Organism Editor changes, Geography updates (ideas)

#6

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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#7

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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#8

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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#9

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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#10

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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#11

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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#12

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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#13

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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#14

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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#15

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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#16

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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#17

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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#18

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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#19

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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#20

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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#21

Yep, totally agreed with you, the idea of have some organisms that works different than earth lifeforms it’s interesting, when I said insects I didn’t meant bugs and ants literally, I meant little organisms that should carry plagues with them selves, and as I planned before it don’t need to be an full organism because would be hard to recreate an Bunch of little flying aliens like bugs and etc, so they could be just an visual blur effect for bigger organism and if the organism keeps around the bugs for a long time would have the risk of infections, and etc…

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#22

I think you will have enough time :slight_smile:

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#23

I hope so, I’m talking about an 3D animated full video but I’ll do my best to be early.

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#24

As TJWhale pointed out, I’m afraid this sort of discussion - speculating on later stage concepts without much relevance to the Microbe Stage or specifics for implementation - isn’t really suitable for the development forums. We try to restrict to either Microbe Stage design or, at most, prototyping the later stages.

You are however free to discuss such things (and post that video) on the community forums where I’m sure plenty of community members will be excited about your concepts. Devs will still reply there too, and if an idea gets enough traction it will be considered for the game.

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#25

I just had ideas for the Aware to Spacial stage and some to Multicellular transition to Aware, because I don’t wanna talk about the microbe concepts because I guess it would be more difficult to have an idea for the Microbe stage being accepted than for future stages there still just in ideas and concept…

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