Long term and (semi-)permanent consequences of Stages

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Rather than something immediately relevant to Multicellular Stage design, below are more long-term musings, other than perhaps how it could affect design of our current stages.

Something I’ve been recently thinking of because of design questions related to the Multicellular Stage, specifically the handling of cell membrane types, is what the long-term effects of Stages in Thrive will be. One of our stated design goals is to make sure that the game feels like a cohesive whole, rather than a series of separate games strapped together. I think the most important parts of that are the direct stage transitions, and consistent design principles between the gameplay of different stages. But I believe the third point should be a feeling of connection across the stages. Does what I did in the Microbe Stage matter, even in a small way, in the Space Stage? If not, why should I still care about what I did there? Why is it part of the same game?

Spore famously (and not very realistically) handled this by giving you a “card” for your “average playstyle” in each stage, that then provided a specific bonus or ability in every stage after. As typical for Spore, this does not really emulate evolution in any way, because it was unrelated to the actual design you ended the stage with, just your average playstyle inside the stage. The cards additionally decided what playstyle you started with in the next Stage, and in the specific case of Cell → Creature, restricted what selection of certain parts were available to unlock.

As you might have guessed, I think the natural way for Thrive to decide lasting effects is the last design (or the end state in a wider sense) you have in a Stage before transitioning to the next. I also personally believe that this design should always matter. Otherwise, the fact that you played through a stage or what you did inside it becomes meaningless other than the experience in itself. That’s a step towards being a series of independent games strapped together, rather than an integrated whole. I also believe that rather than choices in stage A needing to directly affect stage C, it is sufficient to have a “cascade of choices”. So stage A choices determine the sub-set of choices in Stage B, which then affect a sub-set of choices in stage C, meaning the influence is felt even without direct reference. Finally, it can be mentioned that since many stage transitions represent a change in timescale, there’s also a certain lock-in of the environment around the player, both living and non-living.

One thing Thrive’s current designs have pretty well covered is the short-term effect of the end of one stage deciding the beginning of the next. For example, your last Microbe Stage design translates 100% accurately to the starting cells of the Multicellular Stage. That’s the advantage of using mostly the same mechanics. My only concerns here are in translating the Multicellular Stage design to Macroscopic in a way that actually matters, and much later Stages that we have less settled design for at this point: Awakening to Society and Industrial to Space. For the latter two, there might be some difficulty in creating meaningfully different end-states in the previous stage that also translate to starting states in the next Stage that make a meaningful difference between each other. But the work on those is still quite far into the future.

For longer-term effects it appears to me that these have come about more as consequences from other choices or time-scale changes rather than as deliberate design. I made a table of what appear to be the short- and long-term consequences of the Stages as designed right now. I have tried to differentiate between things that subjectively to me seem like “fairly settled consensus design”, “previously made suggestions that are less settled”, and “things I am plain guessing at?”.

Note that this is written as the consequences that the stage has, so what cannot (or cannot easily) be changed after going to the next Stage. For example, “species design” is in “Awakening”, because you can’t change it afterward.

Current (or planned) consequences for how you end each Stage:

Stage Hard long-term Soft long-term short-term non-living environment living environment
Microbe - More difficult to change membrane type Exact starting cell design; Exact population locations -? Other multicellular lineages
Multicellular Membrane type (which then determines some later availability of organelles and macroscopic structures?)** Afterwards more difficult to change metabolism? Translated to next starting design;rough translation of population distribution? Atmosphere baseline set, less extreme variation in the future?; Other macroscopic lineages (immediately or later)?
Macroscopic Basal body shape locked in (but not yet settled what exactly that means); Basic metabolism locked in? Some attributes like symmetry type become harder to change? Exact body design; Exact population distribution - ? - ?
Aware Some aspects of the body? Harder to change most aspects of species design Exact body design carried over; Exact population distribution atmospheric composition stabilised and climate changes narrowed down again?; Most “fossil” world resources are set Other species also mostly stop evolving?; Other “awakening” species
Awakening Species design fully locked Principle social organisation group (herds/family groups/troops/etc.)? Exact body design carried over; starting location?, starting technology and cultural traits? Climate changes further narrowed down (for example glacial or interglacial period)? Other starting (near-?) civilisations; all species designs, but extinctions can still happen.
Society “traditional culture” to contrast with coming rapid changes? More difficult to change some cultural traits? Exact locations, infrastructure, technologies, etc. Natural climate (to contrast with industrial climate change) locked? Other societies industrialising at the same time?
Industrial -? -? Exact locations, infrastructure, technologies, etc. -? Other societies going into space at the same time?

What stands out is that right now the Microbe stage definitely has no impact on the player species that cannot be changed later. Though this has also been discussed within the team as a deliberate choice to not lock players into a path too early, I think it is worth thinking about.

To add to the table above, you could also say that the “short-term consequence” of designs carried over or translated is also an soft long-term incentive to keep going in a certain direction. Though currently that is also weakened for the Microbe Stage, because the Multicellular Stage provides a discount on everything the Microbe Editor does.

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Leaving thoughts focused on the Multicellular-Macroscopic and Macroscopic-Aware transitions. I think your singling in on something very interesting for the Aware-Awakening-Society stages related to time and MP pricing that I also find myself thinking about, but I wonder if that’s best to discuss in a separate thread.

General Note

One thing I often think is that rather than focusing only on a “stage-to-stage” perspective, it makes a lot of sense to focus on a “phase-to-phase” perspective - where in this context, phase basically means gameplay character/perspective. So the first phase would be Thrive’s “microscopic phase”, it being Microbe and Multicellular, second phase will be Thrive’s “biological phase”, then being Macroscopic, Aware, and somewhat Awakening. Then “societal phase”, focused on the Society and Industrial Stages, then “space phase”, focused on Space and Ascension.

There’s a lot more implicit gameplay connection between the stages in these “phases”, so focusing on connections between the perspective shifts could be a useful lens to focus on where a lot of thought really needs to be focused. I also personally often think of gameplay within these phases to be continuous to help with certain concepts and progression instead of hyper-focusing on a single stage

Comments on Your Table (Hard to Quote)

Multicellular-Macroscopic

  • I think it would be really hard to make things like metabolism even a soft long-term impact because transitions to more “typical” forms of metabolism - non-lithotrophic heterotrophy in particular - is such an important thing. Hh also mentions that he will at first make metabolic sources like iron, sulfur, radioactivity, etc. pretty big dead ends for a long while. We also just, in many ways, do not have much reference for what that looks like - we can probably generally deduce that very simple organisms which have these metabolisms focus on surface are for a while, but what after then?
  • I also have some hesitancy about making membranes particularly strict, just because we will likely have a similar issue of having sessile gameplay be largely neglected for a while until motile gameplay is pretty well fleshed out. So what that would mean is that 4 membrane types are basically no-goes in the Multicellular Stage, especially if we make it more difficult for Multicellular membranes to be changed. As then you’ll be an absolute dead-end for a long portion of development time - which in Thrive terms can be a decent portion of a decade - in the Macroscopic Stage. In the macroscopic editor concept, I deal with this by assuming that all motile macroscopic organisms start with the same, mucaceous “base” skin type, and using the “skin attribute” system, allowing the initial unlocking of certain attributes based on your membrane type in the Multicellular. Though this is more easy to integrate and cohesive for the player, it isn’t without flaws - this cheapen the impact of membrane choices in the Microbe/Multicellular Stage if differences between these attributes aren’t strong.

I think the Microscopic/Macroscopic transition will be the most difficult transition for us to deal with in Thrive just because there is such a huge perspective shift. With the Biological/Societal transition, elements like the world and your organism atleast serve as a baseline - here, the entire world changes, the time shifts forward, and your organism is inherently different.

I do think you bring up good dynamics to focus on in this transition.

  • Sessile v. Motile.
  • Performance in the stage influencing starting number/distribution of population.
  • Starting “environments” of the Macroscopic.

Macroscopic-Aware

  • For “basal body shape locked-in”, I think a big aspect of that will essentially be your choice of a skeletal structure. I focused a lot on the difference between a hydrostatic, exoskeletal, and endoskeletal system. The editor concept also attaches things like available skin types to your skeletal structure as well. If we make it so that certain structures must be removed - joints, limbs, etc. - before you can change your skeletal system, that can effectively work as a soft-lock for the Aware Stage, only being really an option for organisms who only very recently chose a certain skeletal structure. That also has some concepts related to MP pricing - making limbs very expensive for endoskeletal organisms, not necessarily for exoskeletal or hydrostatic organisms - which can influence gameplay differences. There is definitely room for more - representing segmentation for example - but I do think a big part of the long-term impact from the macroscopic/aware transition will be based on your skeleton.
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You’re very much correct on there being very clear phases in the game where the game design has a lot of overlap. But there is also discontinuity between the stages. And the reason I am hyperfocusing on the stages in this topic is because we made each Stage transition non-reversible, so that’s another reason why they’re a natural point for making permanent choices.

We also have our plans for pre-made starting point in later stages. And for example having a typical “animal” starting point and a “plant” starting point in the Multicellular stage would be odd if they can easily lead to the exact same point within two generations.

Yes, this is one of the guesses that I was least sure of for that reason. But do note that it is soft for a reason here: you can still change it, it would just be more expensive. Similar to the soft-lock on membranes in the Microbe-Multicellular transition, the intention is: The human player can still do it to get out of the dead end, but AI species would likely not do it, because auto-evo says there are better things to spend MP on.

That would allow players to not get stuck, while still forming clear lineages in the evolutionary history, instead of a chaotic mess where everything blends together with 0 resemblance to how real evolution worked on earth. And I have to warn that the latter is a likely outcome if we’re not willing to make evolutionary choices “stick”.

Remaining thoughts:

  • I was mainly thinking of this as not adding new metabolisms. Plants can and have ditched photosynthesis for full heterotrophy for example.
  • All that’s needed for heterotrophy metabolically is converting glucose into ATP, so that only excludes iron oxidation and radiosynthesis.

I also want to note that I also made this guess based on the realism perspective. If we look at earth’s history, because of the timescale difference between Microbe and Macroscopic, we just don’t see massive overhauls of cellular metabolism anymore with any frequency. No branches of macroscopic life suddenly develop thylakoids or chemosynthesising proteins in their cells.

The exception of course being through various types of symbiosis, like photosynthesis in lichen and corals, or chemosynthesis in vent tube worms. And that’s of course an exception I would want to maintain.

Yes, and I think we mostly have the answer for that, similar to how we know it for sentient obligate phototrophs and non-terrestrial technological civilisation: it’s a scenario that isn’t actually realistically possible on an earth-adjacent world, so we can’t actually let the player do it, but we also need to warn them and give them the opportunity to get off that track.

We’re pretty inevitably going to end up in dead ends because of the number of metabolisms we decided to model in Microbe, so I think we need to start designing these kinds of escape mechanisms instead of designing to make everything viable long-term. Because we’re barrelling right towards the point where the latter would visibly clash with basic scientific accuracy.

As I said in the Multicellular Parts thread, I think we can actually make 4 out of 6 membrane types fully motile-capable in a scientifically plausible way (that’s actually also interesting from a gameplay perspective!). So I will answer the rest of this point as if we’re talking about just the remaining 2.

(And those 2 remaining, while accurately would be inflexible, could still be motile through ciliary motion and mucus gliding, though that would probably not be reasonable beyond small Macroscopic species. So, granted, that would only move the problem.)

As I said above, I think the healthier approach here is to accept there are evolutionary dead-ends and develop escapes for them, rather then trying to drag every possible option straight through to the society stages while fully breaking away from scientific accuracy and similarity to real evolution.

And I think we should look at “sessile macroscopic is not super developed right now” the same way we look at “Macroscopic stage is not very developed right now”, i.e. we just nudge people away from it towards the areas that are more developed. Also again worth noting that you can currently play sessile Multicellular, which isn’t particularly engaging, and yet we don’t make any particular adjustments for it either. We can handle sessile Macroscopic life the same, because it is entirely player choice to go there.

This is indeed the thing I fear would be very likely. Especially if it’s just “initial unlocking of certain attributes” instead of something fundamental that can’t be changed. Because you’re taking something that would be the same as what makes plants, fungi and animals permanently and fundamentally different, and turn it into something that’s a temporary speedbump. That’s not just an accuracy question, I think that’s just shooting ourselves in the foot in gameplay variety and interesting world variety.

(And, as I have mentioned elsewhere, turning cell membrane characteristics into just skin

If we complete the current version of the roadmap, I think the change in the organism itself doesn’t need to be as fundamental as you might be imagining. I think things can be quite accurately translated. But certainly the perspective and world change makes it tricky.

I’ve said it elsewhere, but I do think this functions very well as a soft lock-in mechanism.

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Very interesting and important list to keep track of. I‘d like to add some points to „non-living environment“, since this is related to my hobby-horse of the 3D anorganic environment design document. The phase of the microscopic and biological stages will determine many resources for the societal stages and the microscopic phase will already determine these resources for the (3D) biological stages. I‘m thinking of fossile fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, but also of things like chalk which comes from foraminifera exoskeletons and mineral remains of certain algae species of ancient dried up oceans. Also many types of limestone are of biological origins, both microscopic and macroscopic (often made of mussle shells etc). This also has huge impacts on soil fertility. For example the amazon basin is fertilized each year from sahara sand being blown across the atlantic from the foraminifera-exoskeleton-rich Bodélé Depression in Chad.

I‘m surely forgetting some other similar resources, so any other ideas are welcome!

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That’s a very good point. I’ve added this to the table under the name “fossil” resources. From what you’re saying it seems like part of these would be unchanging after Multicellular, while some others would become unchanging after Aware?

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I‘m not an expert, but no, from my understanding none of these are necessarily unchanging after the microscopic changes.

Let‘s take chalk for instance. The Cretaceous Period, so the most recent part of the era of the dinosaurs, is named precisely after these sediments which were mainly formed by shelled microscopic algae called coccoliths. I mixed them up with foraminiferans earlier, although I believe that both can have similar effects in terms of soil fertility and chalk creation.

Anyways, in real life these sediments chiefly produced by microscopic organisms also developed during the „macroscopic stages“ if you will. The question is to which degree microscopic life can be simulated in the macroscopic stages. Maybe here we could also simplify (or outright end?) microscopic evolution in the macro stages. But an ocean should probably at least continue to produce microscopic-derived sediments and resources during the macro stages.

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Alright, based on this I changed this in the table to Aware. I think the Awakening Stage timescale is too short for this to change a lot?

Instead, from the Awakening stage you could be using some of them instead?

Considering the time scale difference, I would expect us to have at least slowed down microscopic evolution by a lot. But I would expect us to still be tracking their population to some degree, given it is also a food source.

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