The Build-Up to 1.0

Deus · October 25, 2025, 2:28am

This is a thread for organizing discussion related to potential efforts related to the 1.0 release. I don’t think we should pressure ourselves to make the 1.0 release a fireworks show. But it is a significant milestone built on the labor/support of hundreds of volunteers and thousands of community members, and is a great opportunity for building engagement and momentum for future releases and outreach. So I do think we should put in a decent amount of additional effort to honor our past and put ourselves in a solid position for attention.

To start, I will post notes taken from the developer meeting which took place on October 11th, 2025, which focused on cleansing out the roadmap and some basic discussion related to the 1.0 release.

We should create a section of our next roadmap for the Multicellular which rolls over items that we don’t feel are binding for 1.0, but would still be important to have long-term.
Context dependent hints probably aren’t necessary anymore because of the tutorial rework and the text which pops up explaining events.
For performance related issues - graphics presets are probably sufficient for 1.0, and other benchmarking/more labor intensive tasks aren’t necessary. For presets, disabling the ripple effect and disabling MSA should be considered, as @HyperbolicHadron noticed them to be rather expensive on their model low-spec computers.
Loading screen tips which are more in-depth and advanced are needed. I can work on creating those by EOM November.
We should consider posting an application of some sorts on the forums inviting someone to focus on polishing the Thriveopedia. I am working on some organelle pages and other members occasionally work on it, but there are a bunch of potential takes and ideas that can be integrated within the in-game Thriveopedia.
The binding sound effect is fine as is to also be the engulfment sound effect, since that noise can imply a general “your cell is actively doing something” mode. But keeping it on the rolling-forward section of the roadmap is fine.
General balancing is more important at this point than specific items, such as the death penalty coefficients. Current balancing processes are adequate for resolving “final” stage balancing, though this is inherently something that will be continuous based on feedback and progress.
For the intro cutscene, HyperbolicHadron can create a simple one for panspermia using his planet generator. Overall, not completely necessary for 1.0 binding, but is really desirable in the long-term to differentiate starts.
Cell division animation can be bound to the 1.0 roadmap still, but a more simple implementation is acceptable. Hh has some ideas for a simple, not extremely fancy effect.
For terrain, having a few more chunk configurations would be useful. I can try my hand at some basic tweaking and try to get decent progress there by EOM November, but I’d need atleast one reference for each terrain type in a patch to work with.

Beyond that, I will bring up some potential points for discussion…

There are numerous efforts behind the scenes, particularly one that relates to @Thim, which we should be mindful of (being intentionally vague here for now). Does Thim or anyone else feel the need to bring something up, or have an idea related to that effort?
We brought up creating atleast a few shorts in time for 1.0, since YouTube shorts can acquire a good number of views. I say we could target atleast three displaying some of our mechanics - maybe how the climate evolves/environmental events, basic gameplay interactions such as engulfing or toxins or stabbing, and a bit of editor gameplay - which could catch the eye of a person unfamiliar with the game. Does anyone have any ideas here?
Along with a trailer, it could be a good idea to create a video honoring prior versions of Thrive. Basic ideas include prior versions of the game. Would be worthwhile to tag @Naggorath here, but ideas are welcome.
It might be a good idea to post items on social media, such as Reddit, before 1.0 comes out noting that Thrive is actually leaving the Microbe Stage. I can post some threads on Reddit, but are there any other ideas related to outreach?
This is something I bring up often, but I do think it would be nice to reach out to some former devs in a friendly manner, invite them to the podcast if they wish, and generally show them how far their little project has gone. It’s hard to wrap our heads around, but this is a pretty big freaking deal for Thrive.

I’m not exactly exemplifying this in this post since I’m listing out points - but I think if someone brings an idea up, they should try to offer their effort to execute. We’re a team, and we’ll support each other in these endeavors, so not everything is solely on an individual person - but we all need to put our hands in if we want 1.0 to be a notable release.

(and as an FYI: if I tagged you for a particular item, I’m not trying to assign everything on you or demanding an explanation; just want to see if there is any input from people involved with certain things )

Also linking the current state of the roadmap: Release Roadmap - Thrive Developer Wiki

Also:

HyperbolicHadron · October 27, 2025, 5:56pm

As far as media that we produce for 1.0, such as trailers, gameplay videos, etc. do we think that posting it all one 1.0 releases is the best idea or would we space it out, either posting some leading up to 1.0 release or posting at a consistent rate after release?

And after 1.0 release, do we intend on trying to keep up the momentum by continuing to focus more on media updates, either for a short period like a month after release or on a longer timescale?

We are limited of course by how much effort people are willing to spend on these tasks, but I think at least in the near term after 1.0 there would be an uptick in willingness to work on these sorts of things. For me, I am trying to get the world generator into a state that, even if turns out that there is not enough time to integrate it fully into Thrive before 1.0, that it can be used to show any ‘future of Thrive’ or 3D stages concepts for the future stages of development. Creating a panspermia intro cutscene is one example of a scene that I should be able to accomplish before 1.0 releases.

This does bring up a point I would like to discuss more: how exactly do we want to present the 1.0 release, in terms of Thrive’s current state as well as the plans for the future?

Put it another way, how do we want to pitch Thrive upon its 1.0 release? This especially concerns the main Steam trailer, as well as whatever changes we make to the front page of the website. I know we will want to focus on the microbe stage completion, but how much do we want to emphasize the next stage (multicellular) both in its current state and how we will be developing it next? And how about the rest of Thrive’s future, especially the Macroscopic stages which will eventually be the heart of the game? And the Society to Space stages, which are currently the least developed in concept and yet are still a huge portion of the overall game?

My thoughts would be that we want the 1.0 release to primarily focus on completion of the microbe stage, secondarily emphasize the currently high momentum Thrive has as a project by showing the Multicellular stage’s current state and Thrive’s immediate future, and thirdly show off the long term vision for Thrive in its later stages.

Lets call it maybe 60% Microbe stage completion, 20% Multicellular Stage immediate future, and 20% complete vision of Thrive’s future.

I think that I would be most useful by helping out with presenting the long term future vision of Thrive, as the world generator that I have spent the majority of my time on Thrive developing is primarily focused on the future. I intend on creating demos and videos of the world generator before 1.0 release anyway, and knowing how we want Thrive to present its future stages would be useful in knowing what to create, and whether it would be integrated into the trailer and other videos/website or if it should be separated to avoid any confusion about what state the game is at in development.

One interesting difference is that our website’s home page is, aside from the 2021 Trailer, a fairly comprehensive if somewhat generic (and in need of an update) overview of the entire Thrive project. On the other hand, our Steam page is pretty focused on just the Microbe Stage, with a little bit of Multicellular mentioned, and essentially no mention of future stages. I assume this difference is mainly due to wanting to prevent misconceptions on the current state of the game for Steam reviews, and the main website has not had its written content updated as recently. How much would we want to change this for 1.0 and the future? Do we want to have the website and the Steam page content more unified? We will at least want to increase emphasis on multicellular stage in the Steam page once 1.0 releases.

I am interested in helping write and update the content related to the Macroscopic and later stages and especially the Society and later stages, both on the website and the wiki, but I need to know how we want to present Thrive’s future going forwards to know how it should be structured.

hhyyrylainen · October 27, 2025, 7:28pm

While I suppose it is fair to ask these questions, I almost entirely expect that in total 1 to 2 pieces of extra outreach are managed for the entire 1.0 release. I say this very pessimistic view because it almost always ends up being the case with Thrive that people talk much more about plans than what gets actually actively done by anybody.

But I do remember that if you post everything at once on social media that’s basically a waste. You should wait at least like 6-8 hours between posts to get maximum impact (and people from slightly different timezones).

Are you still talking about the main trailer or? In my opinion the trailer has to be 80% microbe stage so that we can hit all of the major features and show of the best visuals. And only the remaining 20% should be mostly about “going beyond” with some multicellular footage and then like fading out and insinuating that there will be more stuff even after multicellular.

Which is how it must be, because the page has to represent the Thrive people are considering buying at that exact moment, not a vague future promise what might be.

I don’t think we’ll magically have much more active people suggesting updates to the Steam page, but I do think it needs to be updated for 1.0 as we’ll have much bigger impact features done than some of the much weaker points on the page currently.

For example, anyone could have suggested adding any of the major features we’ve done over the past 3 years to the Steam page, but no one has done so. Thus I don’t think that going forward people would magically be much more inclined to either volunteer or remand me about updating the Steam page text.

The developer wiki should be updated first. But before that there should be at least some rough consensus on decided things to be put on the wiki. The later stage pages being so barren is actually a benefit here as otherwise we’d spend years talking about the plans for the future stages that would basically be wasted in my opinion. I don’t think we should put any significant extra content on any of the wiki pages past awakening as that’s still so far away and the future game design has to be constrained by the earlier Thrive stages that will be done once we get that far. So I think that going crazy with updating the later wiki pages will be wasted effort, but I certainly wouldn’t be against having a bit more defined goals and major directions written on the future stage pages.