I say it here so we can avoid arguing about it again: do we want to call the player microbe LUCA?
The short recap of our discord debate is that the term LUCA (last universal common ancestor) refers to the latest organism in the tree of life such that all organisms alive “today” are descended from that organism. When you are running time forward millions of years, that gets hard to measure, but in theory, assuming all other microbes you encounter in the first generation are your children, the statement is always true as of that pop up message, but could become false later on (even for that starting microbe) depending on how the evolutionary tree pans out.
How so? My opinion is still that the player is either the LUCA or they get a game over. All species are generated from existing ones and in non-freebuild mode the player species is the only one added initially to the world. So assuming that someone doesn’t find an extremely rare case where another species wouldn’t split off from the player at generation 1 (It seems that auto-evo is currently tuned to always create 2 or 3 new species in the first editor cycle), it should be the case that the player literally always is the LUCA?
I suppose that is possible. But even then player species generation 2 would be the LUCA? Eventually enough species split from the player that at some point there are extant species descended from the player. So isn’t it still accurate to tell the player that they are the LUCA? Even if it’s at generation 2 (or generation 3, 4 or whatever) rather than generation 1.
(well as long as we assume that easy playthroughs are “non-canon” as you can swap to another species if you would get a game over)
This has been a very time consuming process to create 6 new tutorials, and to adjust the text and sizing of all of the tutorials that are part of the primary flow.
But I think it’s now done. I’ll post screenshots of the full tutorial flow so people can give feedback on the new tutorial. I didn’t exactly get as clear message about the metabolism pathway in the tutorial, but there’s multiple mentions of being a cellular factory trying to produce ATP to stay alive and there’s mention of intermediate products. So hopefully that makes the core gameplay loop much more approachable.
I hid the screenshots as there’s a lot of them, hopefully showcasing how much stuff there is in the tutorial actually.
That’s the main flow of the tutorial. There’s also multiple context-dependent tutorials that may trigger at any point (when they are relevant, but mostly they are just here and there or after the main flow). After that last screenshot it is just 2 editor cycles until the tutorial prompting the player to add the nucleus (if they are ready for it) so this rework definitely makes the tutorial portion of the game much longer.
I made devbuilds if someone wants to playtest: eb2da6102122dbd7b22b5845f4a90fa6872ea0f8
Really like the flow from the images and the playtesting I did. Great job overall. A few bullet points I wrote down:
Would probably be good to mention that you can press spacebar to pause the game if they need to read a tutorial slide during live gameplay, reducing the threat of starving resources.
Some tutorial messages in the auto-evo report disappear quickly just by habitually and instantly switching tabs when entering the editor and report screen. This of course is partly because I, an experienced player, just want to skip ahead to the editor 90% of the time first and foremost, but it might be worthwhile to have an “OK” button present so that players can choose when to dismiss information.
When pointing towards the cellular process tab, it might be harder for players to locate it. Telling them to look at the bottom left of the screen would help here I think. I have a larger monitor, so there’s a lot more space on my display for me to get lost in to be fair.
Also a bit more of an important point: at this point of the tutorial directing towards the Auto-Evo prediction screen, the emphasized area didn’t correspond to the intended section:
Which tutorial / at which point this would be presented?
From what I’ve seen the players are usually pretty good at not spamming the tab change buttons when playing the tutorial. The reason the previous tutorials clear is so that the new ones fit on screen. If the old ones didn’t close then the player would need to manually close them and at that point they would then not get the tutorial they are intended to see at that point.
I don’t see this as a massive issue, but if it is a problem I could just hide the tab buttons entirely before the tutorial is completed.
I suppose, but that message already is very long in terms of a during swimming around section message. The game is helpfully paused by this tutorial so it should be fine if it takes a few extra seconds, though I can try to fit in the “bottom left” wording somewhere.
What did you do to trigger this state? From the screenshot it kind of looks like the auto-evo prediction part hasn’t been shown yet so you’ve managed to skip ahead in the tutorials and that probably broke it.
If I recall right, this tutorial cannot fit even a single more line of text…
I’ll just make a new tutorial that triggers the first time exiting the editor when another tutorial is not open. And then I’ll have space to briefly mention the saving of cool species feature and require the player to pause and unpause the game to complete that tutorial.
That would be helpful. About the only idea I have so far is that I’ll add a safety check to ensure the prediction panel is actually visible before that tutorial is allowed to trigger.
The message is a bit longer than necessary but I wanted to mention the fossilization feature as otherwise the player might be confused by the buttons that suddenly appear on screen.
I decided that as we are going with a full tutorial rework, I will also hide the tab bar while the earlier tutorials that are easy to skip haven’t been completed. So that way no more tutorial breaking (hopefully) by experienced players messing with it. This makes the tutorial slightly more annoying for someone who has played it before but this is the only easily doable tradeoff.
Added this mentions. (though this required the tutorial to take one more line of vertical space)
Would be good to test this more, but I’ll merge what I have now so that I can do immediately a follow up to fix some corner cases (and add one more missing tutorial about digestion efficiencies, which is now harder to see as the stat is all the way at the bottom)
