are already placed. This could be in the form of a selection in the right-click menu on placed cells, or letting you place new cell types on top of others (akin to placing organelles on top of cytoplasm). I am not sure which of these is easier to implement, but either of these would work. The important part is that this should be cheaper in MP than deleting a cell and then placing a different cell type in the same place. I do think, especially with the new starting point I outlined above, this is a necessary mechanic to make it play smoothly.

As a corollary to this: I also think you should only be able to save a celltype as long as there is at least one cell of that type in your organism. I think making lots of edits to a cell that doesn’t even exist, for future use, goes against the objectives of Thrive.

Non-cell elements

I would say this part may not be strictly necessary, but it’s definitely a matter of questioning how accurate we want Thrive to be to reality. As you might have seen in diagrams of those choanoflagellate colonies, that gap in the middle of the sphere can be filled with a big glob of extracellular matrix. Lots of (simple) animals have large chunks of the body that are not really made up of cells. Cnidaria (yellyfish, corals, etc.) have Mesoglea, a gel-like skeleton that takes up much more space than the actual cells of the animals. Sponges have Mesohyl, which is very similar. Then you have things like shells, bones, the stony structure of corals, etc.

Technically these kinds of elements could be left to macroscopic (where they would really become necessary). But I think there is value in adding them here already.

As for how this would work in practice:

These would be listed separately from cell types in the main editor screen when available. They would be placed on a hex in the same way as a cell. They can only fulfil very limited functions, but because they’re not living cells they don’t cost much upkeep. Functions could be low upkeep storage, a tough outer shell, a place to farm bacteria, etc.

As for when they would be available:

This would depend on the cell types in your organism. For example, the binding agent would unlock “glob of extracellular matrix” (meaning this is available from the start). The slime jet/mucocyst could unlock a permanent slime layer. This system could even be expanded so that you can only place these non-cell parts next to a cell that can produce them. I think that would be a fairly interesting mechanic for players, but am not sure if this would be too much work to implement.

Cell membrane type

Something that could encourage the use of the above structures: I think there’s a good argument to make that once you hit the real multicellular stage, your membrane type should be locked, or at least forced to be uniform across all cell types.

While within IRL organisms there’s quite some variation between cells in the exact composition of their membranes, when we’re talking about the major types implemented in Thrive, as far as I have seen, these are universally consistent across entire organisms. Normally I say that we don’t need to stick to earth patterns for the alien life in Thrive. But the fact that this is such a consistent rule indicates to me that this is a valid restriction to put on players. And not, as this is now the case, varying membrane types between cell types being a very cheap and easy option that I see used quite frequently. From a biological perspective, I can also imagine that the methods an organism evolves to stick their cells together are probably quite dependent on how those cells’ membranes are built.

This then gives players new choices to make, on how to deal with this restriction.

For example, to bring this back around to the previous part: If you’re a single-membraned organism and you want a defensive layer, you don’t have the option of creating cell type with a silica membrane (which I currently do sometimes), but instead you need to place non-cell “shell parts”.

Another restriction would be that multicellular organisms with cell walls cannot become engulfers, because they can no longer create a different cell type without a cell wall just for engulfment.

Symmetry

This came up in discussion about the macroscopic editor as well. And it’s just a question about whether we want this choice to take place in multicellular, macroscopic, or both.

At it’s base this can build on the current symmetry button we have, but it’s more involved in gameplay. In short: symmetry should be a deliberate choice you make somewhere along the line. Once you’ve made it, you’re stuck with it, so you have to keep your organism (mostly) conforming to the symmetry. But, there’s a big payoff: the extra cells being placed or modified, do not cost MP. So you can make much larger changes at once, in exchange for being forced to have more regularity in our shape.

As I said before, this could either be skipped here and saved for macroscopic, be an option in either (and carried over in between), or even be one of the requirements before advancing. This all depends on what we imagine the organisms on either side of the the stage transition to truly represent.

I will come back to this post later on, with proposals on the second of the two trends: making sure multicellular ends with more or less cohesive tissue blobs that can be translated to macroscopic.

3 Likes
9

This reply doesn’t respond to everything, but you bring up some very great points here.

One thing I read from Dr. Nick Lane in The Vital Question - it’s inherently expensive to maintain an extensive genome. I don’t remember the exact math, but Dr. Lane presented how much energy is spent maintaining a specific number of genes, and it was pretty astounding. That’s part of the reason why endosymbionts became so specialized. If it costs a bunch of energy to maintain an unneeded part of your genome, like a membrane resilient to ocean water, why maintain it when you live in the most ideal medium: cytoplasm? So that’s another piece of theory we could flirt with.

Off the top of my head, I think this is a very seamless way to encourage specialization that has many great effects. I also prefer option 2 here, for the same reasons. It also feeds well into the “optimizing stats” motif in the current interpretation of the Multicellular Stage, allowing players to really focus on hammering down their cell’s abilities.

I do personally think this should be something exclusive to the Multicellular Stage (or to the binding agent, for reasons I will discuss) along with other mechanics to give the Multicellular Stage unique features. There are other concepts focused on Microbe Stage specialization, such as MP discounting for parts already on you and cost increases for parts you don’t have, which we can investigate first.

Going back to binding agents: I think you found a great way to add more depth and enhance progression in binding agents once we begin to genuinely flesh out the transition to multicellularity besides a simple “collect 5 other cells and you’re instantly multicellular”.

In the Microbe Stage, binding agents can have a similar effect in colonial unicellular organisms, though capped. In order to make it a not universally beneficial part that is a no brainer for literarily everything to have, in the Microbe Stage, perhaps the binding agents could also slightly debuff parts that aren’t your most frequent part. At some point, we can start to have binding agents be more effective and sensical for more advanced eukaryotes. Perhaps relating it to size, or prokaryotic vs. eukaryotic organelles?

We would still need something to figure out what exactly transitions the binding agent from the “collect other cells in live gameplay” part to “this part represents you going to the next stage” part. But as for binding agent effects, that’s a solid idea.

I think one thing to keep in mind is that this technically is a feature resultant from our reproductive strategy in the Multicellular Stage only being asexual budding.

This isn’t to say I disagree with you - I think the similarity between the late Microbe Stage and this form of reproduction can be repetitive, and I think one major milestone of the Multicellular Stage is reaching a point where you start out life as a Multicellular organism.

But I do think there is room for this current “growth pattern” (for a lack of a better catch-all term as relevant to Thrive), perhaps as the first or one of the first reproductive strategies, and then another reproductive style allows you to have a more advanced start. Your point also does still stand, since ideally, the challenge isn’t necessarily “get as many cells as you can” but “specialize” regardless of stratety.

A complicating factor is that choanaflagellates themselves aren’t necessary sexual and do display asexual reproduction, so I don’t think this is as easy as “sexual reproduction unlocks starting as a multicellular organism, asexual reproduction gives you more basic pattern”. But overall, I think if we target maybe two forms of asexual reproduction and two forms of sexual reproduction, and bind different growth behaviors to that choice, we’ll be pretty good.

A few quick brainstormed ideas to exhibit how we can utilize this:

  • Budding (Asexual) - Reproduction as currently seen in the prototype. No distinct life cycles.
  • Spore (Asexual) - You start with one cell at the beginning, but grow in phases as opposed to 1-by-1.
  • Diploid (Sexual) - 50% discount for MP, but you must find another member of your species to reproduce. Slight increase to reproduction time. Enables ability to start life with a multicellular body plan.

Again, I won’t address everything in this post, but some general/unstructured thoughts for the rest:

  • I like your point about the membranes being uniform. I think the best way to deal with it is having it so that you can change membranes, but that change applies to every single cell. That does loosen some of the strategy now related to external surfaces being more resilient and internal being more soft, but we can approach that via the rigidity slider. We can attach more effects to the rigidity slider as well - more fluid membranes allowing greater bonuses in cell-to-cell interactions for example - to reinforce the whole “internal parts being gushy to enable cellular processes to occur better, and external parts being stiffer to protect those processes” phenomena.
  • I recognize the purpose of non-cell parts in representing things that go beyond the functions of an individual cell’s structure, but am wondering if that is the best method of implementation. I’m wondering if it might be better to represent that instead via multicellular-exclusive parts which apply effects based on your general body plan stats - for example, juiced up versions of what something like myofibril does in the game already applied to those functions you brought up.
  • Interesting thoughts on symmetry; making the alteration to the “mirror” discounted/free could be a way to encourage the use of symmetry. Maybe that can be tied to reproduction strategies, where the strength of a discount changes based on the strategy?

Progression

I do like the general idea you’re going for - progression going from “numerous unspecialized blobs” to “blobs being gradually specialized” instead of our current “collect as many as you can and feel free to do every single thing along the way”. The section I went in more detail on in this reply - related to reproduction - is relevant to that topic.

I think we have made some leeway on two important facets of the Multicellular Stage Editor that are unique mechanics we should prioritize:

  1. A mechanic to focus on specialization - you proposed two interpretations that I think are very solid - which changes the way you build your actual cells compared to the Microbe Stage.
  2. A mechanic focused on cell adjacency/proximity to introduce a dynamic that makes the player consider general body plan structure. We have less here, but I think we can make progress on this one quickly.

The “glaring hole” now I think when it comes to our concepts is stuff on progression, which is why what you brought up is so interesting. If we have a solid idea of how progression throughout the stage can look, then I think we’ll already have a lot of actionable items, or atleast have a good general approach/design philosophy behind the stage.

I also think stage progression is something that is important to have a clue about earlier on in this process just because changes to progression would be more difficult to undo/alter later on (I think). I think we can slightly alter specialization/adjacency mechanics more easily if we want to tweak things there vs. realizing “oh crap, this growth mechanic we have limits us here”.

All this to say - great concepts so far. I think we should focus on nailing certain details you bring up first and foremost before going on to more nuanced or “dependent” mechanics.

I have a gut feeling that if we look at how binding agents work, we can figure out something that addresses progression really smoothly. It’s something we need to do anyways since the current entry condition to the Multicellular Stage is too loose, and you’ve started there. But something is telling me that creating a concept to address that transition into our next stage will be pretty revealing on how we scale progression.

Regardless, I will spend some time this weekend focusing on the Multicellular Stage, so I will post more feedback to your post here. Great stuff overall.

1 Like
10

Right, and this is why I also considered the alternative solution of only looking at the number of different types of organelles in the cell. (instead of looking at the number of each organelle type). Because as long as you still have one copy of an organelle, that means you’re still maintaining that information in your genome. (This still goes for multicellular organisms, because keeping a part of the genome active in one cell also has a cost).

But again, that would have the downside of more gradual specialisation not giving as much benefit.

I guess I was going for the concept of :
Every mechanic between the two stages is the same. The only difference is that you are made up of multiple cells you can individually specialise. But that one difference changes everything about how you interact with the mechanics.

I think there’s a certain mechanical design beauty to that, but I am definitely not married to the idea. You also have a good point on intentionally making the stages more different.

I am definitely a great supporter of this as well. Though I am not sure where in the planning we can still make a change this big? Microbe stage is almost about to be considered feature-complete, and this would also have a ripple-effect onto multicellular stage even as it is already in progress.

Of course, it might be slightly odd for binding agents to unlock this mechanic when it doesn’t actually enable the ability to individually specialise cells. Feels a bit like a disconnected effect perhaps? I had it in my mind as a small bonus to the previously existing effect, but I am not sure if it still makes sense if it’s the first time you encounter this mechanic.

For balance: it would be relatively easy to make the binding agent itself have some significant cost that means it’s only worth it if the bonus happens to big enough for your current cell layout. But again, I am not sure if it makes sense to give colonial cells a greater bonus for specialising before they get the ability to specialise individual cells.

As for other potential benefits to the binding agent: There’s been actual practical experiments on trying to induce more colonial/multicellular behaviour in species. And as it turns out, in quite a few cases, this happens when co-grown with predators. The hypothesis is that the colonies are simply to big to swallow.

I am not sure how easy it would be to implement engulfment take into account the size of not just the target cell, but the whole colony. But that would be a strong benefit that is very tightly integrated into our existing mechanics. And in my opinion quite intuitive to players.

My first thoughts on this for it to be a many-step process. Either through additional organelles, or upgrades on the Binding Agent organelle. As a demonstrative example:

  1. Unlock binding at all.
  2. Get a osmoregulation cost reduction for binding.
  3. Start sharing compounds.
  4. Reduce movement penalty for being large.
  5. Start getting the efficiency bonus you mentioned.
  6. Multicellular stage.

(Of course, that’s by no means a final list)

Yes, I did realize, which is why my initial suggestion is for this change is for it to be purely for the “final fully adult” stage. So you would still start out as a single cell after exiting the editor, but the final form would already be determined to be a multicellular colony.

This is also entirely biologically reasonable, a lot of colonial organisms (including those on the border of being multicellular organisms) will split off individual cells that swim off to build new colonies elsewhere. Starting to instead split off already multicellular “larvae” to swim off is probably a development from this stage. (Remember those predator-induced multicellularity experiments? This transition is one of the things they saw happen).

In fact, I can’t immediately find a source for this, but I believe I’ve read before that one of the most basic types of cell differentiation in colonies is that specific cells specialise to perform exactly that task, of swimming off elsewhere to produce new colonies. That might be something interesting to think about.

As you said, choanaflagellates do not always reproduce sexually, but they do sometimes. (like a lot of other single-celled organisms) Meanwhile, a lot of organisms reproduce sexually, but still send out the resulting single-celled spores to spread. Similarly, there are asexually reproducing species that can send out multicellular “propagules” to spread. (To say nothing of animals that lost sexual reproduction).

So maybe it’s a good idea to entirely separate the evolution of (a)sexual reproduction from the selection of “juvenile form + growth pattern?” Sexual reproduction would slightly complicate the reproduction process in return for the mp discount or other bonuses. Independently, you would select the option for how the offspring starts off and develops.

I’ll have to come back to the different reproduction types. It’s a bit difficult, because I do think we’re stuck to some limitations in this stage: Cells that you start with probably have to stay in the same form, in the same place. We can’t change and move cells around as it grows. (So the typical vertebrate “more-or-less” mini-me form is not attainable in this stage) So whatever the offspring juvenile looks like, those cells will still be there in the same shape in the adult organism.

Random thought here: maybe it’s at least possible to have cells start out as the “stem cell“ and later differentiate into the cell type you actually put there in the editor?

I think it could work, my only thoughts on it are:

  1. Feasibility of implementation: I imagine locking membrane types once you hit this stage is an easier change than propagating this change across all cell types. We’d also have to figure out how to price that mp-wise, but that’s a simpler point (To be frank though, at this scale that’s such a massive change it might be 100 MP)
  2. As far as I can tell on earth this never happened. Is that maybe an indication that we should regard it as extremely unlikely? (Biologically speaking, my theory here is that the cell connection system is fundamentally adapted to the membrane/wall type).
  3. Having the lock might actually be a really interesting differentiation point between playthroughs. Similar to how your macroscopic editor concept ties things to the skeleton type. For example, muscles really only work when the cell membrane can be really flexible, not if they all have cell walls.

Could definitely work. Maybe we also want some option here to give protection here in return for giving up engulfment. Because I think “dedicated mouth area” is something we definitely want to have as an emphasised option. (and uniform membrane type removes that)

Part of the idea was to replace some things that different membrane types on different cell types currently do. For example, protection where you don’t need a mouth. I am not entirely sure how that would work with effects on the general statistics? The point of them is to still be located in a specific hex, both functionally and visibly. For example, with a shell-producing organelle, I would still expect the shell to be placed around/near where that cell type is located.

Though if that condition is met, I think it can work equally well.

The other part was the simple fact that looking at biology, large volumes are simply not made of cells. A jellyfish for example is a big jelly skeleton sandwiched between two layers of cells one cell thick. Mollusc shells have 0 cells in them, etc. So in my opinion we do need to consider this for macroscopic, though it’s much simpler there because we don’t need to show anything like the cells outside the editor. It’s just a question if we want that to start in multicellular.

And evidence suggest a pattern like with the jellyfish was very much there for the earliest animals, like we can see in embryo development today:

Blastula
Blastula707×371 68.6 KB

Or some old hypotheses on evolution of animals:

Nielsen-sponge-larvae-2008-stages
Nielsen-sponge-larvae-2008-stages900×659 176 KB

(By the way, I am pretty sure myofibrils were removed from multicellular)

It could be, though I guess biologically I don’t see them as fundamentally connected?

Good points here. I suppose for stage transitions you’re also thinking specifically of how we transition into macroscopic? I’ll see what I can think of myself. I have a feeling big steps will be on the reproduction types/growth modes, maybe along with interactions between the cells.

1 Like
11

Some quick brainstorming I jotted down.

Questions to Address for Progression

  • How do we limit how many cells can be added to the body plan by the player at once?
  • How do we incentivize specialization looking like the change of unspecialized blobs into more specialized functions iteratively?
  • What signified “multicellular” as opposed to “unicellular colonial”? A.k.a, how does progression look from stage to stage?

Mechanic 1 - Binding Agent Cost Scaling

Adding a cell adds an osmoregulation cost to all your binding agents; this cost increases the more cells are on your body plan.

For example - having 1 cell means the osmotic regulation cost or binding agents is 2. Having two cells makes it 5. Having 3 cells makes it 10. Having 4 cells makes it 20. Etc. etc (balancing out the window right now for demonstration purposes). This additional cost is applied to every one of your cells, requiring you to manage costs and functions well as you become more multicellular.

Pro: This creates a natural limit to progression that isn’t arbitrary, creating a dynamic progression system - the player must optimize before they get too bloated.

Con: This doesn’t necessarily encourage the “unspecialized blob to specialized cells pipeline”.

Mechanic 2 - MP Discount Behavior

MP pricing for specialization should initially be pretty high, and start being more manageable as the player progresses throughout the multicellular stage. MP pricing should be pretty stable for adding cells throughout the stage.

Perhaps tweaks to a stem/base cell are priced normally, but tweaks to a modified cell are much more expensive.

Pro: This works to encourage the addition of cells first without an extreme amount of specialization, then

Con: Natural incentive towards hoarding cells instead of specialization.

Combine the Two!

Both of these mechanics have a con that is addressed by the other’s pro, so why not combine the two? Particular attention needs to be given towards balancing to make sure everything is working smoothly, but I do think these two mechanics combined should work to create a smooth baseline for progression we can add onto.

Progression in the Microbe Stage to Multicellular

With the binding agent mechanic, we get an interesting dynamic in the Microbe Stage. Instead of collecting other microbes being a numbers game that lets you skip into the next stage, the player needs to make some intentional design choices to make sure that their cell can actually maintain the energy needed to bond with other cells.

A progression condition could be: reproduce in a colony of atleast 5 for atleast 3 generations. This actually becomes a challenge because of that scaling binding cost - can your cell sustain such a high energy cost enough to reproduce successfully? If not, optimize your costs and create a more energetically productive organism.

Size-Related Costs

This was a feature who’s necessity we were unsure about previously, but I’m really starting to see the value of it.

In the Multicellular Stage, we want to encourage players to utilize multicellular mechanics. The problem is that there really isn’t much reason for the player not to just slap on an extra pair of mitochondria/other part.

Having size-related costs really puts a pin in this. After a while, the player just won’t have nearly as much reward for adding more parts, and will instead have to rely on things like socialization/adjacencies to drive energy generation.

This also creates an intentional effect for specialization. Currently, parts naturally become the most frequent component in your organism just by the incentive of wanting to add more each trip. With size-related costs, the player intentionally has to choose what goes into their cell before they start getting that size-related cost.

So I think we are at a point where size-related costs wouldn’t just be a cool-but-unneeded feature. Size-related costs have extreme relevance for the Multicellular Stage, and we should make sure it is conceptually sound.

Questions

  • How do we pace the pricing surround tweaking individual cells? Sexual reproduction discount can be a big part of it, but another factor should probably also be considered. Maybe the number of cell types you have has an effect?
1 Like
12

This is essentially size-related costs, just for the multicellular organism instead of cells, right? Maybe we can look more in that direction, rather than explicitly making the binding agent consume more?

Because this would indeed quite effectively put a limit on how much cells you want/can have. But I am not sure if it feels natural in the biological sense? Why does it cost more to bind to neighbouring cells just because the colony is bigger?

I would rather look into decreasing the effectiveness of all the processes that require outside (evenly distributed) compounds, as an exaggeration of the problems multicellular organisms face.

Also, does this apply to unicellular colonies? If not: will that be confusing and hard to justify? If yes: can we adequately communicate this to the player? Especially since colony size can be very dynamic. (Multicellular organisms to a lesser degree also, come to think of it. Would the penalties grow with you, assuming you are born as one cell?)

Making specialization itself more expensive is a bit difficult, I think. When it comes to specialising for things your base cell can already do, that’s just a question of deleting unneeded organelles, which is at the base level pretty cheap.

Making editing non-base cells more expensive feels a bit artificial and may not be completely effective: you could create a copy of your base cell, and then proceed to specialise your “base” cell, then make another copy, repeat. Thereby mostly evading the extra cost.

Perhaps instead we can instead make creating a new cell type quite expensive? Especially if we also require that each cell type needs at least one edit to make it unique and require at least one cell of that type in the organism in order to save. Then all of that should be made to have a total MP cost that is quite high.

Also, I feel like maybe that type of specialisation where you are just deleting unnecessary functions shouldn’t be too expensive? It’s something else for creating specialised cells that do entirely new things. That should be expensive.

Hmmm, having essentially an “achievement unlock” to progress is quite different. My first feeling is that I would still prefer some fundamental addition, like we have with adding the nucleus and binding agents.

Definitely support this, but both for individual cells and the whole multicellular organism. Question remains what these costs would actually affect?

Talking purely about MP costs here?

I could see the MP cost for making an additional cell type rising for each cell type you already have. That puts a limit on the complexity. I feel like tweaking the individual cells doesn’t really need additional costs? Editing your cell in microbe stage is already plenty expensive.

P.S. We could also have f.e. the nucleus increase in upkeep with each additional cell type, because that is more and more genetic complexity that needs to be maintained.

1 Like
13

It basically is, yes - with this concept, as the size of your colony increases, so does the cost associated with binding agents. We can just assign that as size-related costs associated with colony activity, but since this would apply to unicellular organisms which can exhibit colonial behavior as well, it might be difficult to present that as its own thing.

I realize that problem would still be present with binding agent costs as well; but if we include intracellular size-related costs as well, could that lead to some confusion or crowding for the player to look at? Atleast with binding agents, players pretty clearly associate that with multicellular activity.

This would apply to unicellular colonies in accordance to the progression from 1st to 2nd stage concept, and communicating that cost could be difficult.

Perhaps one way to approach it is to have binding agent costs act a bit differently for Microbe Stage organisms, where each additional bond adds a flat cost instead of one that might be more dynamic for Multicellular colonies. So the initial osmoregulation cost of a binding agent is 5 - binding with another organism adds another 5, another bind adds another 5, etc. So with this math, the player could somewhat intuitively figure out that a colony of 5 would require atleast a 25 ATP margin to fly.

This cost can be less for a prokaryote if we want to allow colonies a la cyanobacteria (a stacking cost of 2 with each agent instead of 5). They can’t progress to Multicellular without a eukaryote anyways, so progression there looks different.

That is a good point about whether or not the penalty grows with a multicellular organism or if it is just applied from birth to every cell. I think it would be best to just have it be applied from the beginning for multicellular organisms so that your initially productive cells don’t just start dying after a certain part of your growth. Though that does bring up questions related to player intuitiveness.

I think that’s very valid, I just wonder how intuitive it would appear to the player. I think costs are more intuitive for the player to understand (could be my own intuitive biases) because they tend to be more explicitly tied to a sort of baseline, whereas generation can be affected by dynamic rates. I’m definitely not against this interpretation, I was just focused on costs since they seem more immediately understandable.

The “eh here’s some jargon” explanation that immediately came to me was that multicellular organisms tend to have more complex enzyme feedback/regulation because they need to both optimize specialized performance and still make sure that every cell exists in the ideal state for the colony as a whole. So perhaps that cost represents the additional upkeep needed to keep everything regulated and optimal.

One of our old Theorists, Bird, explained this better than I can in an old message:

image
image1815×196 37.3 KB

Keep in mind however the context of that answer is in regards to why macroscopic organisms can’t just rely on enzymes as much as unicellular organisms to adapt to environmental conditions - so this isn’t me trying to say that my jargon is a theory-approved idea. You have a stronger theoretical background than I do, so if you think what Bird was describing is a different phenomena and doesn’t pass the sniff test for that concept, I’ll take your word for it.

I think if anything, something like this:

Could be a good alternative, since it has the more intuitive effect to costs as opposed to generation while still presenting some sort of that scaling effect.

That could also work, but I do think about how exactly that would work if adding this part results in the stage transition. Do you just build up to this expensive part, and if you reproduce x amount of times with it, you become multicellular? That could be more in step with how progression related to the nucleus works - but what would incentivize a player to actually utilize binding agents if the placement of a part is the definitive source of transition, and not action related to the agents?

I definitely think the current stage transition is flawed in that it is very easy to fulfill once you place down a binding agent, but I atleast do like how it forces you to mirror an action or behavior fundamental to the stage you are trying to get to.

Good points here, I agree.

I agree - I think size-related costs should apply to a unicellular organism, and that same cost should be present for members of a multicellular organism.

I think Size-Related Costs should be their own “box” in the ATP bars for Organism Statistics, if that makes sense. Another interpretation involves just scaling osmoregulation costs, but I’m not really in favor of that. I think it is important that players understand exactly how much their size is costing them, and if that is bunched with osmoregulation, that isn’t very intuitive: what part of osmoregulation is just because of my parts, and what part is because of my size?

I think that’s a good point. Mutations to individual cell types are discounted currently in the editor. We can look at that discount when it comes to progression.

Responding to some of your prior points…

Fair point - there are some pretty weird and cool behaviors, like quorum sensing, that allow unicellular organisms to accentuate or mitigate certain functions if conditions allow. But that might be too much to wrap into a single part.

I also have heard that, and very interesting - perhaps cells need a bigger size gap to engulf cells in a colony. This would incentivize the development of cell functions and abilities as opposed to just relying on engulfment when engaging with other colonies, mirroring the development of more complex adaptations. Like you mention though, it might be difficult to implement.

I do like the iterative nature of this, but two things:

  • Since we don’t really have some sort of “linear upgrade” system for any other part of the game, this could stray too far away from our core design principles.
  • These could perhaps be represented as parts - but that would be a large number of parts for a very specific phase of the game, which clutters the editor and could confuse players.

Perhaps these bonuses could be applied to unique parts in the Multicellular Stage instead of a mandatory bunch of parts you must place on a unicellular organism to progress? Through either things you place on your cell, or extracellular parts as you mention.

That is a good point. Perhaps sexual reproduction is tied to the placement of a part on either your colony or your cell (sexual reproduction did evolve with eukaryotes afterall), and your growth strategy is something different. Or it could just be a toggle in a sort of reproduction strategy menu, such as the basic one we already have which only lets you select budding.

I do wonder if we could atleast have it so that certain parts in a cell disappear at different life cycles, since if any stage could have a pretty dedicated breakdown of a life cycle, it would be this one. Though like you said, it entirely depends on whether or not this feature could be demonstrated intuitively, and if it is worth the labor.

  1. I agree with the pricing.
  2. I wonder how frequently membranes change within eukaryotic species as opposed to multicellular species - could membrane switching in eukaryotes to the extent we have it in the Microbe Stage be similarly not based on sound science?
  3. I agree, but that could also lead to some frustration on the player’s behalf if they realize that they are restricted upon entering the Multicellular Stage and beyond. My concepts for the Macroscopic Editor does have the integumentary system be binding in some cases, but atleast with that, there’s a possibility for change if you “de-evolve” certain parts. For something as fundamental as a stage transition, I wonder how possible it would be to offer that “revert-point”.

That is very interesting - perhaps more rigid membranes increase the size discrepancy needed for engulfing things, and fluid membranes do the opposite.

Those are good points.

I think a good approach here would be first to create a list of some potential abilities we can represent in the Multicellular Stage (like you mentioned, some examples of shelling, mesoglea, utilizing very powerful currents to engulf, etc.)

Then from these abilities, we can discuss whether or not these parts can be fit into traditional part placement, or if it would require something like extracellular parts. Again, I’m not necessarily against this concept, just wondering if it is a layer of complexity that should be added in this way. If we come up with abilities that would really benefit from this interpretation, then its case is much stronger.

1 Like
14

From what I have read recently:

  • Cell differentiation
  • A defined body plan
  • Anatomical structures that do not exist in individual cells

And maybe, from an older article I did not yet summarise:

  • Some cells not being able to collect their own food, instead being fully reliant on other cells closer to the exterior.

All three of those first once do absolutely require the multicellular editor, so I guess that’s fitting. Though I suppose “defined body plan” happens automatically when you unlock the editor at all, while cell differentiation is a conscious choice afterwards.

Two other related things:

  1. Directly sharing resources between cells is something that some but not all colonies do, while true multicellular organisms obviously always do. So this is a clear candidate for a prerequisite step before transition to multicellular.
  2. Something that pretty much all the forms of more complex multicellular life have are cell types specifically for reproduction, which I will inaccurately call germ cells here. This may or may not be a good candidate for advancement to macroscopic.

Hmmm, I was thinking that having it hidden away in the tooltip of an organelle that by definition players may have little reason to look at after placing it might be a problem. With having it being its own very obvious UI element being the better option then.

To be honest, this is starting to concern me a bit with potentially adding a large cost on an activity that actually has fairly little benefit right now.

That would indeed be a reason to have the penalty be constant during the generation, even though it probably does not make logical sense.

Right, I am wondering if we can think of a type of penalty for having too many cells that is clearly detrimental, but not lethal in that way. We might need a hard cap on the number of cells anyway to ensure performance from what I remember.

Good point also. But to clarify what I am thinking: similar to your macroscopic editor concept, there’s a list of statistics for the whole organism off to the side somewhere stating among other things: organism size x cells, causing -y efficiency in all processes. Or something like that.

I think what Bird is saying here makes some sense, but more in the sense of the types of things our organism needs to evolve in order overcome the problems I mentioned in the previous paragraph, in order to become macroscopic.

To be honest I was originally thinking here about stage transitions be directly caused by something like placing an organelle, or in this case an upgrade on the binding agent, or something along those lines.

Just to give an example (that is of course itself not a good idea): imagine placing the binding agent and leaving the editor didn’t unlock the ability to make colonies but just directly sent you into the multicellular editor. Sure you could ask “what is the feature of this organelle?” and the answer would be “the whole next stage”.

A decent question, but I think it also goes for any other organism feature you yourself secretly only add because of what you want to evolve it into later. (like bony fins, because you need to turn them into limbs later on). Maybe the answer should be the same: if you have them, you should want to use them because their function, in itself, is too useful to ignore.

But I do actually also like the idea of requiring some gameplay action to transition. Maybe this could use organelle unlocks or something similar?

By the way, if we include the multicellular stage starting with you already having a design of an unspecialised colony; I do also like the idea of making you play one generation growing into that colony, before you get to enter the editor and edit it/start specialising cells.

I think this would be a good approach. My only concern here (and with things I suggested myself before) is how to bridge from “organism-level statistics” to ATP costs, which are at the cell level always.

I do think going for “you need to be large enough that you can could engulf the whole colony in one go” would be the simpler option here. Though I do realise that will mean “you cannot engulf cells in colonies” most of the time (outside extreme cases or prokaryote colonies), that’s not necessarily a bad thing? As you said, it makes you look for more advanced ways to fight colonies.

As for implementation: I just realised that the game must be keeping track of colony size already (because there’s a counter for it). So quite possibly this is a case of simply making engulfment check for if the engulfer is large enough to engulf target cell size x target colony size.

Hmmm, I was only concerned about if the system/UI implementation would be manageable. I figured if the upgrades still had their own cost/downside, so that they’re not worth it for every species, that would still be in keeping with Thrive design principles.

Very true. I would at max go for having one more part: an “exterior organelle” (so like flagella, etc.) that forms a connection with other cells for the “sharing compounds” part of the colony behaviour.

Well, the random examples I gave have things that I would consider should be in place before you go into the multicellular stage proper (especially the compound sharing part. Once you reach that point the focus should really be on changing the colony into a proper organism (rather than “getting better bonuses from colonies”.

I think this indeed makes the most sense. Quickly reading through the existing literature, I think it could be made a feature of the nucleus itself, or even an upgrade to it.

The multicellular stage aspect would be somehow making a specialised cell type for this purpose. (which as I said before, could even be a requirement for progression).

I guess we’ll have to ask hhyyrylainen about the feasibility of this later on. But I am also concerned about whether this is too in-depth for typical players to handle. Visualising it could also be difficult unless we have separate screens for the growth stages.

On a similar note: maybe we can have new cells growing in the organism as stem cells before they turn into their proper type?

Well, plants and fungi both evolved a cell wall compared to animals, so I guess that’s more frequent?

Good point here. Then maybe we can borrow that idea from the macroscopic concept also? We keep the “cell membrane type must be the same across the organism”, but only lock it completely as long as you have a part somewhere that requires your current membrane.

By the way, I was thinking of how we can potentially have “muscles” in cells that have cell walls (because otherwise everything that does not have a “fluid membrane” would be pretty much not worth playing in macroscopic and beyond). And I remembered that plants do “abuse” turgor pressure to move body parts around, and apparently fungi use it too. In principle, the potential is there as long as you have a semi-flexible cell wall.

So that could be a cool starting difference between types: if you don’t have a cell wall, you can unlock myofibrils, and if you do you can unlock for example a membrane organelle that turns the tissue into a “turgor muscle“. With some statistical differences between the two.

I don’t really like messing with the size ratio unless we add an ability to easily confirm whether you can engulf something without trying it. But that would work with rigidity slider, while an on/off on engulfment would require a different type of toggle. (like a new “type” of cell membrane that you can use as an alternative to your normal cell membrane in the multicellular stage for specific cell types).

Good idea, we can check whether such a system would even be necessary at all.

I am also thinking of an alternative where these kind of non-cell structures are just automatically placed around cells that have the appropriate cell parts.

1 Like