With macroscopic development stage getting closer and closer, I think we should talk about how we want this stage to look like and clear out some basic concepts.
Color palette
In each playthrough, where planet is randomly generated, auto evo develops different creatures and random events happen, it would be very important to make sure that players will get a somewhat decent color palette.
First of all it’s important to understand what exactly would influence it:
Patch and planet
-
Depth → How much light reaches the location and thereby determines how strong light sources are in the patch. Think bioluminescence being more noticeable in deep sea than shore.
-
Compounds and minerals → While compounds won’t be as visible as in microscopic (there won’t be any visible ammonia clouds), they could still influence the minerals present in the patch, but because the majority of minerals that can be found on the surface are mostly grey, white or brown,
-
Turbidity → Turbidity would be directly influenced by the currents. Think muddy rivers and clear open waters.
Anyone who played subnautica knows how important it is, just take a look at the crash zone and how easily it creates the atmosphere of danger
-
Events → Events such as asteroid impacts could increase turbidity as well as spawn some special rocks (Let people see the meteor that turned the whole planet into a snowball!). Overall players have to not only feel the event, but also see it in some way.
-
Type of light → If we are still implementing the different types of chloroplast that work with different light waves, type of light would have direct influence on any photosynthetic organism in the area.
Organisms
- Sessile organisms (such as plants, bacterial mats and organisms feeding of symbiotic bacteria) would have the biggest contribution to the overall color scheme in the majority of the patches. Their color in turn would depend on patch factors mentioned above, especially depth and type of light.
- Auto - Evo creatures: This part is a little tricky, because creatures will be more affected by sessile organisms instead of patch properties. The most simple example would be creatures developing camouflage or developing crests to stand out from the rest of the patch.
Auto - Evo
With these criteria in mind, we should still be able to provide a unique gaming experience for each player, we don’t want every world look the same. Of course we could just allow auto - evo do it’s thing and randomize the colors, but unless we want auto evo animals look like this:
we would need to set some limits.
First of all, less is more. Animals shouldn’t be allowed to have more than 3 highly different colors. If we would have a patch with many different creatures color palette could quickly go from this
to this
which isn’t optimal. So I suggest that we limit the usage of colors to 3 highly different colors with 1 color being the dominant one.
Second aspect that needs attention is how saturated we want auto evo to get? In my opinion limiting auto - evo’s usage of colors won’t be very realistic and would leave players without coral reefs. Instead of that auto - evo could use factors as camouflage by comparing animal to the color of the surroundings (plant life or sediment based on life style).
Won’t it mean that eventually we would reach a state where creatures are the same color as their patch? While it is a possible outcome, supporting some colorful structures would outweight their punishment in other ways, for example reproductive rate or communication.
In addition it would add an aspect of color to the equation, limiting the migration possibilities for coral reef dwelling creatures.
Player
If player want to play as rainbow colored worm, they should have all the rights to do so. The same rules of auto - evo would apply to them too however, maybe they would become a more frequent target of the predators, but overall having fun playing game would be the first priority rather than designing a boring creature.
Thoughts t on Textures
It is still not exactly clear to me how we are going to add textures to the metaballs, but I just want to share that really easy way to create somewhat realistic skin texture that is extremely simple:
