Great work MirrorMonkey! These are good ideas for these pages.
I think on the point that TJ raised, some of these pages should be unlocked by specific technologies later in the game, such as the world map page, since we don’t want to reveal that info to the player too early.
One distinction I think is important to make is that these don’t technically count as the in-game encyclopedia. The “Thrivopedia” (for lack of a better word) will cover general rules and concepts about the game, such as how to reproduce as a microbe, whereas these sorts of pages are more specific to the current playthrough you are in and would be part of a different category.
Allright, sorry for the delay, but I was on holidays for a few days and only had internet access with my phone. I quickly made new versions of the existing pages. I changed the font on most of the text to jura and drew some fog of war.
I interpreted Nicks demand for a general encyclopedia which explains playthrough-unspecific concepts by adding a general „?“ page to the icons on the far left. General entries for in-game concepts such as „species“, „compound“ etc. could be found here.
This way there aren‘t two seperate encyclopedias, which would in my opinion only be confusing. Like this the playthrough-specific and -unspecific information can be found in one place.
Maybe if you open the Thriveopedia for the first time in a new playthrough the „?“ page could show up first so you have fast access to the basics.
What do you think? Is this approach viable?
I think we should have different names for general in game help encyclopaedia detailing what organelles do, tips etc. and another for viewing data about the current game the player is playing, their species, other species, the planet etc.
We could steal the names from civ and have Thriveopedia and maybe something like Catalogue of Life (which is an actual website) or something like Current universe (which would cover everything the later stages unlock information about).
I think as microbes can’t really draw maps the map should be like a connected graph of different biomes the player can move between.
So there would be squares with images of the biome backgrounds and lines between them. That would be enough of a map for cell stage and early multicellular. And as a plus it wouldn’t reveal information useful for later stages that the player can’t find out by moving between biomes as a microbe.
Perhaps the playthough-unspecific things should be in Help or the Thrive Guide or whatever, and info about the current universe, the planet and species and such, could go in Statistics. They’re two completely different things, so I think they should be in separate places.
This is an idea worth investigating. Basically you‘re suggesting something between what I proposed and what TJ proposed in his old thread. If I understand you correctly this system could in earlier releases stand on its own, the game would just generate a grid of biomes. In (much) later releases that feature an actual heightmap of the planet the game could check which biomes have a border to one another and create a grid based on this information. I made an exapamle of such a grid and the schematic map that this grid would be based on:
There could be arrangements which would be very impractical to display on a square-based grid, for example if one biome borders to 20 others (Am I wrong in the assumption that there will be that many biomes? Are we talking about 10 or 1000 biomes per planet?)
If we have a grid without a map it is equally probable for a species to either of it‘s neighbouring biomes. To make an example on my map sketch: If a species lives in the Ulrarian Rift, its chances of randomly ending up in the Ulrarian Ocean are much higher than its chances to end up in the Ulrarian Vents since the border between rift and ocean is way larger than the border between rift and vents. How are we going to represent that difference? (Am I losing myself in details btw?)
A large benefit of this grid „map“ would be that biomes that are on top of one another could be represented more easily. The ocean surface biome is linked to the twilight zone, which in turn is linked to the deep ocean.
All of this feels quiet speculative at the moment. I don‘t even think it‘s clear yet how exactly biomes will be implemented (exept for the various nice backgrounds, which are already in the game.)
I don’t think it will be possible to have a very huge number of neighbouring biomes. So if the graph is circles that are on a 2d plane and can move freely it should be possible to clearly display a whole planet that has a reasonable number of smallish biomes. Perhaps looking like this:
For that we can represent that as weights on the vertices between the biomes, and a higher weight would indicate that it’s easier to move to that biome, which would be calculated from the amount of shared border, currents etc. Basically I want the biomes to be a mathematical (unfortunately the wikipedia article has no graphs with weights) graph that is displayed graphically to the user.
As was mentioned I think it’s actually quite important to distinguish the Help/Game Rules/Thrivepedia from the stats of your current playthrough info (Statistics?/Demographics?), because they are quite different topics.
The map idea is good for later in the game with the discovery of cartography and then later with Satellites/GPS. I think the node web that hhyyrylainen suggested is a good idea, because it will show you the biomes and how they are connected without giving away geographical info that you don’t have. And yeah we’ve got to find a way to calculate which biomes are connected to which to display that graphically.
@hhyyrylainen That looks awesome, that type of layout would be perfect for presenting the biomes/patches to the player in the early stages. That screen may also be needed after reproducing, if the player chooses to migrate their species to a neighbouring biome before spawning.
I agree with Nick on pretty much everything. I think a node web is a great way to represent the planet’s biomes without revealing the its geography.
I like his reproducing idea too; would it let you spawn in a biome where your species isn’t present at, or one where they couldn’t survive? Or would it restrict you to the biomes your species already exists in, and it’s up to you to adapt your species to those environments in order for them to migrate there automatically? Or would it be manual?
Alright, in that case don‘t mind the ? symbol in some of the images. If we‘re going to put those two things in seperate places we‘ll have to figure out how to access which. I‘m going to look at the GUI of the current game to suggest a place to put the two menus (I think we already have a very tiny help/? window, don‘t we?) For that, I‘m going to have to actually play the game again some time.
I think the plan is that Statistics will be a Bar Graph icon on the UI, and the Thrivepedia will replace the Help icon and be shown as a question mark or book icon.
Yes, I’ve already planned a Tree of Life for the encyclopedia, I‘ll draw it once I‘ve got enough free time on my hands. Could you give me a link to our name generator? I didn‘t know we had one, but that sounds awesome!
I believe Nick already has a tech tree concept but also not sure if it’s been updated with new ideas or how old it is. In my opinion every conceivable technology that could be developed would only increase the potential for unique game experiences, even a period where your species has to develop simple tools as a way to flow into the later aware stage until you form an early society structure that continues to grow.
I’m curious, will the encyclopedia include humorous random descriptions about certain things like (landmasses, rocks, resources, etc) when your creature reaches enough mental development to know these things or they are discovered? Will the player be able to put in their own description and name for species and other discoveries they find along their journey through thrive?
A tech tree isn‘t what I was thinking about tho. I believe untrustedlife was talking about a tree diagram which shows how species would be related to one another.
Would be highly entertaining to be able to name and describe. First we need the faux scientific names back, i put an individual named citrusite on it, they haven’t gotten back to me in awhile so I might just go ahead and write it unless we get a new programmer some time soon.
That’d be pretty cool and it’d really help to tie the game together, but it feels like 0.4.1 would be too early for this sort of thing, since there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be refined/working beforehand, like patches.
Here’s a quick concept I made of the different “layers” of the statistics menu, mostly based on the work @MirrorMonkey2 has been doing in this thread, which has been pretty nice so far.
