In light of discussions on Discord, I wanted to post a though regarding how to approach the transition to tweaking body plans instead of individual cells.
I think we should first think of the broadest level of detail first - how editing the entire organ system will work - before we think of the finest level of detail - creating and editing individual cell types that compose specialized tissues. By that, I essentially mean instead of designing an organ system by having the players place down tissues they made to be a neuron or a vessel or a whatever, we’d essentially generate the system automatically, think of the broadest scale first, and find some small-scale areas/details for the player to tinker with.
I can foresee many problems that may occur with the first approach, of making the player design an entire system by placing individual parts:
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Can be way too iterative, where you may only have enough MP to place maybe half of a nerve net you’ve been meaning to place, or half of a muscle
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Requires sooooooo much work for so little output: would we be designing specific components for tubular blood cells, neurons, skin cells with oils and secretion, fat cells with lipids, digestive cells with special cilia, etc. that would realistically only be useful for a single type of cell?
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There’s variations within the cells of a specific tissue as well - short twitch v. long twitch muscles, long neurons vs short neurons, different types of epidermis - that would be unruly to implement
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I really just don’t see how we can assume that the player will have enough knowledge and skill to place cell layers in a way that ends up in something like a limb with bones, vessels, nerves, muscle cells, etc.
Whereas I can see a lot of benefits from the latter approach, of providing a broad organ system automatically to the player, prioritizing broad scale changes, and finding small areas to allow things like the editing of cells:
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Can reduce tediousness and repetitiveness, as it would be annoying to have a limb that is otherwise perfect except for the fact that you haven’t perfectly synched nerve network, blood vessels, etc. Structures don’t form system by system as they probably would with a limited MP pool; that assumes too much foresight and planning from evolution.
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We really need to ensure that we don’t overwhelm the player with designing different cell types for different organ systems at the same time. By providing a broad template for the player to tinker with, we have a steady and controlled way to introduce anatomy to the player.
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Let’s us focus less on devoting resources to incredibly small components (specific organelles of cells and tissue types) of what will undoubtedly be a huge stage (macroscopic) and let’s us focus on making sure the game flows as well as possible. It makes it easier to envision a nervous system when we don’t worry first and foremost about the individual neuron for example.
So, what does this mean? The transition should probably involve a pretty large jump in complexity where a player is provided with the most basic forms of advanced organ systems. So instead of approaching the transition to the macroscopic stage by thinking of ways to create different highly specialized cells, like neurons or blood cells, think of ways we can involve cool broad, macroscopic tweaks to those very basic organ systems. Then, from this broadest level of detail, perhaps we can work our way down to figuring out opportunities to involve the player’s control over details as small as individual cell anatomy.