Finishing the microbe stage roadmap

[hhyyrylainen]

@NickTheNick

Fix framerate performance. For obvious reasons. It prevents us from adding more entities and adding more CPU/GPU-using features.

I’m just about to start working on the gameplay for the macroscopic stage, but my initial guess is that as there’ll be just one graphics node per game entity, the performance will be wildly better in macroscopic than the current microscopic stages.

So fixing the performance in microscopic likely won’t have any relation to later game performance.

@NickTheNick

Endosymbiosis. Because becoming a eukaryote is a necessary step to becoming multicellular, we shouldn’t have a placeholder system in place to simulate this (which we do have currently). Additionally, this should help us greatly in balancing the Nucleus by giving us more natural restrictions to place on obtaining it, instead of the crushing Osmoregulation and Mutation Point costs we’ve assigned to it currently to prevent all cells from evolving it.

Do you mean endosymbiosis lite or the full implementation? I really hope it is not the full implementation as that’s a huge mechanic rework that I kind of don’t want to tackle at all.

@NickTheNick

Let me know what you think about this. I think the main goal of such a bare list is that, as I said above, having more content in the macroscopic stage will make Thrive fundamentally more fun, and draw in more players and developers, who we can then use to help fill out earlier-game content. If you’re attending the meeting on Sunday, I think it would be a good chance to discuss this thread and designing our future roadmap.

I think we should still try to finish a roadmap for the microbe stage. I think that once I’m done with the prototypes, and especially if I can work fulltime starting next year, I can make super quick progress on a lot of the features on the roadmap. I’d say that it’d be possible to finish the entire roadmap (as long as we still get the occasional other people helping out) within a year so a bit optimistically I’d say microbe stage could be complete by the end of 2023 or the first half of 2024.

@Deus

and with many bugs still remaining

This is actually something I forgot in my initial post in this thread, we have nearly 500 issues (and well some are new features) in our backlog currently. Some of those are probably pretty important for the enjoyability of the microbe stage and should be put on the roadmap.

@Deus

(I’m sure many people would interpret a lackluster microbe stage as an indicator that the macroscopic stage would similarly be lackluster). And the microbial stage really serves as the pillar for the rest of the game.

This is an excellent point. I’ve myself thought that many issues with the microbe stage players can tolerate if they know there’s more to the game afterwards. But I’ve since realized that the main menu and the microbe stage is what gives players the initial impression, if it’s not good, they won’t play for the two hours needed to get later into the game.

@Deus

But I do think I know what you’re getting at; we are filling out gameplay wise. Now, the mentality we need is to wrap everything up in a way that creates a very engaging and replayable experience.

This is one of my biggest annoyances in Thrive, the fact that people post ideas and suggestions to slightly tweak (or entirely rework) already very good systems in the game. These discussions (if they are accepted) just lead to extra work for a tiny bit of extra polish to a small part of the game when we still haven’t made all of the microbe stage yet (and we have even bigger stages to tackle).