Oh, I understood it as you could place down cytoplasmic proteins like we can currently, rereading it though I’m pretty sure you’re correct, duh.
So in that case, a one-hex cell would be able to use any amount of proteins, so long as the player has them unlocked, and growing large wouldn’t be an absolute necessity if you wanted to use more than one protein?
Would it be too unrealistic for a cell to be running multiple processes, all at full efficiency, in every single hex of cytoplasm it has?
After reading through everything once again, and thinking about our discussion and all the points everyone has made, I believe I’m actually starting to lean towards keeping our prokaryotic parts while introducing the protein system for passive effects for now. My reasoning is that Thrive as it is was built around the placement of parts to build your cell up to ever increasing complexity, and completely removing the prokaryotic organelles creates a bit of a void in that area as we dont really have much to fill it with at the moment. It’s alot of work for an uncertain reward.
That doesnt mean I am entirely against the idea of converting our prokaryotic protein parts into this system, But I would prefer to go about it slowly rather than dunking ourselves headfirst into a completely new system.
That being said. Here is my decision; If we all like the idea of the protein slots system I say we go ahead and implement it. It would be a nice big feature to release alongside our environmental hazards such as cold once we are ready for that. All the while we keep our current prokaryotic parts alongside the system.
This way we can get a feel for the new system and see how we like it as a place for passive bonuses, and then decide on where to go from there.
Apologies for not replying earlier, classes went from 0 to 100.
Exactly. It’s actually quite realistic, since there are many proteins that are dispersed throughout the cell’s cytoplasm that perform many of its vital functions, and these proteins are tiny and evenly distributed across the cytoplasm. In gameplay terms, the limit on this would of course be gene space, and also that if you wanted to become a eukaryote to use eukaryotic organelles you’d have to get larger.
@Buckly Sounds great! It would be good to at least get the Protein Slots system into the game first to see how it feels like, before we take a more drastic step like removing all Prokaryotic Structures to implement those into Protein Slots as well.
Plus, if we are to think in terms of priorities, I think first we should focus on implementing Organelle Upgrades, then Protein Slots and Environmental Adaptations, and then finally revisit the idea of whether to switch Prokaryotic Structures into Protein Slots.
I can create a wiki entry to describe the system. In the meantime, since it’s not planned for this or the next release, I think we could just leave it in the “Finished Concept” bin for now and revisit it later when we want to implement it? Unless there are any inspired concept artists that want to visualize what the interface for this system will look like.
One question I have around this is how is it visually displayed to the player what proteins AI cells have? So if you’re swimming around and you see two single hexes of thylakoids how do you work out one has a tonne of proteins and the other very few?
It wouldn’t be displayed. Do we feel that it’s necessary that they are displayed?
Well I guess they would all look the same, but maybe that’s ok.
I guess one question is that if agents are in that same system then you wouldn’t have any ability to tell what was dangerous or not.
Which might be tricky from a gameplay perspective, and might be awesome, not sure.
Nope, you wouldn’t. There’d be an element of uncertainty when approaching foreign species as to what they’re capable of.
I’m not worried enough by it now to suggest we change that approach, I think it’s better if we just proceed like this and see how the player-base feels. I think it is important that not all information, especially about the AI players, always be immediately available to the player.
Players engulfing things wouldn’t have fun trying to randomly eat cells that won’t burst into agent projectiles that kill them. It’s pretty cool to be able to visually identify if something is prey or too toxic to eat.
I think on that point, it raises the question of what should happen when you engulf cells with damaging agents? Should they kill you, damage you, or have no effect.
If they kill you, then yeah definitely there should be a way to visually represent it to prevent that frustration.
If they only damage you, then I don’t think the visual cue is necessary, because the first time you try you’ll learn that that species is damaging, but will still be alive to learn from your mistake and apply it.
But also is it necessary that they damage you? I thought agents only deal damage (or perform their function) when ejected?
In the current version if a cell dies while it has agents stored, it will shoot up to 3 agent projectiles in random directions. If the player is unlucky enough to be hit by all 3, I think it’s enough to kill if they don’t have one of the membranes that buff health.
I think it makes sense that ingesting a poisonous cell that has agents in it deals damage. As the same agents on contact will hurt you. If suddenly they wouldn’t hurt you, if you got the agents in your cell through engulfment, feels wrong to me.
Hm interesting. I feel like there could be a few ways to account for this, but I can only think of these two:
We reduce or eliminate damage taken from ingesting toxic cells.
OR we keep the planned placeable hex organelle, the Agent Vacuole, as the organelle that stores and ejects agents. This would be a visual cue to the player which foreign cells could have toxic agents.
For the first time in a long time I had some time on my hands to dedicate to Thrive so I read this topic and made a quick concept.
First of all; I really like this idea. It preserves the familiar mechanic of placing parts onto a gird, without impacting your cell’s size and shape. This should makes understanding the mechanics much simpler, and potentially more satisfying. The shapes being used to limit availability of proteins is also a really clever way of unobtrusively blocking players from using eukaryotic functions.
The only significant issue I really have with this concept is the organization of the protein library. While it’s organization helps with visualizing the upgrade paths and relations between proteins, it is otherwise likely to be a messy affair when picking out the proteins you want to place into your cell. I think it would benefit from a selection similar to the parts list in the normal editor tab rather than the player needing to pick their proteins from what might feel like a messily organized drawer of tools.
But yeah I really like this idea and am glad you threw it out here. It might be a more appealing replacement to my own design of the protein slots, so I look forward to seeing what the others think about it.
Yeah, this is a pretty cool idea, I love the concept art too! However I do agree that finding individual proteins could get a bit frustrating, and also I’m not sure how I feel about the path to unlocking a protein being paved entirely out of unlocking other, unrelated proteins, especially if you don’t even know what they are beforehand. In the Organelle Unlocks thread I tried doing something similar, but as more of a tech tree with a lot of small, less expensive “steps” in between, and even then I found it difficult to avoid unwanted relationships between unrelated proteins.
Alright, so with this new idea for protein slots, I’ve decided to do some brainstorming on how we could make the concept more easily navigable for players, while still featuring the upgrade path mechanics that @MirrorMonkey2 provided in their concept.
The two new organelles I brought up in the concept are to provide players with options for different means of protein storage. The exact stats and costs are up for discussion, but I have provided an idea on their shape and storage capacity.
The micronucleus is fairly self explanatory, but the nucleoid might be a bit problematic when it comes to implementation. It would make sense that the nucleoid would be essential should it be a feature, but it wouldn’t make sense for a cell to still have one after evolving a nucleus. So perhaps the player’s nucleoid would be replaced by normal cytoplasm once they place down their nucleus?
Edit: I have decided that the starting nulceoid be replaced with a cytoplasm upon placing the nucleus, the nucleoid’s contained proteins will be migrated to the nucleus, so the player will not lose anything. The nucleoid will have the same stats and costs as a normal cytoplasm as well, so the player will experience no fundamental change aside from the natural costs of the nucleus.
I believe that accessing the protein placement menu should be done similar to organelle upgrades, by selecting a protein storing part in your cell and accessing it’s “upgrades” via the selection menu. This should help prevent too much visual button clutter in the UI.
Edit: I should mention that I do not believe we should use this system to replace the current prokaryotic parts, but to instead act as an addition to both prokaryotic and eukaryotic gameplay. From a gameplay perspective, keeping active processing proteins such as metabolosomes as parts helps keep prokaryotic and eukaryotic gameplay similar to each other. I would prefer that both types do not deviate too far from each other so that the transition between is not jarring to the player. It is also worth mentioning that I intend for proteins within the slots system be distinct in that they are intended to be passive changes to the cell’s functions and defenses, rather than active processes. I believe we can save the discussion of keeping the parts or not for after we implement the slots feature, as it would not be inherently difficult to migrate the parts into the slots system.
I’m not a huge fan of having the proteins as placable parts in the cell, particularly the CAMs (binding agents) which are distributed through the cell membrane and don’t make any sense being a placable thing. I much prefer the method outlined by Buckly most recently.
