This system makes sense if there are many possible proteins to unlock. Right now there are only 6 organelles and nothing would stop the player to grind as a single cytoplasm hex until they reproduced 6 times, which wouldn’t take too long anyway. Would it be possible to have editor sessions were no special proteins are unlocked to avoid this? Or better yet. If you don’t unlock new proteins, could the proteins you have be upgraded instead?
This could work well with this system imo, limited slots would force the player to choose which proteins they wanna keep and which they prefer to ditch out. And of course they could always add more DNA to have more slots.
It’s been a while, can you remind me again what the “Lock and Key” system for agents was? Is that where each agent has a randomly generated hash-code that determines its properties and what can resist it?
As DonGoro said, I feel like if we wanted a “Slot” system could fit in quite easily. It could be added as a cap for how many Proteins and/or Agents you have unlocked at a time.
This is true, but the player can already do this in the current system, unless we wanted to add a further layer of progression? I think this is where other restrictions may come into play. For example, this means giving up 6 turns of evolution, where you cannot respond to your changing environment with any changes in the editor for 6 generations. Also, even if you unlock all 6, your cell probably won’t be energy efficient enough to maintain all 6 of those proteins placed as hexes.
Additionally, we have quite a number of proteins planned. On top of the current proteins, we have quite a few proteins we want to implement, and quite a few more that have been mentioned but never agreed upon. These are some off the top of my head:
Proteins that grant environmental tolerance: Antifreeze proteins, heat resistance proteins, pigment proteins
You have it right, the idea was that each organelle has a lock code and each agent has a key code and the closer they match the greater the effect. And then you can alter your codes over time.
It’s nice I think because it’s an adaptive system which is somewhat close to real protein binding.
However it’s also quite complex to explain and feels very un-gamey. Putting things in slots that have obvious effects might have a better and more obvious feel to it. Slots are also nice because they help with balancing, even if everything is good you can only have a certain amount.
One thing I’ve always quite liked conceptually is “everything is a placeable hex”. The reason being it unifies it all under one drag and drop interface. Like in kerbal when you add control systems you do it the same way as you add tanks or engines.
There’s also been that concept floating around for like the nucleus, or a nucleoid, only letting you place some capped number of hexes before needing to add another nucleus. That is sort of similar to slots I guess. It would also make sense of multinucleates which I think could be cool to include as they really exist and really it’s just dropping in more nuclei which I imagine is not so bad from a code perspective.
Also yeah the eyespot is one of my favourite microbial structures, I’d love to see that, pun not intended but enjoyed.
I think I had a suggestion for eyespots at one point, which I dont think we discussed. My idea was that an eye spot could help your species migrate to sunnier patches. So instead of moving one patch, you would move two patches (dropping off some of your population in the patch you skipped) to simulate your species ability to follow the sun over the generations. Of course this would only really make sense when we implement a dynamic patch map that changes over time (and also maybe have far away patches hidden).
But yeah, im not sure if this is the place to discuss ideas for eyespots again
An idea which I also thought about when it comes to organelle unlocking. I was thinking that a organelle upgrade/specialization could be used to unlock organelles. Say a vacuole could be upgraded to either be larger or contain a specific compound. You choose to upgrade it to hold a specific compound. In next editor session you can upgrade it again, this time you might have the option to upgrade it to contain toxins and then unlock toxin vacuoles. The reason why i thought about it this way, is to make the unlocking of organelles being kind of like discovering new tools without it being too random, so that the player still has a sense or urgency and hopefully surprise when they come across something new. I do like your idea for proteins, so this idea would probably only apply for non-protein organelles.
Come to think of it, I think it would actually be really cool to do it the following way:
Proteins are unlocked randomly like you suggested
Then organelles would be unlocked via endosymbiotic (if I understand it currectly) or by upgrading your proteins
Then unlock more specialized organelles through organelle upgrades/specialization
Oh right right, now I remember. Yeah, my initial impression is that I like the flexibility of the Lock and Key system because it allows for such a dynamic range of agent codes. However, as you mentioned I feel it does have it’s drawbacks. I like the idea of pre-set agents as well, but I’m not totally set on the slots system. I would prefer to aim for soft caps over hard caps wherever possible, perhaps with something like reduced efficacy for additional agents as you add more. Regardless, this is definitely a hefty subject worthy of its own thread.
On your point about organelle upgrades and specialization, that was actually exactly what I was thinking, and is also partially planned. As you mentioned, I think it’s best that Protein organelles have the random unlock system in the OP. However, other organelles would also have their forms of progression. Mitochondria and plastids (chloroplasts, chemoplasts, etc.) would be locked behind assimilation, unless the cell already had the proteins when they were a prokaryote. Many internal membrane based organelles (vacuoles, lysosomes, peroxisomes, etc.) would be locked behind the nucleus. We could have the external organelles (flagella, pilus, cilia) be locked behind a “cytoskeleton” organelle.
And then furthermore, many of these organelles could upgrade/crossgrade between each other. For example regular cilia (used for motion) could crossgrade to sensory cilia, or directional cilia. Pilus could crossgrade to injector pilus, straw pilus, ejecting pilus, etc.
A bit late to the party, but I’ll comment on some things.
This sounds very much like the perfect thing to accomplish with Organelle Upgrades
I don’t think this is a good idea, as a complementary method this would be fine, but if this is the primary method playthroughs after the first one will be too annoying as the player likely knows what kind of playthrough they want to go for next. So if the organelles you get is too random it’s going to feel terrible.
This is similar to the endosymbiosis idea where there wouldn’t really be premade organelles (or the eukaryotic organelles wouldn’t exist), instead the player goes around engulfing bacteria to unlock placing them in their cell.
Wouldn’t it be much simpler to just use an idea some community member suggested: make placing the first organelle of its type cost way more, and subsequent copies much cheaper.
@tjwhale’s philosophy is (was) to balance the game so that if you add useless organelles, you’ll die due to lack of energy.
Some randomness is good for replayability, but I think that randomness that really messes with the player are not good. For example if someone wants to do a “plant run” next, but doesn’t end up unlocking the random organelles they need, they are screwed.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints and let’s plays on 0.5.0 and 0.5.1 where the player simply doesn’t find any needed compounds for 5 minutes, that’s not fun. But that doesn’t really like happen to me. So the randomness in the spawn system makes it so that some players randomly have a terrible experience with Thrive and might drop playing the game before getting through it.
I’m all for adding unlock conditions for most of the organelles, so that the first few generations the player would only have like 4 choices of organelles.
It would be so easy to turn this system into lootboxes
I don’t think this example really is fully the same. With the coal example and other kind of industry resource, you can work towards it. In the microbe protein case it’s literally just rolling dice and praying to RNG Jesus. No way for the player to have agency.
Based on the latest agent discussions I would like to go the route that you first get a basic agent, and then you can improve it gradually by spending MP in the direction you want. So that wouldn’t be random either.
A big part of Thrive is that the player is like an intelligent designer trying to beat evolution…
Have you read that organelle upgrades discussion I linked. It seems to be a pretty popular idea. One that I’d much prefer to added randomness.
Except if the player already has a specific run in mind.
From reading things posted in the Thrive community it already seems to be a thing that players recommend specific “runs” to each other, like “have you tried an iron run yet?” encouraging each other to experiment.
Randomness would make that a problem if you already have the general build in mind when starting a new game.
Good example of how organelle upgrades is a popular feature with a lot of suggested upgrade paths already.
You seem to be saying here that by having organelle upgrades and endosymbiosis, we wouldn’t need the randomness suggested in this thread after all?
You raise alot of good points here! Especially with how many players certainly seem to want to be able to have a great deal of control on what they evolve into. This is definitely something I would like to try making a poll on in the community forums or such to gauge the overall preferences of the community, assuming enough developers are in support of such a system. We could probably make some compromises should opinions be somewhat divided.
That being said, I agree with your apprehension of randomization of unlocking parts. As you noted it takes away from the control a player has over their species; and while that’s an exciting gameplay feature, we need to make sure that our community would enjoy such an element before depriving them of the great deal of control Thrive seems to have featured since it’s conception.
By the way when I said evolution in reality lacks intelligent design I wasn’t actually thinking about that goal of Thrive at the time, but now that you remind me, I suppose I should emphasize that it’s best we think pretty carefully on how we want to give players some control over the random outcomes from such a feature as I mentioned before. (I kind of like naggorath’s idea of there being seperate systems for the organelles and proteins but it could potentially be pretty jarring.)
Anyhow, I don’t believe I have seen that idea on making a larger first time cost to organelles but it seems like a nice simple way of encouraging players to think about what they are intending to do with their cell before committing to it. Though we would need a good way to communicate to the player that there’s a marked up cost on first purchase, I’m sure that wouldn’t be hard.
Organelle upgrades are something I’ve been eyeing for a while now, I really love the concept and they seem to be a great way to give players more means of customization and adaptation, as well as giving new flavors to parts and mechanisms. They also introduce that lovely gradual sense of progress that people seem to love. It’s not mutually exclusive from unlock systems though I’m sure you know, some upgraded forms of a part could potentially require a protein you dont have at the time, or the organelle itself may not be available for whatever reason. It’s alot to think about, and I definitely want to take the time to do so eventually.
On an unrelated note, I came up with a hastily drawn concept on how we could make a protein slot system work based on Nickthenick’s brief mention of how he would prefer if the system didn’t have a hard limit. I suppose I should take it elsewhere though as to avoid sidetracking the discussion
Very true, and many of those points were my main reservations while thinking of this idea. By the way, I should clarify that I was intending that this system would actually would exist alongside the organelle upgrades (which I definitely think are important to add). So for example, you unlock Nitrogenase, and then over successive generations you can spend points to upgrade it. I would definitely not want this to replace organelle upgrades at all.
Yeah, if it turns out that the randomness is frustrating, I was thinking that some of the stopgaps I mentioned and Buckly mentioned could be useful in reducing the RNG (if we do implement random unlocks).
Yeah this would exist alongside the possibility to assimilate organelles via endocytosis. If you are a prokaryote, engulfing other cells can unlock metabolosomes, thylakoids, pigment proteins, or antifreeze proteins if they have them. If you are a eukaryote assimilating other cells, then you can unlock the eukaryotic versions of those organelles: mitochondria, chloroplasts, etc. Organelles like antifreeze proteins would be on both lists since they’re not prokaryote/eukaryote specific.
That’s definitely possible, and I remember suggesting that as well in the past. The only drawback I see to this is that you can technically still place any Protein Organelle in generation 1, even if it costs 100MP. This means you can’t get the benefits of limiting rare and powerful proteins.
Yeah that’s very true. One thing that I want to clarify though is that these proteins are not the only means by which a cell can access a playstyle. For example, in our own evolutionary history the microbes in our lineage never gained “metabolosomes” as a prokaryote. Instead, current theory is that they evolved into eukaryotes as anaerobes, and then assimilated mitochondria and became aerobes. So a cell can always assimilate cells as a eukaryote to gain abilities, if they didn’t unlock them earlier as a prokaryote.
Also, there are some other organelles that also unlock in a randomish fashion as well, unless I’ve missed discussions where the concept on them have changed. The mitochondria has a chance to unlock upon assimilation of a prokaryote with metabolosomes, the nucleus upon assimilation of any prokaryote, the chloroplast upon assimilation of a prokaryote with thylakoids, etc.
But anyways, I’m not married to the idea of the system it definitely does come with its drawbacks.
Are you talking about the future, or the current game?
All engulfing related organelle unlocks were removed. Players were very confused by needing to engulf 3 randomly floating around vacuole looking things to unlock things.
I’m familiar with the balancing @tjwhale tried to do so coming from that direction. Once again I want to mention that the game balance itself could make it so that going first for some really specific organelle just basically kills you because the cell ends up way too unviable.
Reading what the community thinks and reacting to it is a great process I think. In general I think that’s a core part of good game design, really taking time to understand how the game feels for you and others and then using that understanding to choose how to improve it.
One of the hardest things I think is understanding the new player experience, because we can’t unlearn what we know and become new players again. So it’s hard to find people who can have it and talk about it.
That’s the way that endosymbiosis works, right? At least I got the picture that it is very similar process to engulfing to develop such and symbiotic relationship between species.
I’ve been asking for concrete endosymbiosis game designs and plans to be made for a while now.
Oh my bad, I thought it was already in the final concept but it could have been something discussed during the previous set of developers.
From what I understand, the plan was to have all endosymbiotic organelles locked by default. Then, anytime you assimilate a cell with the corresponding proteins (such as thylakoids for chloroplasts), you have a small chance to unlock the corresponding organelle. The original chance was something like 1/50 but obviously that’s a number we would need to discover through testing and balancing.
You should definitely read the latest plans.
The plan is that basically endosymbiosis is about capturing prokaryotic species to live inside you. They wouldn’t unlock some specific organelle, instead you would get that prokaryotic species inside you (probably with additional buffs to it).
I’m a bit late, and I’m not sure if I’m really adding much to the thread, but i do think this is an interesting idea and while I’m not sure I agree with it fully I think it’s in the right direction.
The way you can just pick any of the currently implemented proteins from the start of the game as if from a palette and just add them to your cell has always kinda bugged me, for the reasons Nick posted (eukaryotes rely on mitochondria because they never evolved to be aerobic themselves, which is a path most players’ cells tend not to take, etc.), and while I think random unlocks are a good way to solve this specific problem, it might end up feeling pretty frustrating for players who have a specific goal in mind.
I’d suggest making it an option players can toggle, but adding a new setting for every disagreement the devs have is probably not a good habit to have… in this case it might be fine though. some players will want to embrace the randomness of the simulation and see where evolution takes them, while others may want to have something they know they can for sure work towards.
Speaking of which, a similar but non-random method of gradually unlocking proteins would be good to think about to. Maybe there’d be a delay of multiple generations between each unlock, and if you wanted to go for a rarer unlock you’d have to wait a longer amount of time. Or perhaps there could be some sort of dna-themed tech tree system, where the setup is randomized each game, but the player can see how to work towards what they want, and will need to strategize accordingly. Perhaps the first unlock would be easy/inexpensive, regardless of the protein (so if someone wants to start out with rusticyanin, there isn’t too big of a barrier to them) and then maybe similar/relevant proteins would be also a little less difficult/expensive to unlock.
I guess it goes back to the fundamental tension in the game which is that evolution is purely random and games are strategic. So balancing those will always be hard for us.
Yeah my feelings on it exactly. I feel like the proteins are pretty powerful, grant unique abilities, and historically are not evolved often and should be rare. Or at least, they should be rare enough that they are unique per lineage, so each lineage of life has a handful of those proteins that its evolved that make it unique. But I can’t really think of another way to restrict progression through them. For example, in the OP I gave an example of how wings are restricted in the Aware Stage because you need to evolve through several steps to develop limbs that can evolve into wings, and also your body needs to be light enough and shaped properly to stay in the air. However, with proteins we can’t really add that progression, since there aren’t that many intermediate steps we can put in between evolving these proteins. This results in the proteins just being bam I’ve evolved them now.
Additionally, if we found a way to add progression to proteins now, it would also pay off for the multicellular/aware stages, since I’m guessing we’ll have the same problems with evolving poison/chemicals in the aware stage. What’s to stop me from evolving a powerful neurotoxin for my organism, and further what’s to stop basically every organism in the ecosystem a powerful neurotoxin. For example, as far as I know poison dart frogs don’t spend large amounts of energy maintaining their toxicity, it’s simply something they happened to evolve, and now that they have it it’s given them a significant edge in survival.
Yeah I’m imagining this more when more of the proteins have been implemented, such as from this list from the Microbe Stage Appendices (the descriptions are a little out of date btw):
Although this list is missing quite a few, such as rusticyanin, the different chemosynthesis proteins, and some more of the environmental tolerance proteins.
