My vision of Thrive

[iosononeon]

Hi hh thanks for your interest it really means a lot to me, I will adress all the points you raised in your reply.

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@hhyyrylainen

Isn’t this already in the game? The rotation speed of a cell depends on angular momentum, meaning that a streamlined cell turns faster. But then bigger max membrane radius gives you more compound absorption area. So while no text points this out in the game, such an effect kind of already exists.

I tried to emphasize the fact that the cell colony must be a organism made of gregarious cells are working together to stabilize and feed themselves in the most efficient way as possible.

@hhyyrylainen

I don’t think we have active graphics artists available to make a different Easter Egg. So I don’t see this is a plausible thing.

In my opinion this is such a fun thing for players to discover and remember how fake the big S game had their “cell” stage be.

Overall I think we need to just get the microbe stage done. Even on our latest trailer there’s again someone complaining about Thrive being stuck in the cell stage forever. For the health of the project I think it is absolutely necessary to be able to call the microbe stage done this year.

We can later try to expand replayability by making changes that diversify the starting conditions leading into the multicellular stage so that the combined replayability of the microbe stage + multicellular stage will be exponentially higher (I think this is a big advantage if we can make multiple exclusive and different ways to play through Thrive. For example once we have the industrial stage and a player completes a playthrough and then they want to play a different strategy they need to then replay the microbe, multicellular, awakening etc. stages so that kind of design causes an exponential increase of replayability compared to just trying to increase the replayability of a single stage).

Well I think that if we agree on doing something simple it could be easy to redo it, I think that the current easter egg really breaks immersion and makes us lose credibility too in a sense it also didn’t look like we were having fun of the cutsy eyes “cell” stage it fells more like a homage right now. I also totally understand the desire to finally move on from this after all it has been in development for over 10 years and I get why people are more eager to see what comes next. That kind of criticism should be taken with a grain of salt while it is a valid feedback it also comes from a place of limited perspective on just how much work has gone into making the stage as solid as it is today. That said, I think a good middle ground would be to declare the stage “feature complete” but still leave room for future improvements maybe by clearly marking some items in the roadmap as “post-release enhancements” in this way even if we consider the Microbe Stage “done” from a milestone perspective there’s still room for people to come back and polish or expand on it later. After all there are games like Garry’s Mod that continue getting major overhauls decades later their official release so it’s not so unreasonable to think we could have that kind of long tail too. As for your point about replayability I really like the idea that kind of design does create replay value and it’s something that could give us a lot of depth long term. The only thing I’d be careful about is avoiding situations where players miss some early opportunity and end up locked into a suboptimal niche for the rest of their run. That could easily become frustrating especially for newer players who don’t fully understand the mechanics yet.
And just to be clear while it might sound like I am only offering advice I take full responsibility for these suggestions. If any of this ends up on the roadmap I am more than willing to take matters into my own hands whether that means developing the features or overseeing their implementation to make sure they happen.

@hhyyrylainen

Finally! Someone else who is a proponent of the “not resetting the entire world after returning from the editor” camp.

As a matter of fact while making this post I was thinking of a much different process for when you exit the editor, instead of having already a member of the clan already mutated I thought it would have been cool to have that mutation be triggered after some generations after the conditions of triggering that specific mutation would have been met but I thought that it would have been very confusing to new players.

@hhyyrylainen

Interesting. I would expect this to result in vastly less replayability of the space stage, so I’m a bit surprised you suggested this after reading the microbe stage parts of your post.

What I meant is that the species themselves would still be randomized but they would start from preset archetypes in terms of appearance, ideology, behavior, and quest structure and I will add there will be some exception like the lore related ones. This way we wouldn’t have to generate fully random species every time which could be an unoptimized and possibly chaotic approach. Instead we are randomizing from structured templates.