I have had my reservations on the concept as well.
I feel the same niche could adequately be fulfilled in as much simpler to understand manner via direct upgrades to the parts. Be that customization of the parts themselves, or a eukaryotic variant producing glucose instead of ATP directly. The Rubisco as a part is, in my view, wholly unnecessary. I didn’t like it, I bemoaned it, and my feelings only grew worse as I playtested it.
But who am I to say that others wouldn’t enjoy it? I may be a game designer, but there are games that I do not enjoy, games that others praise as the epitome of design. I may not enjoy the feature myself, but since the other developers seem so intent on it’s existence, I’ve since decided to shift my focus away from “Do we need it?” to “What can we do with it?” Afterall, I won’t have to use it, just like how I don’t have to play games I don’t enjoy.
I’m willing to give the part a try. If done right, it could provide a potentially interesting way for the more technically inclined players to further specialize and adapt their cells in increasingly efficient ways that may be difficult for other players to understand. The part could maybe create glucose at a more efficient rate than the traditional self-supporting parts we currently have. In a multicellular organism, you could pull off some crazy functions with a cell dedicated to creating and packaging glucose to send off to cells specialized to burn it all.
We could even introduce optional customizations that make our traditional parts stop producing glucose directly, and ATP instead to support this feature.
It would all be optional of course, a cell should be able to survive just fine without separating the formation of glucose between parts, and I forsee lots of players struggling to understand the balance of such a feature (Not to mention autoevo), but having the option to go beyond for those willing could be a win in our book.
If other people are determined to implement the part as is, then I’ll try to make it work too. I’m just wary of thinking like that because I wouldn’t know how to offer input on the part, and I also don’t know the core grievance this feature as currently executed addresses without adding much more confusion for the player.
I just think it’ll be an exponentially more useful implementation and less of a wasted effort if we wait on integrating it until we have an understanding of what a customizable process panel looks like.
Unless I’m massively misremembering, customizable process panel is not on the roadmap, so it might never be finished. Again if I remember right only process speed control / pausing for the process panel is on the roadmap. And if it is purely a player controlled thing to store energy as glucose, that obviously doesn’t work for AI cells and we are back where we started: there needs to be an automated ability for cells to store excess energy as glucose (and the easiest way without redoing the organelle / protein system, which also isn’t on the accepted roadmap, is to just have the ability be triggered by a placeable organelle).
If that’s the case, and if you say expanding the process panel would be a lot of trouble not initially planned on the road map, then I accept your point. I accept the part, though I still do think that the current issues we face in playtesting are fundamental to the nature of the process being implemented as a part. We can try and find a less intrusive solution.
I’m really curious what aspect / assumed functionality you are basing this on. I can’t come up with what the fundamental difference there is between having the ability enabled for all cells from the start or only having the ability enabled after placing a certain kind of organelle. The only thing I can think of is that it might be easier to balance if all cells constantly do it, but then again that requires rebalancing the start of the game, whereas a specific part giving the ability only requires balancing to work when that organelle is placed (it doesn’t affect the early game).
Reflecting on this more, I was really thinking of the graphical/information representation of the part more than anything. I wasn’t sure how well the player would be able to understand the effect of RuBisCo on their metabolism and energy output because ATP isn’t treated as a stored item. Though this is remedied a bit by the fact that we have the process panel implemented already, which gives real time information on inputs and outputs.