Alright everyone, Microbe stage is finishing up, which mean that, after some frantic debugging, we are going to be hands-on-keyboard for multicellular. With over ten years to plan, we are obviously ready and everybody knows what they’re doing, right? 
In all seriousness, I’m on the record for not having much confidence the microbe stage would even finish, but I am actually very optimistic for the multicellular stage. Not only do I think our current generation of volunteers might be our most dedicated and versatile in quite some time, but a lot of the work is done for us: many, probably most, mechanics of multicellular were already created for microbe stage. Frankly, I think it’s also helping us that people haven’t been focusing on multicellular all these years to keep scope creeping semi-finished ideas to take away focus.
I only saw the last 4 years of Microbe stage work, but I’ve seen a lot of talent and energy go to waste. Devs talk about some great gameplay idea, decisively decide to take more time to decide things, write a very long and interesting forum thread that newer game designers don’t read because it’s super long, then leave, and the whole concept gets forgotten or cut. We can’t make progress on a feature for a year because there’s no 3D modelers to make models, then a 3D modeler shows up and we can’t decide what to ask from them, and the modeler understandably leaves for somewhere else. One programmer makes a really cool prototype and leaves before ever incorporating it into the game, while another programmer makes a very good PR which withers on the vine after 6 months, while nobody else works on that feature because there’s already a PR for it.
I can’t solve all of this (and we probably never need to; Thrive is a chaotic project by nature and likely always will be), but while the multicellular concepts are as uncluttered as they ever will be I want to make three lists:
- Stuff that we know we’re going to do, at least mostly understand how to design, and need a programmer to implement.
- Stuff we want to do, but need to come to a decision on or prototype on so we can put something in the first list before we finish the stage.
- Models/art stuff we know will be in multicellular stage, even if we don’t know how exactly we are going to use it, or if we don’t have the other resources to implement it.
I know that there have been other attempts to make similar lists; we can put the results there or draw information from there if you want. I expect we will eventually populate our release roadmap with this kind of stuff, which was the closest thing to a GDD we were using by the last couple years of Microbe Stage development (pop quiz: how many GDDs does Thrive have? How many can you find?)
I would rather see a low-resolution list of things for the whole stage, than a very detailed breakdown of every PR we need to make. I expect any plans made here to change, that’s okay. What I really want is a list of what we are and are not trying to fit into Multicellular stage (not macroscopic), as of right now, and what needs to happen next for each of them. What needs to happen next might be “decide if and how we’re really going to do this”, but that itself is a task.
@Gamedungeon I’m going to put you on the spot here, since you are the lead game designer. The next few months are likely to be a good season in my life to whip up a prototype for you, although the skeleton of Multicellular may not be in a strong enough state to learn much from them just yet.
