These sound very interesting! I’m not qualified to comment on which ones are problematic in light of hhs earlier comments and which ones are okay, but I’ll add my thoughts regardless.
I’d like to open up some questions about the graphical depiction of these upgrades. The two upgraded organelles which we have in the game right now (chemoreceptor and pulling cilia) look the same as their base versions. I think this is fine for now as I wouldn’t know how to visually communicate which chemoreceptor searches for which object.
Some of the upgrades you suggest clearly indicate that the upgraded organelles would look different from the base version, such as the red and brown thylakoids. This makes a lot of sense, as their coloring impacts their functionality and it would be strange to upgrade a thylakoid to be brown without it changing its color.
Firstly, I’d like to ask the programmers: We already have a system which changes the organelle colors based on the color you choose for your cell in the appearance tab. How feasible would it be to modify this system to recolor some organelles depending on their upgrade? If this is possible at all, we could then talk about wether the red thylakoid would always have the same shade of red or wether it would just be pushed towards red in its rgb value from where it was when it had the base color of the cell… Anyways I’m curious to hear programmers views on the feasibility of this:)
Secondly, if we suppose that this recoloring of individual organelles is feasible, I’d like to propose to reuse this system to visually differentiate other upgrades which you have mentioned. Here are the examples which make sense in my mind:
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Metabolosome with Increased Cold Tolerance - These metabolosomes could either look more reddish than the base metabolosome in order to show that they produce heat. Alternatively, it could have a turqouise/blueish tint to give the feeling that the microbe belongs in the cold environment. In this case, the metabolosome might look reminiscent of a sort of anti-cooling agent (which for some reason looks blueish in my mind)
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Metabolosome with Increased Toxin Resistance - These metabolosomes would have a pink tint, as toxins seem to always be pink in Thrive.
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Hyperthermophilic Thermosynthase and Hyperthermophilic Chemosynthesizing Proteins - These feel like they should have a reddish tint as the microbe should look like it fits hot environment and the red is a natural intensification of the yellow of the base organelles in terms of the warmth of the color. When taking this into account, we should probably give preference to the blueish tint for the Metabolosome with Increased Cold Tolerance which I discussed earlier as it would be strange for a reddish tint to represent both a preference for heat and a preference for the cold.
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Storage Capacity v. Glycolysis Ideally, we would represent this as the cytoplasm being more transparent for the increased storage capacity and more opaque/whiteish for the increased glycolysis. This would make sense as this would clearly communicate that the standard cytoplasm being an intermediate between the two extremes. Increased transparency would represent the needed emptiness and increased opacity/whiteness would communicate a stronger connection to glucose, which is white. However, this sounds like a nightmare to implement, as it would surely be hard to render each hex with a different opacity. So this upgrade probably shouldn’t be represented graphcially at all!