Multicellular Roadmap Planning

[Rathalos]

@hhyyrylainen

I realize that point. But I think getting to multicellular is the wrong place:

• It is the first new stage the player gets to
• At the start of the stage the player is still basically playing the microbe stage (even if now we have the initial body plan of 3 cells, the player can still in theory remove the other cells)

So while I do see that in the future we need to have some hard locks for specific stuff in the game, I think putting them at the start of the multicellular stage is too early.

Fair enough. This also made me realise we could make this a deliberate pattern in Thrive: if editing something is disabled in stage N, then stage N - 1 makes it more difficult, but still possible, while it was easy in stage N-2. I think we actually have a previous concept with this in the Awakening Stage still having access to the species editor, but to a lesser degree than the Aware Stage.

@hhyyrylainen

So my idea is that we need a special button to switch the type. And it is only allowed under the condition that the player has made no other changes, and when the new membrane type is selected the game does a massive hack: it starts the editor exit process but right at the very end it goes in and directly modifies the species cell types to have the new membrane type.

It’s unfortunate that it would be so difficult to implement. From a game design perspective, I think it works: it’s something that would definitely be doable for a human player, but it probably would rarely make sense for auto-evo, so it would not be common.

[hhyyrylainen]

@Rathalos

It’s unfortunate that it would be so difficult to implement. From a game design perspective, I think it works: it’s something that would definitely be doable for a human player, but it probably would rarely make sense for auto-evo, so it would not be common.

Oh yeah, auto-evo as well. I suppose that “luckily” there’s no multicellular auto-evo, yet, but it would obviously also need to follow the membrane lock rules if implemented.

[Rathalos]

@hhyyrylainen

Oh yeah, auto-evo as well. I suppose that “luckily” there’s no multicellular auto-evo but it would obviously also need to follow the membrane lock rules if implemented.

Well, from what I know of the auto-evo system, this should be as easy as not including the mutation strategy line in their SelectionPressures.
(The scoring requirements for Multicellular auto-evo are different enough that I think it will be pretty “parallel” to Microbe auto-evo, not using the very same SelectionPressures.)

If we even want auto-evo to use the same option, that would also be possible. Funnily enough, looking at how mutation-strategies change the data of species, that would probably be easier than the player editor. I could probably do that myself.

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Reminder from the wiki: We have a standing goal of a better inter/extracellular (intracellular is probably a typo) matrix? That would connect well with all three variations of the non-cell parts idea.

[hhyyrylainen]

The roadmap was discussed and the roadmap to 2.0 has now been put on the wiki:

Release Roadmap