Game Flow

Gameplay
1

This was something we talked about a bit on Discord but I think it would be good to make some decisions. All feedback and ideas welcome.

Where we are at the moment is we have two things, swimming and editing and they alternate.

From a technical perspective the plan is to have the CPA computations happen in the background while the swimming is happening. This means we can have a lot of patches and a lot of species per patch which will hopefully be a pretty cool feature. Because the players actions while swimming around have an impact on their population their patch may need to be calculated last.

So that gives us: edit your cell, swim around and have the CPA calculations done, see a report for how your species did in the last round of calculations, edit again. I think it’s clear you need to see the report before editing for the next round.

The things we need to add are the climate report (how the conditions have changed in the patch you are in as well as others that you can see (don’t know which patches you should be able to see)) and the patch selection screen (map) where you can choose to split your species and move to a new patch if you wish.

A couple of options I think are reasonable:

  1. you edit, then swim and the CPA calculations are done, you click the button in the top right, you see a screen which has the CPA report + climate data + patch selection on it, you choose whether to move, you go to the editor. At no point can you go backwards.

  2. you edit, then swim and the CPA calculations are done, you click the button in the top right, and there are 3 tabs which you can switch between at will, one is the CPA + environment report, another is the patch selection screen and the final one is the editor, this lets you move back and forth as you want between these screens.

I think it makes sense to have the patch selection screen before editing because if you choose to move that will change your editor decisions quite a lot.

I’m open to ideas if other people are imagining this differently. The good thing about this is once we’ve built it then it should last all the way through to the end of the creature stages so it’ll set us in good stead.

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I’d imagine that this could be improved by ordering the tabs so that the first tab is the environment report and has a “next” button to the patch selection and the last tab would be the editor. That way you can proceed through with the things in order or jump between the tabs if you want.

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