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:
- 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.
- 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.