Microbe Stage Terrain Generation and Features

[Deus]

Let’s discuss terrain a bit, as that area of the Microbe Stage timeline is pretty rough. First, what do we want from terrain? I think it serves three important functions…

1. Provides a more engaging experience when it comes to navigating your world. Instead of just picking a direction and pressing W, you have to navigate around obstacles and potentially avoid dead ends in certain patches.
2. Differentiation between patches, making certain patches offer different gameplay experiences than just a difference in backgrounds.
3. Increases visual richness, enhancing immersion and making Thrive more than just wide-open spaces.

The inherent difficulty with terrain however is that we have to make sure it is realistic to the scale at which microbial life. We’ve previously had discussions about, for example, pillars or tiny emitters in the hydrothermal events or maze-like structures on the ocean floor. However, that isn’t very accurate because at such a microscopic scale, fine structures aren’t very common.

There also is a difficulty in that the Microbe Stage is a 2D representation of microbial life, so there is a degree of gamey, intentionally unrealistic design choice made in our presentation to make a fun and intuitive game. For example, organisms all generally swim at the same exact level even though there is an entire ocean around them, organisms in patches near vents and the ocean floor swim at a point just above a surface, etc. In real life, microbes generally attach and move on a substrate, whereas in Thrive, organism swim above it.

All this is to say: whatever choice we make with terrain will inherently be unrealistic, we just have to be clear what level of abstraction we are and are not comfortable with.

Possible Implementation

I have previously written about terrain in this post, which also details how terrain can be differentiated across different patches:

Patch Map Improvements

I noticed that there has been renewed interest in our patches so I wanted to jot out some ideas related to biomes, as an excuse to write something about Thrive after some inactivity. I’m not necessarily against the idea of “new patches”, but I agree with Hh in saying that it’s best to assess any new additions once our current patches are actually more fleshed out with features such as terrain generation and currents. With no complex mechanics implemented, gameplay across patches is largely the …

To sum up this proposal, we could perhaps have terrain essentially serve as the distribution and nature of free-floating structures similar to iron chunks. We can have different models of larger particles, such as sand or chips of rock, serving as our “terrain”.

Depending on the patch, these chunks will spawn in different manners. For example,

• The ocean floor could have an immense amount of chunks which spawn very closely together in clusters and are extremely heavy, meaning players have to find their way around chunks. There can be numerous very large chunks surrounded by smaller chunks, creating fields of tight spaces.

• The estuary can have medium-sized particles which aren’t very massive and are heavily affected by currents, creating a dynamic environment where the terrain collides, floats away, drifts, etc.

Does this sound feasible? Details can be somewhat expanded upon if the base idea makes sense from an implementation standpoint.