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 with 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? | 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.