This is a freight train of excessive thought, but I think it’s good to express. My ultimate concern with this topic is placing limitations on an editor which:
- Will serve as a bedrock for atleast 5 hours, very easily even more hours of gameplay.
- Is the most ambitious in scope, and will have to support the greatest diversity of phenomena in the game.
- Will likely be Thrive’s big selling point: there are several “cell games” and many society/space civilization games, but very few “animal evolution” games.
I’m not saying this because I’m convinced anything suggested here is inherently flawed or unable to be “patched in” to a cohesive Macroscopic Editor. That’s just to say that in my head, the most important objective of a macroscopic editor concept is to make sure that, above all else, it is a great macroscopic editor. Obviously that’s the goal with any sort of mechanic in a game - it’s not like we created a microbe editor with the goal of it being anything else than the best possible microbe editor we can create - but the macroscopic editor is just so big in scope, that any limitation can be really jagged. And we have mechanics leading into the macroscopic.
So I get really nervous about hyper-focusing on making sure everything in the microscopic stages hooks up directly to the macroscopic editor across this time jump because the two editors have completely different rules, scopes, and goals. Or more specifically - focusing on the macroscopic editor with this at the front of our minds.
In my ideal world, we create macroscopic editor mechanics we know will work well, and then with those implemented, figure out how to hook the multicellular/microbe features in - not start with multicellular/microbe features as the base layer then find a way to jam macroscopic features on top. Though obviously this sounds a lot prettier than it would likely end up working.
That’s also why I took the approach I did in the macroscopic editor concept of just figuring out the best mechanics to represent as much as possible, instead of stressing over how to hook everything up. Building up this monumental and extremely important tool on mechanics not meant for this stage can lead to some very difficult constraints placed on possibilities.
For example, with membranes and the integumentary system as a whole: there are just so many questions related to mobility, muscle rigidity, flexibility of internal components, etc. which root from how membranes work in the microbe/multicellular stages. So I decided to distance from that a bit, and my first concern with the integumentary system was creating something that would work with representing as much of the diversity we see in metazoans.
That spawned the Skin Type & Skin Attribute system in the concept document. Then from there, I worked backwards to make some assumptions, and concluded that two options would work pretty well:
- There is one Skin Type that all motile macroscopic organisms start with, and your choice of membrane in the microscopic unlocks a unique Attribute, or -
- We create multiple Skin Types based on your membrane choice, that all have their own attributes.
The merit of either can be debated, but the larger point is that I started from a point of understanding what was best for the stage at hand, and then worked backwards to the Microbe/Multicellular - not started from the Microscopic Phases and worked forwards.
But I will concede that I am being very extreme and binary in this discussion when in reality, most aren’t mutually exclusive. I also want to clarify that I’m not trying to say that anyone is “hyper-focusing on hooking things up” in a rudimental way (everything brought up here is very important to consider, and would have to be considered no matter what approach we take), and I hope I don’t make that impression.
I honestly think that a part of this reaction is due to the fact that I wrote a bajillion words of macroscopic editor mechanics over a long period of time, and through that process, I bumped into hundreds of of dead ends and difficulties before landing on something that sounded kind of right for every concept. So I remember all of the ways I’ve gotten stuck for certain topics, and am really fixated and worried about us bumping into that down the road because of a decision we make earlier.
TL:DR - I really do hope we consider things from a “best for macroscopic, work backwards to the microscopic” approach instead of a “work with what we have and grow into the macroscopic” approach. Rathalos already does this in the original post well for many segments.