Hey everyone,
With Buckly stepping down as the lead game designer, I have now assumed that position. Though I’m sure he isn’t disappearing, having him as the lead game designer for the majority of the completion of our first stage (5 or 6 years) was a tremendous source of design consistency, which will be sorely missed.
To improve shared understanding and organizational knowledge, I’m going to write a bit about how I approach this role and designing concepts for Thrive as a whole. It’s not like there’s going to be a major change in how things are done, but sharing such information of existing practices helps us be more robust as a team, and helps demonstrate my perspective, strengths, and weaknesses as a game designer.
- I see the design lead’s role as ultimately being an extremely decisive decision maker in defining the scope of Thrive, as well as establishing the general mechanics and foundational framework underlying how we approach the development of a stage. Part of this is inherent to the concepts I propose, and another part of this is inherent to the concepts I identify as being either important or unnecessary. I don’t think my role is necessarily being the one to create every final concept; I think of myself as screening for ideas and seeing if they cooperate well with our goals.
- I think the current objective of development should be the completion of the road map, and also to pursue actions that can help us generate more profit to sustain development. I believe that there might be opportunities to improve Thrive’s microscopic gameplay once the Microbe Stage is complete, but any improvements should be prioritized only if it is found that the Multicellular Stage is lacking without refinement of underlying mechanics. Though I do think we are missing out on some gameplay depth through a rush to complete the stage, I think the benefits of completing a first stage outweigh any loss of depth, that depth can be added later on if necessary, and that the best way to ensure Thrive can be developed for the more distant future is to get some newfound attention on Thrive.
- My focus on concepts tend to be top down. I start at the highest level, trying to create a mechanic which can generate as much representation of different life forms with as little individual handling as possible. I think I’m good at organizing the larger picture of what Thrive can be, but tying very detailed mechanics together is something I can improve.
- I currently tend to balance things in a way that makes the game more challenging to the player, out of a believe that said challenge can increase depth and strategy. This could be useful as we finish up the Microbe Stage in creating an engaging experience, but can make me less focused on player accessibility.
- When I propose concepts, I prefer to throw out as much as possible to accommodate as much diversity in life as possible, then cut down on concept complexity depending on what programmers say is and isn’t approachable.
Additionally, here are some things I want to try out, though they aren’t urgent:
- Occasional Developer Voice Chat with Gameplay: it might be useful to have occasional developer meetings where we play the game and discuss things we notice about it, regarding balance, rooms for improvement, etc. It doesn’t have to be that common - once every two months or so perhaps - but a couple of devs hoped on a community chat room a week or so ago on discord and it was a pretty productive session.
- Slightly More Balance Experimentation: Having experimental mode as an option allows us to try different things with balancing without worry of screwing things over. We can experiment with things like quickly increasing the pace of Thrive, having different movement numbers, ATP consumption, etc. and ask the community for their thoughts.
- Macroscopic Editor Brainstorm: This is something I am approaching more long-term and in the background, but I want to try to make a bit more conceptualization around the macroscopic editor so that it is much more manageable to work on rather than implementing it in a rush once we reach that portion of Thrive. Having an understanding of fundamentals allows for the opportunity of atleast some work to be done before we reach the macroscopic stage, and just generally makes an exciting feature more polished. For example - establish how we will deal with symmetry and the “sculpting tools” we will offer on the torso, as well as rules regarding how metaballs of the spine behave in relation to each other, could be a foundational piece of work which makes everything else a lot more interesting to experiment with. I am not advocating for this to take focus away from the multicellular and microbe stage, but it is something that I think would be very important for the project long-term: to atleast have some ideas related to the macroscopic editor, which inherently corresponds to procedural animation.
Once again, this isn’t politics; there isn’t going to be much change (which, when put that way, is kind of like politics). I just think it’s important to share such things.
Excited to see where development takes us! And as a measure of appreciation to @Buckly from the community, I want this to be linked on the developer forums: Thank You Buckly - #11 by DeepSix - Meta - Thrive Community Forum