I was reading Otherlands by Thomas Halliday the other day. It’s a great look into various unique periods of Earth’s history narrated in a way that exemplifies the extent to which our planet itself has a dramatic influence on evolution - with a particular focus on climate science.
Reading this novel led me into a thought train about how the environment in the Macroscopic phase should differ from the environment of the Microscopic phase of Thrive. And in many ways more significant than the Microscopic phase, world events should have a dramatic - if not outsized - influence on the player’s story.
The Environment in the Microscopic Stage
There are some tweaks to environmental events we can make to make things more polished and exciting. But even assuming a perfectly finetuned microbe/multicellular stage, the environment has a very different role for several reasons:
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The world and geography is much more abstract. The player inhabits infinitesimally small representations of a larger body of water in a 2D environment. As such, there are no physical markers.
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A significant ethos of the microscopic stages is the influence of microbial life on a young, initially sterile planet - oxygenation in particular, and all the madness it creates. In many ways, the planet evolves with and in response to life.
Especially because of point two, the environment is a downstream effect of microscopic gameplay. Any improvements to the Microscopic Phase when it comes to environmental change probably should be emphasizing the changes and reactivity to oxygenation and such as opposed to dramatic effects on the player themselves.
The Environment in the Macroscopic Stage
The environment should have a very different role in the macroscopic phases of life. The environment in the first few stages of life is very reactive to life itself. However, in the macroscopic stages and on a more biogeochemically mature planet, the environment switches from a reaction to, to a catalyst for life.
If we look through the fossil record, we see stories of unfathomably powerful and influential climate events. The Permian Extinction saw an area half the size of Russia covered by lava, and caused widespread flora death, ocean acidification, and environmental events which took 10 million years for life to recover from. The drying of the Mediterranean Sea resulted in an immense hypersaline desert with pockets of life evolving in an almost island-like manor - and the flood which catastrophically re-filled the Mediterranean swept away vast traces of land, creating the modern sea. The Earth switched from hothouse and coldhouse environments, beyond just experiencing miniature heating or drying periods.
This isn’t to say that every single environmental event has to be traumatic. Rather, the ceiling for environmental events should be dramatic - and it is crucial that the player must adapt to these changes when they do come, and that the world itself should change. If we had to choose between a world generator/simulator that could simulate 100 different environments at once with less dynamism, or one that simulates 10 different environments at once but with a ton of potential dynamism, I think we’d be better off with the latter. Not to say that we need to choose one or the other, but you get the idea.
Concluding Thoughts
I think the big takeaway from this pretty unspecific thread is: the environment will switch from being a reaction to the player, to being a cause for reaction to the player.
I like to think of Thrive as creating an evolutionary narrative. For me personally, what made me fall in love with paleontology and evolution as a whole are the different stories we see in different periods. We see phases of life where lifeforms are alien. We see an era of Earth’s history where organisms find their way onto land, and the badlands are transformed into lush rolling hills. We see an era of bizarre organisms, not quite reptile but not quite mammal. We see a 175 million year reign of unfathomably giant reptiles, and their eventual descendants evolving into our modern skies. We see a modern era of mammalians, in a period of Earth’s history where things are familiar enough to trace things backwards, populated with large carnivorous koala-lions, giant ground sloths, rat primates, and hippo-whales.
These are of course often generalized and loaded narratives, but still - they are there if you look for them. And what often gets swept under the rug in these narratives is that many of these stories begin with a dramatic environmental event. The dinosaurs rose to reign a world which was destroyed, eliminating the existing market of niches. Mammals and avians rose in the wake of a catastrophe which wiped out the dinosaurs. Permian synapsids rose to dominance in the wake of Devonian volcanism and ocean acidification. Belgium, we often bound geological periods to the extinctions which precede and succeed them.
I don’t have any specific concepts yet - or atleast, I don’t think it would be super useful to create specific concepts at this very moment because in many ways, this touches on a lot of things. For example: discussion for difficulty and lose conditions could be relevant, as more dramatic environmental events can lead more easily to unfair situations.
I just think this is something we should keep in mind for the future. Many impetuses for change in the player’s strategy should be prompted by the editor. This remains a broader topic and maxim that I believe we should investigate as we create the systems for our macroscopic world.