Ever since I joined the Revolutionary Studios team, I have been at work on attempting to balance the rates of consumption and production in all the cell parts in an attempt to solve the issues with cell gluttony, minimal builds, and etc. It is only recently that I have come to the realization that I have been getting no where in this effort, an effort that has been rather narrow in scope as I simply tried to adjust values to make the game “feel right”. I now realize that the primary cause of my lack of progress, is entirely due to an utter lack of true direction. In order to balance a game it is imperative that you have a clear vision of how exactly you want the play to feel, run, and play.
I am posting this with the intention of engaging in cooperative discussion with our team’s game designers and theorists in hopes of creating a plan for how we intend Thrive to be played. The goal is to narrow everyone’s ideas down to precise plans rather than general ideas in order to make balancing Thrive easier and more purposeful. There is inevitably going to be some trial and error with values and specifics, but we will be fine as long as we know where we want to go with this.
Here is a list of important questions regarding the gameplay, I would like to see everyone’s response to these questions so we can see what everybody has in mind, then we can work on narrowing things down to a unified plan.
Questions of interest:
1 How difficult do we want Thrive to be overall? How fast should the microbe stage be completed?
2 How different should membrane types be from each other, how impactful?
3 How much better should eukaryotic parts be compared to prokaryotes?
4 How hard should it be to get the nucleus? How should it be done?
5 How fast should the cell consume resources?
6 How different should the various diets be?
7 How costly should parts be to acquire?
8 How aggressive should other cells be?
9 How common should resources be?
10 How fast should cells be?
To start us off, I’ll cite my own general ideas of how Thrive should feel.
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By my own preferences, the baseline difficulty of Thrive would not be without challenge. Danger will be ever present in the player’s mind as they work to avoid aggressive predators and competition, ward off starvation, and endure inhospitable environments. That is not to say the player should truely always be in danger however! There should be plenty of times where the player can take a breath and relax, just a little bit, and prepare for whatever comes for them next.
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We have a pretty decent selection of different membrane and cell wall types for players to choose from. As of now, they are essentially set up as a linear scale of speed versus health and resistance, with minor deviations. I would like for players to strategically choose their membrane depending on their environment and local predators, rather than whatever is fastest. The current stats of the membranes somewhat reflect that desire, but predators are hardly a threat at all.
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I would like to see producing eukaryotic parts be more efficient, while other parts are more costly in order to help prevent gluttony. This would ideally make the nucleus rewarding to obtain, while unlocking a new tier of powerful tools that are too costly to abuse.
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I would prefer if the nucleus really felt like an achievement to acquire, and not for it to be obtained too soon. I would say that you would ideally need atleast about 12 hexes of parts in order to support the nucleus. Preferably it would be a struggle to get any bigger without the help of eukaryotic parts.
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This depend’s heavily on the availability of resources, so I would prefer to balance this after we settle on a balance of resources, rather than the other way around. That being said, I would prefer the player to consume common resources faster than they would more rare resources, but otherwise they should feel comfortable so long as food is nearby. (Don’t want them to be starving constantly even when food is in sight! Unless it is their fault of course.)
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It would be no fun if all of the diets are roughly the same, as that would be a huge limit to replayability, and would take away from the strategic weight of choosing what you eat. This question probably answers itself atleast, as most diets are naturally going to be different anyhow. But for diets are are similar, I would personally prefer to try injecting atleast subtle differences in how they play.
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I think the general cost of only being able to place up to two parts is perfectly fine as it is for now. But as we include more things to spend precious MP on, such as new parts, organelle upgrades, or things like sliders, we might have to think of some new values to keep things forgiving. However, I would not be against increasing the initial cost of particularly powerful parts.
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I would like predatory cells to be pretty aggressive, but not suffocating. Ideally, they would pursue any nearby cells, but switch targets or give up if pursuit proves fruitless or dangerous. I would also think that competing with other cells for the same food source could be dangerous as well, but they would not actively pursue you at all.
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Overall, I would prefer most resources to be evenly distributed to keep the player moving, but not critically starving all the time or just bored. There could be some exceptions of course! I’ll go ahead and list my thoughts of each resource under this.
- Hydrogen sulfide could be found in irregularly distributed large patches spread thin. Since cells can store excess food into glucose, they could spend some time stocking up in search of other compounds they need. This could create competitive zones around the sulfide, as well as attract prey for predators.
- Glucose should be evenly distributed in small patches that can keep the player going. The player would be at little risk of starvation until the glucose in the environment is inevitably depleted.
- Iron Could be a little less common than glucose in distribution, being in the form of chunks instead of true clouds, but otherwise generally the same.
- Phosphate could be found uncommonly with dense clouds, this would encourage players to keep moving but hopefully not be frustrated by rarity.
- Ammonia could be commonly found in rather low density clouds to encourage the player to move. Ideally the player could have a relatively steady increase in ammonia as they move without having to seek it out.
- I would like cells to be fast, speed just feels great to me even if everything else is just as fast. But of course, speed really makes the distance between things pretty trivial, so we dont want things to be too fast. I’m somewhat happy with the general speed of cells right now, but feel that we need to work on leveling out the extremes of how slow and fast a cell can get.
Edit: I accidentally skipped over question 5, and messed up the order. That is fixed now.