How will the “Aware” stage be done? The current microbial stage has you play as a cell for a day or two (possibly less, depending on how long the day on your planet is.) before reaching enough compounds and splitting. So how will the loop be in the “Aware” stage? Will our creatures be fully grown when we start to play as them or will they be juveniles? I think they will be juveniles considering how the current multicellular stage has the player play as an underdeveloped form of the player species before growing to maturity and splitting/budding.
This could be used to have larval and mature forms of a species
However as the game currently works, you cannot “take away” from the creature as it grows. Only add new cells. So something like a frog’s tail disappearing won’t work in the current version (something that should be fixed in the future imo).
How many IRL minutes/hours will it take for a creature to get to maturity? It already takes a "decent’ amount of time (5-15 minutes) for 20 celled organisms in the current version. So I think it would logically take much longer for a larger organism.
Finally, the game-play loop. Unlike Spore’s mini game-esque creature stage, I think the Aware stage could function like a survival game if the growth time were to take a couple hours.
One old game that managed to do something like this was “The Isle”, in this game you play as a dinosaur. It is essentially what I think the Thrive “Aware” stage could look like.
The game-play loop in this one is simply:
Start off as a hatchling → grow to juvenile → grow to adult → have offspring (which are other players)
and rinse and repeat until the end of time, of course you also have to compete with other players trying to do the same thing (and some are carnivores!). While also risking hours of progress on death.
What Thrive could be doing is replacing the players with (somewhat) clever AI(s) and rather than the loop going on forever, the end goal will be to get to the next stage. Each time the player has offspring, it would open the editor (obviously). Thrive could have each creature-loop last for about an hour or less depending on how complex and large the organism is, I don’t really see the Aware stage being short at all.
Sexual Dimorphism, will there be an editor for each individual sex(es?) if so, how will that work? I suppose an editor for the larval form of the creature would be interesting too.
What do you guys think the Aware stage could look like?
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
2
I recall it was said the amount of time spent in an aware stage inter-editor gameplay should be roughly a dozen minutes or so. So nowhere near an hour.
The Caste System is supposed to cover Sexual Dimorphism, Life Stages, and Eusocial Castes, amongst other things. There are several threads discussing how it might work. It will hopefully be implemented it the macroscopic stage, if not, to some degree, in multicellular.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
6
It should be mentioned that if there was to be a caste system implemented for multicellular, it would have a completely different codebase to the one of macroscopic+.
True, and it would not be worth delaying macroscopic to do it, but I hope, after they bring some people and money in, they go back and add it to multicellular. It would make the difference between a good and a great multicellular. But it can wait.
Back to the original question. I think 12 minutes is to short. How many life stages would that even cover. Early macroscopic maybe, but later on, when you have a more complex organism, have to grow up, find a mate, and hatch eggs, I think 20-30 minutes at least. And that isn’t taking into account the creatures that build a nest/dig a burrow. Or build a Eusocial Hive. Those could take a while. Then add tool building for Awake creatures. For some of those, an hour sounds plausible.
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
8
Well I am fairly sure aware is supposed to last only like 5 hours or so, and one would need a substantial amount of generations played to get to awakening…
I think 20 minutes is a pretty good time for the player to enjoy the life cycle gameplay without stretching the gameplay too much (15 generations with a 20 minute life cycle is about 5 hours)
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
10
I think one would need more generations for a full journey from a simple fish to a human.
For gameplay reasons I don’t think we can increase the editor cycle length (much) in the later stages. Otherwise the game “speed” will slow to a crawl, and I don’t expect that to be fun for long enough. I think we rather need to keep the editor cycles short so that the player can have a meaningful number of them (and thus keep the meaningful simulation of evolutionary steps going).
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aah31415
(The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)
12
And the multicellular critters are ought to develop faster once the development gets there.
