The Microscopic Editor's Role in the Macroscopic Editor

Gameplay
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This is something I’ve kind of been actioning through my Macroscopic Editor concepts, but haven’t really stated out loud. I feel that it is important enough to verbalize.

Historically, a lot of ideas in the Macroscopic Stage Editor have been rooted in the Microbe Cell Editor. Part of this is familiarity with the Microbe Stage and previous ambiguity about the Macroscopic Editor, and part of this is a general desire to have connection between the stages.

However, my editor concepts have explicitly tried to avoid involving the Microscopic Editor as much as possible for multiple reasons.

  • The Sheer Volume of Specialized Features - There are so many specialized adaptations, features, and components of the cells in a macroscopic creature, that it would be extremely difficult to represent a good number of them in a way that is scientifically accurate. Plus the art assets and such that would also need to be churned out for small parts.
  • Complexity of the Macroscopic Editor - If the macroscopic editor is sufficiently designed so that it is complex and deep, it should be sufficient. It should be complex to the point that the player must think critically about how to design their organism, but not critical enough to the point that players are absolutely lost. Having a huge reliance on the Microscopic Editor as well can add a serious burden to the player, who is then tasked with managing both the numerous cell types in their organism and
  • The Nature of Macroscopic Adaptations - A significant majority of macroscopic adaptations are expressed most strongly as adaptations to giant structural units, not as tiny adaptations to the building blocks of these structures. The focus of the evolutionary story we are trying to tell is a shift from minute tweaks to incomprehensibly small organisms, to an engineering question of larger structures in the face of environmental and competitive pressures. If we’re a city design game, that would be like tasking the player with making sure the mix of concrete the player uses is sufficient instead of them placing concrete structures - a bit outside of the scope.
  • Tedium - You’re not playing as the cell you’d be designing - you’d just be opening up another editor window, placing a part down, then receiving some sort of stat because of this tweak. This contrasts to Microbe Editor gameplay in the Microscopic Stages, where you see the effect of the change in direct gameplay. And it would also contrast to the more form-based, constraint influenced design of the Macroscopic Stage editor as a whole. If Microscopic Editor gameplay in the Macroscopic Stage is just placing down parts, that could very easily be seen as an annoyance, and can easily be represented through Macroscopic Editor mechanics.
  • The Macroscopic Editor Should be Self-Sufficient - Where does the boundary between what falls under the “jurisdiction” of the Microscopic and Macroscopic Editors? Say we ask the player to upgrade their nervous system by tweaking their neuron cells - then we surely must ask the player to upgrade almost every other aspect of other organ systems in the same way, necessitating more work in that regard that would take away effort from ways to represent organ system development in the macroscopic scale?

This isn’t me saying that I am completely against the Microbe Editor having some sort of role in the Macroscopic Editor, whatever that looks like. Rather, the point I am trying to make is:

  • We design the Macroscopic Editor, and ONLY AFTER the Macroscopic Editor is robust in an area we can find ways, if desired, to implement Microscopic Editor connections. This is in opposition to designing the Macroscopic Editor with accommodating the Microscopic Editor.
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I’m in favour of the microbe editor keeping being used mainly because I’m not keen on doing an extra editor (it’s a lot of work) when we already have something that can be extended with quite low effort.

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Extended to what - it being the entire basis of the macroscopic stage? We’d have an extremely difficult time representing much of anything in a way that is interesting to the player, as opposed to the more setting-appropriate Macroscopic Editor concepts existing.

And if it’s extended to being a really minimal part of a macroscopic editor, the above design questions remain.

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Instead of reimplementing tissue editor as some new thing, just using the microbe editor for it. That’s what I mean. And yes, I do mean that tissue stats should be derived that way from organelles, instead of making some new kind of editor.

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I do want to emphasize that in theory this will not be something frequently done, but rather done rarely, with big effects. As you note in:

We are however talking about a game where in your step from The Sims to Simcity, you might not have established that concrete, wooden planks, steel, etc. are things produced here. And we do want there to be a strong connection between the Stages, right? I think that practically requires some connection between celltypes and what your Macroscopic Creature can do.

But going back to my initial point, and as a bit of a counter to “The Sheer Volume of Specialized Features”, I want to look at the cell types in the human body. While there are, by some measures, hundreds, if we try to keep it to broad categories that fit Thrives level of detail, we have:

  • Muscle cells
  • Nerve cells
  • Epithelial cells
  • Blood cells
  • Fat cells
  • Connective cells
  • Endothelial cells
  • Bone cells

And that’s really in some places already pushing what I think is relative. I am not looking at the number though. I want to ask the question: How many of these do all animals have, all the way back to the urbilaterian, really just a worm that would be at the start of the Macroscopic Stage?

Everything but the last two. You lose more going further back to the divergence point with sponges, but frankly I think we’re at a Multicellular Stage divergence here.

So throughout Macroscopic and Aware there could be two times you go into the tissue editor to edit cells a bit to add the relevant parts. And those would be extremely major events: Getting bones, and getting a system of blood vessels.

So I do have to disagree a bit with:

I think by limiting things to the more fundamental cell types, we can keep tissue editing limited to very few, very impactful events. And that goes both for both using the cell editor, and any other hypothetical system.

I can agree with this as a first step of development, we do not necessarily need to worry about tissue straight away. But I do think that a deliberate connection with the Multicellular is an eventual necessity. And the design of the cells is the main thing connecting the Multicellular and Macroscopic designs as written right now. If one species becomes Macroscopic while having muscle cells and another without muscle cells, I want to see that difference.

Honestly, without a connection to the Multicellular Stage’s cell types, I think any “tissue” segment to the Macroscopic editor is superfluous.

So, absent having the cell editor in Macroscopic, how would you make the connection between the Multicellular and Macroscopic?

The only thing I can really imagine is a tissue unlock system, which is just a series of checkboxes (potentially in a tree?), where some are checked at the start based on your Multicellular Stage cell designs, with additional unlocks requiring a lot of MP.

I think we can all agree any actual tissue editor would be pointless in the scenario where it is not the cell editor, yes?

Personally, I would still just not like the idea of essentially all the subtleties from the first two Stages overboard when moving on. That flattens so much the life history in the game. It would be like deleting your species design when moving into Awakening and Society, only converting a few aspects into “society traits.”

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I do have some ideas related to an organ systems concept I’m outlining and will post soon in regards to that. From that, perhaps discussion regarding continuity can be more organized.

Beyond that, my general point is that if the cell editor is relevant for 2-3 times across the Macroscopic or Aware session: then the microbe editor is so small and limited in scope that tying significant, stage-shifting mechanics to it feels kind of like tacking on an incredibly big moment to a non-significant part of the stage. And if it is utilized so infrequently, why not just handle it completely within the macroscopic editor as a whole?

If it is utilized so infrequently, it could be really confusing for the player to all of a sudden jump into that editor and jump out with some sort of advanced macroscopic structure as a result of it. And I wouldn’t think we’d want to put so much effort and dedicated gameplay into a very tiny component of the larger experience - so I would imagine it would basically just be placing a few copies of a specific organelle/part, and calling it a day and letting the macroscopic editor take care of the rest.

Which I’m not necessarily or fundamentally opposed to - I’d have questions regarding consistency, but at that point it would be more about flavoring than a completely dedicated game mechanic. What I really would be concerned with is relying on the Microbe Stage Editor for a rather significant portion of the macroscopic stage. That opens up a whole lot of questions regarding where we are asking the player to focus.

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I look forward to seeing that!

Not sure how useful the rest of my comment is, since in the hypothetical without the cell editor and without a replacement, there is a big gap in the question “why does one species have the ability to place muscles, brain matter and/or bones, while another does not.”

Well, from the previous two stages, I think the player would be quite accustomed already to using the cell editor to add big new features. After all “Create new cell type to house this special organelle, then place this cell in my body design” is a core part of the Multicellular experience. I think then having the process for adding for example bone being “make a bone cell type, then add a bone to the body” would be the natural expectation for players, not especially confusing.

Having an entirely new system for unlocking tissue would be more confusing, if anything.

(Also, the idea would not be that creating a celltype suddenly means you have “some sort of advanced macroscopic structure as a result of it”, it would be a building block to let you add those)

I would say because this requires crafting a new system, instead of using the cell editor which we already have and can handle this.

Though that does not sound bad at all to me? With the exception of certain external organelles, this is again similar to Multicellular.

And I agree again that this should be a relatively infrequent thing. Cell-level edits are rather big changes that should be rare in Macroscopic and especially Aware. This also why we have a timescale shift, over the generations there should be many macroscopic morphological changes while the cellular internals stay mostly the same.

There are also things that a cell editor would be able to handle quite easily, but other systems with less nuance might struggle with. For example, just checking if the skin cell has chloroplasts and cilia would be quite easy. But how do other systems express this kind of tissue?