The multicellular stage, according to our legacy concepts, starts upon unlocking multicellularity and ends upon evolving a nervous system. This resulted in some awkwardness in that there would inherently be an early-late multicellular split, with the first half having microbe mechanics, and the second half having macroscopic mechanics.
I was generally not too bothered by this before, but recent discussions considering the limitations of transition between microscopic and macroscopic have changed my mind. Traditional concepts about the multicellular stage had an ambitious, continuously smooth transition between small and big, asking for there to be practically no abrupt jump. Recent concepts, dealing with the obvious difficulty of such a transition format, have instead proposed jumping to somewhere around a couple of centimeters of size as a macroscopic organism.
This jump now presents a very difficult issue - the nervous system likely evolves pretty soon after eukaryotic life becomes macroscopic: not before, or at a point of being microscopic. It is just unnecessary and unrealistic for a microbial, multicellular organism with barely differentiated cells to evolve anything like a nervous system, which was largely a response to a greater need to coordinate activity across thousands and thousands of increasingly variable cells. The microscopic organisms which do have a nervous system, like water bears, likely evolved them as larger organisms, and then afterwards shrunk down.
Besides plain old concerns about realism - since the nervous system would evolve pretty soon after the player becomes macroscopic, is it not odd to have an official “transition” to another stage be presented not at the most significant change in Thrive’s entire experience, but instead a couple of minutes afterwards? When an entirely new set of mechanics essentially have to be redefined, and many previous mechanics are fundamentally altered or irrelevant?
I know that we are aiming for as seamless of transitions as possible, so with a very romantic perspective, our stage names are nothing more than convenient markers for our discussion. But with the jump in scale now being necessary between the microscopic and macroscopic, there is the reality of a baked-in split in gameplay that our legacy concepts just aren’t accommodative of; in other words, the legacy marker is no longer convenient. The prototype multicellular stage already technically is dealing with that issue, which is why the evolution of a neuron is jammed in there. And our discourse has been split between “early” and “late” multicellular to denote two completely different sets of gameplay mechanics, which compromises realism behind the game, consistency of our discussions, and general organizing of our concepts.
In my opinion, we might need to reconsider the transition between microscopic and macroscopic as the ultimate signifier of a switch between the stages, not the evolution of a nervous system. We can keep the names, but they should probably refer to different parts of the game: Multicellular can refer to the microscopic multicellular gameplay, whereas Aware refers to the advent of the macroscopic stage as a whole. Aware stage will likely require the most development effort, and represents the meat of our game, so having the aware stage concept be cognizant of this and self-contained could be very good for organizing development.
Thoughts?