With the recent discussion that I started about making a roadmap to microbe stage “completion”, I’d really like to keep it ballooning out of control, again as is usual for Thrive. I want to focus on the main line through the game so any design that fixes sessile gameplay, should be left out of the initial goals. I’m participating in this discussion only because I don’t want a bunch of rework programming tasks to be dumped on the programming team without any input from any of the programmers.
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Considering how much attention and positive reactions (I’ll link this especially: I made an account just to beg for a phosphate and ammonia revamp - Microbe Stage - Thrive Community Forum) this has gotten. I think I might need to react.
I’m currently focusing on just fixing some bugs and small things before getting back to further prototype development. So I think I might want to pick doing something about this. As I mentioned before a simple change to do that get started towards this would be the following:
- Cells generate ammonia and phosphate automatically towards reproduction
- Reproduction compound use has a maximum rate of use
- New game options to turn off or on the above two features
- Base cost for cell reproduction that needs to be filled in addition to the organelle split costs for microbes to divide. I’ll make this and the reproduction resource use rate into easily tweakable constants for balancing.
If people don’t like the end result more than the current way, those 2 new game options can be set to off by default.
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Sounds good! Really excited to see what it feels like in-game.
I think those are all really good easy to implement quick fixes to get a proof of concept going. In the future, I’d be glad to help in making the Ammonia and Phosphate absorption variable (depending on several factors like membrane size, membrane type, environmental concentration, etc), and removing the base reproduction cost and making it entirely comprised of organelle costs (and rebalancing where necessary).
What do you mean by this? The rate at which ammonia and phosphate transfer from storage towards reproduction progress?
Yes, because otherwise the players can just go to a really dense clouds / engulf a lot of stuff to just get to the editor in 10 seconds.
This seems 100% impossible to me. We can’t have the generation time going from like 5 seconds to a few minutes, so we need to have a much larger initial cost than the organelle costs.
If playing the first 5-10 generations are 90% just being in the editor, that would really change how the game feels. It would be more like the swimming around game part just being something the player has to get out of the way in order to get back to the “real” game which would be the editor.
Ah okay perfect, yeah that makes sense.
Yeah I would definitely not want the first 5-10 generations to be 90% being in the editor. I’m sure we could make such a thing work if we implement variable absorption rates based on your membrane size and some other tweaks. I’ll experiment with that in the future. For now though go ahead and put the base cost I’m just thinking for the future.
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I’m going to keep this conversation going by asking an as of yet unadressed question:
Is the suggestion to do away with naturally occuring ammonium/phosphate clouds? Or is the idea to remove them as clouds all together?
Currently ammonium and phosphate, together with glucose, act as the “blood” of microbes. When microbes die, they drop their organelles along with a cloud of nutrients. The organelles then release their nutrients into the environment until they are depleted and dissolve completely.
Would the idea be to still have microbes release ammonium/phosphate upon death? Because removing these compounds as clouds all together would mean doing away with this dissolving mechanism. And imo this dissolving feels pretty natural and removing it would be a step back.
On the other hand, keeping ammonium/phosphate clouds in this form and simultaneously implementing them as invisible environmental compounds akin to nitrogen or oxygen would set a new precedent: They would be the first compounds which could be present both in a concentrated and in an environmental form.
The latter option could potentially be confusing for the player, but imo it’s better than to remove ammonium/phosphates crucial role as microbes spilling body fluids.
Furthermore, enabling ammonium/phosphate to be present both in a concentrated and in an environemtal form opens up a possibility which I alluded to earlier in this thread:
The way I see it this could be a viable compromise which leaves the early game as it is, yet tackles two central problems with the current system, which are
- The frustration of finding enough nutrients to reproduce as a large cell and especially as a mutlicellular organism
- The impossibility of sessile gameplay
Both of these problems only arise multiple generations into the game, which is when they should be tackled. There is no need to make the early-game less fun in order to make the late-game more fun.
Popping back into this thread with a sudden thought I’ve not seen anyone mention:
The phosphate generation mod proves that having infinite ammonia and phosphate available causes one big problem: cells multiply without limit, filling the screen and tanking performance. There is now a slight mitigation thanks to Made microbe reproduction respect entity limits by hhyyrylainen · Pull Request #3536 · Revolutionary-Games/Thrive · GitHub, but that has knock on effects on gameplay as hhyyrylainen noted in the related issue. What will removing compound clouds or having a passive reproduction rate do to stop the same thing happening?
@Oliveriver Well I think we have to make a distinction between generation and passive absorption. The microbes shouldn’t “generate” compounds out of nowhere, their rate of reproduction would be tied to the concentration of environmental compounds.
But yeah, I can see how this could represent a problem, especially with propositions of incredibly fast passive absorption floating around, like reaching reproduction in under 30 seconds (which I really don’t think would be a good idea for various reasons).
Now that you brought this up, I remember another problem this could generate:
When a cell splits, its glucose will be split between its two descendants. Unless they found some glucose before splitting again (which seems unlikely at such fast intervals of reproduction) the consecutive generations of on-screen microbes would have ever less glucose and would quickly perish.
The player organism would kind of circumvent this, as the player always starts with a base amount of glucose. This results in the “flipside problem” of the former problem, which is that the player never has to face the consequences of an unsustainable lifestyle.
All in all, I think passive absorption can only ever be a viable model if we ensure that the passive absorption rate isn’t ever too fast. And I suspect that bar of “too fast” can be reached all too quickly.
I started on this:
The basic functionality should work, I’ll probably have enough time tomorrow to make sure the tutorial still makes sense and do something for multicellular.
Edit: for the sake of documenting this which might be interesting, I’ll say that yesterday I worked about 2 hours on this to get the basic functionality done (single microbes only, no multicellular, didn’t fix tutorial). And today I worked 6 hours basically just doing the multicellular part, fixing and tweaking the tutorial and various bugs and things that likely would have confused the players. I think that shows pretty well the ratio of getting something started and getting it across the finish line.
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The way I envisioned it, no, they would still release these compounds. We could have them release each compound as separately coloured clouds as they do currently, or we could have them release a single gooey substance that represents their cytoplasm (which would be more realistic), that when absorbed yields glucose, ammonia, and phosphate.
Their rate of absorption will be directly proportional to their environmental concentration, and as such we’d have to implement a basic nutrient cycle for ammonia and one for phosphate. Both Ammonia and Phosphate can be generated from several natural processes, and then can get consumed by cells, and so should eventually peter out at an equilibrium where consumption matches production. The rate of natural production of these two therefore serves as an upper limit to how much life a planet or biome can sustain (as well as other factors like sunlight and oxygen availability).
Awesome work HH thanks so much! I can do some testing once I return. Also, I can help with tutorial work both in doing the writing and in coding, so happy to help flesh out the tutorial.
I did rework the tutorials to work with the new system, so that should be taken care of already, at least on a basic level. This is a pretty huge game mechanic change so maybe rethinking the tutorialization around it might make sense still.
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