Organism Editor changes, Geography updates (ideas)

Gameplay
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Hi guys, I’m new in Thrive’s family, but I’m really excited to be part of this so I had some ideas and made some concepts to improve the gameplay and facilitate the developers lifes, I also have another ideas (Thrive Points, Tech Editor changes, Society Center updates, Strategy mode changes and a lot more), but I didn’t finished the concept arts so will update it in the future, I hope you like it:
PS.: The concepts are just for better understanding of my ideas, it isn’t a beauty concept art. But if you like the idea and want to see more, I can try to create an video demonstrating with an games simulation.

Organism editor changes:
I read the organism editor’s page on Thrive’s website and I noticed there are somethings that’s almost impossible and wouldn’t be to dynamic, intuitive and fun for the player, so here’s some changes that I thought could improve gameplay and facilitate developer’s lifes
The player would have a base to start with a spine and should add head, thoracic skeleton, tail and another parts from it,(to invertebrates organisms the same idea, that’s why in the concept art you can see an slot of items for body, such as types of body and etc…) I also think ins’t very intuitive to create the whole skeleton, muscles, fat, organs, systems, and etc for the organism, most people would called it boring, so I guess a better choice would be to every part already come with skeleton, muscles and fat, and the player can control it directly in the organism, I also think it’s a bit useless to the player develop all the organs and systems for an complex organism (besides that would be a nightmare to developers) so I guess the player just gotta choose the respiratory system by the chosen thoracic skeleton and the organism’s diet by his jaw and dental arch choosen. I also added some new features and behaviors for the organisms to interact with the environment

Pressure level:
would be very interesting if the game had some plessure system so when deeper in sea the higher pressure and the highest on sky lowest pressure, this also means that some creatures gotta have an apropriatte anatomy to support some pressure range

Superhuman skills:
In real life some organisms have some incredible skills like thermal vision or sonar and a lot more, this should be implemented in Thrive when some items should have some skills like night vision, flight and etc…

Male or female dominance:
It’s important that the game reach every audience, so would be good that the player could create a male and female version of his organisms, the changes should be limited to dimensions, porportions, skin and colors and the player should choose if their species it’s guide by a male or a female organism

Plagues and toxins:
The player should be able of get sick in game by insects plagues, another organisms toxins, eating something out of his diet, push his temperature range for long time or suffer with bleeding after combat, this things should make him lose Thrive Points and he gotta evolve or create tools to help him to improve in survival, stronger skins, toxins resistance, toxins recognition, armor, long range weapons, medicine and another things would be created to fight some this survival problems and prevent extinction.

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Thanks for your feedback! I see you would like to make the creation of creatures simpler, but changing it this way may result in some issues.

Creature’s skeleton, muscles and fat would be generated and altered by the player to some degree. Removing these options and replacing them with pre-made parts would restrict the creativity of what can be made.

I agree about the organ part, every single one doesn’t have to be designed but there still should be options for how some of them work.

Senses that humans don’t have are definitely planned for creatures.

With male and female dominance it’s a bit more complicated. We can’t assume that every alien creature will have the same sexes as animals on earth. Of course the player would be able to implement males and females but the options for various other ways of reproducion should be available too. The feature for making different variants of the same species is planned and the integration between them could be more complex than just domination of one.

Plagues and toxins sound good and they probably will be a feature, though we can’t tell how complex we can make it to be.

And lastly, unlocking various items is a very restricting way of allowing a player to evolve. Biomes that the player is in should not remove the possibilities of which animals can adapt to them because every feature can be used differently. The most organic way is to change part’s specialization overtime. For example fins on a desert could turn into a cooling fan just like ears of fennec foxes on earth.

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When I talked about pre-made parts, I mean basis which the player could not even mess with proportion but also add fingers and etc, if the player want to put a finger in the nose he could, it’s just for prevent bugs and to give an better and intuitive gameplay, because how I mentioned for the most people create limbs an everything from zero would be boring and to the developers I can only see a nightmare of bugs and problems with everything including uv mapping, modeling, rigging, animation and everything else… So if we had a great number and variation of parts besides that player possibility to edit them not only in proportions but also with location and everything else it would be better for both players and developers, just imagine if every new organism the player had to spend a lot of time just to create a simple limb and in the end it moves completely weird in gameplay…

About organs functions can be something good if it be fun for the player, see Spore, every part of the game was fun to play (okay it was another kind of game for another audience) but I mean, besides it had a very limitated possibilities it were fun, with Thrive we should give to the player more possibilities but never make the game looks boring and etc… About organs I really think that only the respiratory and maybe the digestory systems would be fun, intuitive and useful.

And about unlocking items, what you said it’s exactly what I mean, if some organism goes to desert with fins it may transform in something useful there, exactly! No organism would evolve fins in a desert, right? That’s what I’m saying, the organism must have his own features and etc but he gotta adapt to new environment so he will evolve parts to help him to do it, bringing to Thrive’s universe, if a frog goes to desert he will probably need a stronger skin so he will “unlock it” there, besides if he goes to deep ocean he wouldn’t need a stronger skin like in the desert, so he will never “unlock” it there, got it?

You also don’t mentioned the geography, temperature, biomes, pressure and season ideas did you liked?

If you want I would love to create an video demonstration of some of my Ideas (like a Thrive’s teaser) I wanted to make it as fastest as possible while the developers still in concepts of stages, for a video demonstration I could bring some time to show and was afraid of being to late, but if we don’t have plans to start the aware, awakening, society, industrial and ascension stages by now I would love to show my ideas on video so you can understand it better…

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Looking at some of these suggestions, it feels like you are too centered on earth. For example not all species would have males and females and some could have multiple different genders.

Also the invertebrate , vertebrate distinction is an earth one and while some properties of invertebrates and vertebrates would exist they most certainly wouldn’t be invertebrates or vertabrate sin the way you understand them. They would be something that is kinda like a vertabrate or something that is kinda like an invertebrate. Theres alot of possible ways bodies can end up.

You talk about insect plagues. insects, again, are an earth thing you most certainly wouldn’t get insects as you understand them on another planet. They might be like an insect except they have mushy bodies, and 4 legs instead of 6 and no wings and blood pumps throughout their bodies etc. I feel we just need to be careful not to limit ourselves like that.

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About the biomes, we had some ideas on how it would work and the idea is to not label them like we do on earth and let the place form itself depending on the temperature, moisture, terrain etc. That would lead to way more natural and exotic feel of the game. Seasons would be a complex mechanic but important enough to add.

I completely agree with Untrustedlife though animal mechanics such as swarms would be a bad idea. Giving one species a trait like this would lead to repetitiveness like in no man’s sky. Animals on different planets may look a bit different but they feel the same.

A thrive cinematic trailer made by the art team would be a great way to get attention but its too early for one since we don’t even have a cell stage done. But if you want to make an idea demonstration then go ahead.

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Our whole audience are humans, even we have the freedom to make a whole new alien world and etc, we gotta relate the game to humans, ex.: every sci-fi alien movie, another dimension, reality, etc has some human relation, that’s what makes something interesting even talking about another worlds the player gotta feel immersed in Thrive’s world and if it is too distopy from our reality it would never happen got it? That’s why even the creepiest and weirdest aliens in movies, games and etc have some human our animal character, to make it believable and attractive to audience.

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I get where you’re coming from but don’t we have enough of scifi media that takes inspiration from earth lifeforms? A game that doesn’t make relations to earth would be intriguing and the player could still make his own creatures more or less based on what we can find on earth.

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Isn’t that simple, if we create a game with completely alien biology and etc no one would feel relate to it, we can feel related only by things that we think interesting and makes sense for us, how I said, we can create a whole alien world and etc, but has to be based on earthforms for the player feel related to it, for example: in some alien planet could live aliens that looks like a cloud, no eyes, no limbs, no nothing, just looks like a cloud, should we bring it to the game? One of the biggest critiques of tha Fantastic 4 movie is it, they tryied so hard to keep the villain alien that the audience couldn’t relate to it, look at Guardians of the Galaxy, they fight a planet but we could relate with the movie because it has a whole human back story and etc… Got it? We can’t get to far from earthforms because this would get us (players, humans) far for the game itself…

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The thing i like the most about xenobiology is how it can push the boundaries of what lifeforms can look like, and that’s something where most sci-fi works fall short, mainly because they modify creatures from our world instead of making them from scratch and from a scientific point of view. Just look at how many antropomorphic aliens are out there when there are so many different body plans that could be explored.
For me the weirder the lifeforms are, the better they get, that’s why artists like Alex Ries and Wayne Barlowe are my favourite, because they create creatures so eerie and unrecognizable that they actually look like something from another world.
Thrive is about the evolution of life on an alien planet and I think that the greatest aspect of this game would be how weird and unique it’s lifeforms could get and how much they could push the limits of biology itself. The last thing I’d want to do in this game is playing as something familiar, I don’t want to play this game to relate to my creatures, what I want is to see lifeforms completly different from anything I’ve ever seen before.
Would that make Thrive a niche game? Probably, but it’s still a niche I really enjoy, regardless of its popularity.

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I also love weird creatures, but even them have something looking like some earth lifeform, If you look at the detail, at the end there’s something earth like that connect us even with creepy and weird alien concepts, that’s what I’m talking about, we can create a nice game with earth biology and even be weird enough to look alien, got it?

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The first Thrive’s stages “Microbe” has very similar cells to earth ones and it don’t makes them bad, just make them better because even being something there we carry in our bodies, we still love to discover and explore more about it

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Just for make sure, in the topic’s picture I used Earth’s animals bones, but it doesn’t means that the game should have only earth look like parts (I just used it because was easier to find), of course not, it may have a lot of different and creative new parts that should make the player feel inside of a brand new world, like he’s really walking into an alien planet with alien creatures and etc…

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Hey Joao,

These are some interesting ideas you have. One thing is that the way we work is to plan only a few months ahead. So while there are ideas for later in the game things don’t get fixed until just before they are implemented so the later stages are still pretty open to changes.

Re your specific ideas:
Organism Editor: yeah I agree it is important to find a balance between how easy the editor is to use and how flexible it is, it’s a good problem and will probably need a lot of iterative testing. I think a lot of what you are saying are good ideas.

Pressure: Yes we have talked about this for the microbe stage, it’s something we may do at some point.

Superhuman skills: This is something we are doing in the microbe stage, the microbes can live in areas humans cannot, they’ll be able to bioluminesce, they’ll have little toxin darts and probably jet propulsion. So yeah lots of interesting things for this stage.

Male vs Female: Yes as the others have said we want to be very flexible about how species work with genders and castes etc.

Plagues: Yeah this sounds interesting, especially for the strategy stages.

Similarity to earth: One reason the microbe stage is similar to earth is because the team keeps discovering more and more mindblowing microbes on earth which are already very alien. For example bacteria that move with slime jets, cells that have eyes, single cells the size and shape of plants, bacteria with spearguns. So one of the main reasons we haven’t made up more stuff is Earth is already too crazy!

If you’d like to make some concept art or videos of later stages that’s a nice idea. It can actually be quite a cool way to influence the project as if people get inspired by it they may want to go in that direction. Having said that we are a long way off finishing the microbe stage so it will be a long time before we are implementing the later stuff.

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So you are talking about having niches and behaviours similar to those on earth? In that case, yeah I agree with you, mainly because life in earth is so diverse that it would be really hard to have a planet where the same behavioural patterns (e.g. predators, scavengers or gregarious lifeforms) don’t occur. However, a behaviour editor is planed. So, as far as I’m aware, you won’t choose your creature’s behaviour from a list of archetipes, but instead there would be a bunch of parameters that you could edit and they would define how the creature is going to behave.

In a nutshell, the objective here is to have an editor so fluid and free that you could create any liform you could imagine. But, as Tjwhale has said, we are too early in development to flesh out this stuff yet, let alone start working on it.

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Thanks! I know you’re already working on microbe stage, that’s why I create ideas just for Aware stages to Ascension, how I mentioned I got a lot of another ideas for another stages and etc Hope to bring them here soon… You also don’t mentioned de biomes, temperatures and season dynamics which I think would be something wonderful and one of the mostly important things for the game dynamics and everything. I will be working on some video explaining my whole ideas about Thrive and hope to finish it before you start to work in the Aware stage, it’s been a amazing pleasure to be with you!

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Yes, this is exactly what I meant! And if you look at the concept that I made I already bring some behaviors and other things generated by the organisms parts and by the players historical in game, there are some things that I really think would be nice to have in a gameplay, such as diurnal/nocturnal habits, diet, habitat, tolerable temperature and pression range, favorite biome, weight, speed, strength and a lot more…

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You should check out the Documentary ALien Planet:

And the documentary series Extraterrestrial.

And all of these:

https://canopy.uc.edu/bbcswebdav/users/gibsonic/Snaiad/snduterus.html

This is what people want from thrive, we dont need insects, or earthlike plants etc. For people to be interested in fact what they want is the weird things.

Im not talking Lovecraft and weird tentacles, im talking realistic alien life.

Hoping to see some cool concepts from you.

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Actually, we are working on that too. We are discussing on how to implement a map of the world with biomes and a dynamic environment. https://forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com/t/patch-map-design-discussion/597

I suggest you to browse the forums for a while, because some of your concepts and ideas may have already been proposed.

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Okay, thanks, as you know I had a basic knowledge of game engines and already had some ideas to simplify the biomes, weather and seasons dynamics in game

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What I mean is , you will see autotrophs evolving, but they wont nessessarily be plants they will be something that works kinda like a plant, you may see things kinda like insects but they wont be insects etc.

We aren’t limiting ourselves that way.

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