Had a quick thought related to our game over condition that I wanted to record. Not something that I deem necessary, but could be an interesting discussion.
One thing about sandbox games, especially editor-based ones, is that they encourage and accept failure. It often is expected that players will likely have unviable builds once in a while that blow up, sputter, and crash - so these games will give the player multiple attempts to fix something. I’m not saying it is something that a sandbox game must have, but it does often encourage experimentation.
One thing that can make Thrive difficult is that if you have a poor build, there’s very little chance for corrective measure unless you get into the editor - which, for an especially poor build, could result in death spirals that result in a game over screen.
Proposal: Lives Via Switching Upon Extinction
We do have a mechanic which allows players the chance to start again - you are able to switch species on Easy difficulties. What if we integrate this more thoroughly instead of having it be a setting?
As is, if you go extinct with the setting enabled, you’re able to switch freely. Instead, it can work kind of like a “life” system, where there is only a certain number of times you can use this before officially losing. On Easy, it could be 5 chances after your initial extinction. On Normal, it could be 2 chances after your initial extinction. On Hard, it can be a single, or no chance.
This can benefit us in two ways…
- Encourages Experimentation - If players are less afraid of entering a death spiral, they’ll be more willing to try something out depending on how much they value each life. It would be fine if something became obsolete because you’d have another chance.
- Balancing for Replayability - We can afford to make certain things a bit more challenging or in-depth if we provide players multiple chances. We don’t want to create situations where the player is absolutely trapped no matter what they do, but certain mechanics, especially environmental events, could be made much more influential. For example, Snowball Earth can be much more traumatic if players are offered the ability to retry, and the evolution of the major compounds as the atmosphere develops can be much more pronounced.
There would have to be some sort of selection process so that players are provided options of what lineage they take over. The life counter would also probably have to reset once a different stage is reached. But otherwise, this can be a pretty simple but beneficial change to our gameplay loop.