Environmental Tolerance Adaptations

[Buckly]

@Deus

We actually did have an enzyme slot system concept a loooong time ago and I was actually a big proponent of it, but concerns over how it would connect to the rest of the stages and level of control offered to the player through this system were concerns that prevented us from considering it further. What game were you playing though?

Ah yes… This really brings me back. My first official concept for this was the idea of having a separate “gene” tab where you had limited capacity to throw assorted gene of various sizes to grant your cell tolerance.

Yeah, five years ago I used MSpaint for my concepts still. Crazy to think that my earliest multicellular concepts were done in MSpaint as well.

The biggest problem with this concept is defining the exact difference between proteins that would be in the “genome” and what would be in the parts list. As you can likely see from the discussion back then, it got a little… derailed.

These days I am rather hesitant to pick up the idea again as I do not like having to approach defining this distinction again, and would prefer to avoid having too many complex menus for players to need to sort through.

In my mind, players should need only place a couple parts that better allow their organism to survive in an environment. Maybe customize other pre-existing parts to further maximize their tolerance if they want to go further than that.
Just think about how quickly the environment in Thrive can change. Not just over time, but from traveling patches as well.

Think of it this way: When it gets cold, some people want to redesign their house to be better insulated, tap into some kind of solar or geothermal heat pump system, and replace their windows with solid wall. Others just want to throw an electric heater in the corner and call it a day.

In Thrive I intend to cater to these hypothetical archetypes; Basic tolerance increasing parts for the heater people that just want to be done with it, and part modifications for the designer people who want to go the extra mile.

I recognize that this may not be a perfect solution, but it should be a viable basis to start with by using what we already have and avoiding further menu bloat if we can.

@Deus

Thus, we could potentially be looking at oxygen, pressure, and temperature as the only environmental tolerance factors to be mindful of in the Microbe Stage. This could benefit us in several ways:

• Less burden on the player, as they just have to worry about three proxies instead of five or so initially.
• Easier to manage and balance.
• Allows us to focus on making those three environmental factors a bit more engaging and polished rather than having several factors serving as very similar.

I am fully in favor of starting small. Both for the benefit of the players as you have stated so well, and for our own benefit to take things more gradually for sake of better testing.
Later on we can add something like salinity as a factor, but anything more than that might just be unnecessary tedium for the sake of gameplay. Whichever the case, we make that choice when we implement these first three and can then decide if it feels complex enough or not.

@hhyyrylainen

I’m thinking we need constantly on-screen text in the top middle of the cell editor that shows any tolerance adaptation issues. That way the player shouldn’t be able to miss them. We’ll also need a tutorial that points out the feature when the player first experiences it.

I will once again shamelessly plug my editor helper tool concept.
I do agree that having a decent tolerance summary somewhere would be nice. The statistics panel is getting awfully crowded these days… But so is the editor UI overall.