@Buckly Amazing work in this thread, it’s great to get discussions like this going to really establish a consistent vision of what we want the gameplay to feel like.
Going back to some of your questions of interest from your July 7th post, I agree with most of your ideas on that. I just wanted to pitch in my two cents on some of those questions.
6 How different should the various diets be?
7 How costly should parts be to acquire?
Regarding these two questions, I agree that our current rate of evolution feels good. However, I think one thing we could add would be some rarity and progression between parts that grant unique abilities to your cell, such as changing your diet. I went over this in the recent Organelle Unlocks thread I posted. I think some Organelles are unique enough that it’s not good enough to just make them cost a lot of MP, rather, there should be a system where they first have to be unlocked before they can even be placed.
9 How common should resources be?
10 How fast should cells be?
I agree both with your ideas on compound abundance and on cell speed. I think the best way to create the sense of survival and of competition we want is to make compound clouds relatively common, but to make other cells pretty competitive (either by being fast, aggressive, etc). This way it’s less a question of “Did the RNG spawn compound clouds for me to survive this generation” and more a question of “Did I plan my cell well and play well to get enough food to reproduce”.