I don’t think it is a good idea to withhold releasing the microbe stage in the hopes that delaying it makes it more likely for further stages to get major development. That just seems entirely backwards. We might as well abandon the microbe stage development at that point and just randomly make the most impressive seeming parts of the later stages. Then we’d be in a point where the start of the game is almost polished and we have a bunch of somewhat playable prototypes but no fully complete part of the game at all.
I have more to say on this but I suspect the dedicated thread will be a better place to fully formulate my thoughts.
This is a good idea, because like I suggested there’s probably not enough time to finish a full planet generator thing.
You should check the PatchMapGenerator.cs file to see how it is made. It is just a simple “one” step algorithm that just directly generates the patch objects and assigns positions to them based on a few rules. It doesn’t have any fancy underlying data structure that is converted to patches.