I might introduce new ideas here but I’m mostly looking to learn what is planned for development.
Also apologies if my biology jargon isn’t correct or too simplified.
As I understand it, development now seems planned toward one celled organisms in a world of one celled organisms.
From what I understand this kind of corresponds to bacteria(though my wikipedia dive seemes to indicate that’s too specific of a name)
I have 2 main questions
Will we also introduce viruses and will these be playable?
Other question, I feel like most of my knowledge on this scale has been gathered by watching cells at work so:
Will we add biomes inside of a body and can we make all cells in a human body (blood cells, immune cells, …)
In terms of in-game representation right now the plan is to represent a decent fraction of the diversity of : Eukayotes ( Protozoa, Cilliates, Amoeba, Dinoflagellates, Diatoms etc.), and Prokaryotes (bacteria, archea etc.) Of course there are so many of them , that what we represent will end up as a very very tiny small fraction of their diversity but a person can dream.
We have discussed viruses and usually come to the conclusion that if we ever do it it will be as particle clouds, not playable viruses,
For biomes inside the body, probably not, not that it wouldnt be cool, its just beyond our scope at the moment, we will have multicellular/animal gameplay before we even consider those things.
Building on what Untrustedlife said the game is set at the start of life on an alien planet. So your first cell will be the first life on the planet and then everything will be descended from that. For that reason we’re nothing thinking of having cell play inside larger creatures because you need to make the larger creatures for them to exist.
For the same reason we’re not considering nano-tech, which could in principle be awesome for the microbe stage, it doesn’t fit with the setting.
Feel free to ask as many questions as you like! A lot of the project is folk knowledge so it’s helpful to write it down.
Just to add on to the last bit about being inside a human body. I don’t think this will ever be possible, as someone has mentioned it before that if the player is a cell while inside a creature’s body, by the time the player’s cell becomes sentient their host creature will most likely have conquered half the galaxy already.
Well that all assumes we have to follow a linear journey like spore.
We also don’t know what it takes for a species to become sentient so it may well take the other a very loooooong time.
I don’t know what a non linear journey should look like but I also feel we shouldn’t rule anything out at this point.
Many people seem to want to play scenarios in Thrive that won’t lead them to progress through the game. They basically want to ultimately lose on purpose.
I think we can add such things at some point. But anything that doesn’t lead you to victory at the end of the space stage should be very low priority.