Macroscopic Core Gameplay Discussion

[Deus]

@Kashnox

A player could play around that by making a really general species that’s specifically designed to survive in a wide range of environments so they’re more likely to survive a rapidly changing environment, but I think that’s less fun than making a specialized species that dominates their niche in a specific environment.

I do think part of that will represent a balancing act between specialization and being more of a generalist. Ideally, specialization gives you dominance over a specific niche/playstyle, but ties your fate more strongly to whatever it is you are specialized in. Generalization gives you some resilience, but often requires more “expensive” adaptations and has the risk of being outcompeted in various parts of your strategy.

@Kashnox

I’m not sure how well this would translate to Thrive, at least in regard to environmental changes. The player should be allowed to play a single generation for as long as they want, but each generation would still need to represent a certain number of years, right? Which means the environment would still change the same amount, regardless of what the player does.

Although, letting the player goof off in the jungle for an hour before everything dies from a volcanic eruption might at least make them a little less sad.

I am a bit less strict on the whole “a certain amount of time must pass in between each editor trip” conversation - if we take this too literarily, than basically every extinction event in Earth’s history would be skipped over if we have a 10 MY time-jump (it took around 10 MY for biodiversity to recover from the Permian Extinction, for example). So in interest of representing these events, we would either need to reduce the amount of time passed during environmental events, or generally accept that Thrivian environmental events stretch out for much longer.

Though I will say that I don’t think climate change should occur within a player’s lifetime (barring seasons, or very specific events if we are able to represent) - the world the player spawns into should generally stay consistent for as long as they play it, and change upon entering the editor in my opinion. Unless I misunderstood what you were saying.

@Mr.Pukilar

these are smaller features inside the macro stage that i would like to see, as they make for interesting little fun facts: I think in the macro stage, instead of 50 MY it should be 10 MY per editor

Agree here. I would think some level of dynamism here would be cool here - some editor trips might be 10 MY, others might be 5 MY, etc. I previously thought it would be cool to attach that to the amount of MP spent in an editor trip, but that doesn’t account for quick radiations or living fossils.

Another option is to have the amount of years passing slow down in climate events since evolution tends to happen quickly there. So if the planet experienced a meteor collapse, the next few editor jumps will represent 500,000 years instead of 10 MY. Not essential, but nice for flavoring.

@Rathalos

I’ve been writing more on the moment-to-moment gameplay interactions with the movement system, food sources, metabolism, etc. Not in the highest possible detail, but still quite detailed.

Kind of wondering if I should post it here or split those topics into their own posts. But I think you’ve given me some good criteria to keep in mind for those topics.

I’d agree that these should be their own topic - it would be great to focus on the core gameplay actions, ensuring they are fun, intuitive, and dynamic. If we play our cards right, just the act of moving or eating could be interesting and engaging.

@Rathalos

What this specifically does remind me of is the different geologic era that you mentioned before. Perhaps we can design it so that there are indeed climatic periods that are stable for multiple generations before changing quite suddenly, which would then be accompanied by mass extinctions and change of the biome.

I am starting to convince myself that would be an ideal way to organize distinct phases of the game - have some baseline that is stable throughout an era, and then dramatically change that baseline through a traumatic event, inducing a new baseline. There would of course be changes throughout each era - patches can still change due to vegetation levels, some temperature and geological changes - but these events will represent significant, changes. The Mesozoic had a lot of climate variety because of its timespan, but it was generally much warmer than our current world, and more moist than the Permian which preceded it.

I think what would be useful is to separate what volatility we think is appropriate just as a continuous part of change throughout the game, and what aspect of the game should be volatile and expressed through these era changes.

@Rathalos

I’m wondering if we can offer the player to “reproduce without entering the editor.” Basically using that to boost your population number as a reward for playing more in an era.

This could be an important benefit if we make extinction events genuinely difficult. I feel like there’s some other interesting bonus we can provide as well, but nothing is coming to mind as of now.

@MirrorMonkey2

I think here we should keep in mind that the intended/planned thing to happen when the player species dies in normal (not hardcore) mode is that the player switches over to the most closely related surviving species. In my view this should be something that happens semi-regularly in most playthroughs in which the player chooses fun/experimentation/roleplay over optimization.

Leaving this here: How Difficult Should Thrive Be? - #5 by Deus

But the basic gist of that conversation is the idea that species switching should be a more significant part of the gameplay loop, perhaps through a “lives” mechanic that gives you a limited number of chances to switch to maintain challenge. So you’d start off with 2 switches (lives) in the Microbe Stage, gain a life every time you progress to a different stage, and lose only if you run out of switches. Rathalos had an interpretation of not limiting this switching at all, and just allowing players to switch upon every extinction.

A really fun part about many sandbox games, like KSP or Crusader Kings, is seeing everything blow up and trying again after. The issue with Thrive is that if everything blows up, you’re done. Not only does this limit player creativity, but it also limits the problems we ask the player to solve - if extinction means the entire game ends, then we can’t ever really throw a challenge that is immensely difficult for the player to work through. So our conversation of making environment/extinction events really difficult would not fly at all.

Beyond just gameplay and realism - a playthrough in Thrive is going to be really long. I can’t imagine playing through a 6 hour playthrough, reaching the macroscopic stage, and losing all those 6 hours because you made one wrong decision and entered a death loop. The two potential solutions would be to make sure that players can recover from anything by making events much less scary, or to give them chances to try and solve a difficult problem again. And I’d much prefer the latter.

@HyperbolicHadron

You bring up Crusader Kings as a good example of it being well done, which I agree with. But I am not sure how well it would work for Thrive. We don’t want our gameplay to be static, but neither do we want it to be fully transient, as Deus has layed out so well in the first post. I think that the player extinction as default could easily end up making the player feel disconnected and disinvested from their organism if you are forced to switch as an expected part of the game.

This seems like a good time to really figure out if we want to go this way, as it seems like the momentum is already against it as the first two stages already set up the expectation that extinction is a complete loss.

That was my main issue with just having the “switch upon extinction” feature be enabled for everything, and the idea behind having some sort of “lives” feature attached to extinction and switching. Going back to my favorite (desired) analogue for Thrive, KSP - you crash a lot, but in the career mode, you have limited amount of funds/resources/whatever so that you aren’t just willing to throw rockets against the wall. You may have a safety net, but you genuinely do need something to work eventually.

That way - you have margin of safety for experimentation and for trying out new things, but you do need to succeed eventually. You have a lose condition to be mindful of.

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Linking this as well since it’s been mentioned as context a few times this conversation: Changing Role of the Environment in the Macroscopic Stages