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.