Beginning Concepts on The Multicellular Stage

[hhyyrylainen]

@Deus

Size-Related Costs - After a certain size, non-linear costs begin to apply. This pushes players away from hoarding too many functions.

How would this actually work? What if the player already is so big that they get immediately wrecked once they go multicellular?

I think it would make more sense to have a buff / synergy system for cells that do less each process would get like an efficiency and speed bonus or something.

@Deus

Adjacency Bonuses Scaling Up With Proportion of Parts in Cell - Adjacency bonuses get stronger the more of a specific part is in your organism, pulling players towards engaging with specialization.

So we want adjacency bonuses for organelles? And that would also apply to the microbe stage? (as it would be quite a pain to separate out the bonus to only apply in multicellular).

@Deus

Rigidity Slider - A less rigid membrane increases strength of adjacency bonuses. A more rigid membrane provides greater resistance. This incentivizes the development of the more tough “skin” and the more chemistry-conducive “goop”. Other rigidity effects, like health and mobility, compound here as well.

Thinking about the actual implementation of adjacency bonuses on the hex editor screen, where would be put them? And more importantly if we have these many overlaid effects how are we going to get the players to understand them?

I think a relatively light visualization could be made by having like green and red lines appear when hovering over a hex showing the bonus / penalty it gets from surrounding hexes. I think that’s a pretty good UX design, but then trying to explain that modifying the rigidity of the individual cells affects the bonuses a ton, I’m not sure where we could even put that explanation.

@Deus

Looking at the above list, we have only one push mechanic - size-related costs - discussed. I’m not of the opinion currently that we need another new push mechanic for the Multicellular Stage: instead of an entirely new mechanic, we can implement new parts or something that cost a lot of ATP.

I’d even argue that we shouldn’t have any immediate push mechanics, because like I said before it’ll suck if you get to multicellular all excited and then get hit with so many penalties that you cannot even survive and need to load an older save to tweak your cell before it is “safe” to go multicellular.

Still I find it agreeable that the cell body plan could be affected by SA or other size mechanics as I think we’ll want those in macroscopic so a simplified introduction of them in multicellular makes sense.

@Deus

As such, we should make sure we have something pushing the player towards working with our pulls. Otherwise, players will just go “eh I know these mechanics exist but I’m just going to do the same thing I’ve been doing in the Microbe Stage”.

I think @Rathalos said something about wanting to change the “20 cells to proceed” criteria to be something else. Maybe it could be reworded like you need at least 3 cell types (that are placed) and that you have at least 5 cells with a +10% modifier from adjacencies. Or something like that that you need to actually design stuff to advance?

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In terms of the first features I suppose that hex placement adjacency bonuses, both for organelles and cell types as a whole (and maybe this needs the cell specialization bonus to be done as well to know what cell types want to be next to each other) could be a good first set of features to do as it’ll upgrade the body plan editor to have more significant effects.

Also probably movement speed / growth speed for colonies need to be adjusted as an absolute first priority to make the stage not a slog.

After those are done I think we should have a general full team meeting to discuss what we need for multicellular and get a roadmap into place for the rest of the year.