Difficulty

Right now the game is great for testing purposes but lacks some basic things that “Spore” had, mainly the option to select world difficulty at the start of your new game. Now I personally have only very limited coding knowledge and game design knowledge, I have only really ever used MMF2, but, I know that at least in that program you had different “levels” for your game and each screen you saw was a different level including the home/start menu screen. With that program you could simply copy a whole level and then work of it so you could then make the level slightly different than the previous one without having to go and recode the whole damn level again. In doing that you could simply change the values of certain things in the level to make the game harder or more easy wilst still keeping the same level. Think Pac-Man but you change each dot you collect to give you only 1 point or 100000. Now I come back to my original topic, you could do this or something similar with Thrive, at least in its current state, by making the value of resources 2x (not the amount of clouds though) the current rate for a “Abundant” mode, while keeping everything the same for a “Hospitable” mode, and reducing the value to 0.5x for a “Harsh” mode.

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The reason I posted this was because whenever I played I would be significally lacking in one resource because the auto ATP creation would sap me dry of gluten and I could never get enough to make it anything more than just a complete grind for gluten or whatever resource I happen to be lacking.
And yes I do understand that basically thats what being a cell is all about but, from a gameplay perspective, it makes the game boring very quickly.

Maybe the game difficulty could work by making planets more or less habitable, with environments, how many huge, world ending meteors there are, or how much an atmosphere can change, they could make things living on your planet much more aggressive in harder games.

Thats the jist of what I said but I don’t think meteors would be a good idea at least in the “creature” stage. And I dont think “Spore” did it right either since most meteors vaporize before they can even impact on any planet with an Earth like atmosphere. I could only really see meteors being a thing on low atmospheric planets and then they would have to be rare even on the hardest of difficulty.

Meteors could be large enough to actually crash on a planet. Like the Barringer Crater. Maybe they don’t have to appear too often, they could be rare, but when they do, they could do some serious damage on a planet.

yeah thats why I mentioned Spore and its meteor system. They are not the most common thing but they do impact somewhere other than where you are playing and then send fragments that slowly rain down and stun you if they hit. I think that if they do decide to add meteors that is a perfect example of what not to do. If anything the debris should kill anything it hits, should be moving near the speed of sound away from the impact, and a huge cloud of dust and derbis should at the very least be visable if not affecting the weather.

Well we’re currently in the process of reworking how the compound clouds work (mainly with the mindset that they are harder to find but be more bountiful so you don’t need to find them as often as well as starting with more resources), but this is probably something we can easily implement into the next version, so we’ll definitely try it out. The only problem at the moment with making resources too abundant is that you can run into the problem of filling up on one resource which means you have no room for other necessary resources. Two ideas we’re thinking of are making gases omnipresent and you just take as much as you need relative to the amount diffused into the surrounding area (so for instance if you’re in an oxygen deprived area, ATP generation would be slower), and allowing the player to excrete excess compounds. So in other words, thanks for the suggestion, we’ll definitely try this out.

To be honest, the current difficulty is much easier than how Eukaryotes at this point in time (sometime before the evolution of multicellular creatures) would’ve had. Free-floating glucose was practically non-existent by this point (as researched by NicktheNick, you can read his research in the latest mini-devblog or on the development forums under Evolution of Early Planets). One way we’ve thought of correcting this is by starting in the Prokaryote phase at the very start of life where there were plenty of complex organic molecules floating about in the early oceans. Again this is talked more in the latest devblog. Something we’re trying to keep in mind is balancing accuracy with gameplay. While we want this to be accurate as possible, there are things that unfortunately need to be simplified either because they would be too complex to simulate (for instance there is no way we’ll ever be implementing the complex ways in which changing a single amino acid can change a protein to fold completely differently thus changing its behavior, researchers are still working on that problem), or they add nothing to gameplay. For example since we’re discussing turning toxins into clouds, we’re planning on having organisms having at least some base resistance to their own toxins as any organism that didn’t evolve resistance shortly after evolving the toxin would invariably be prone to accidentally killing themselves. Certainly we could add in the need to evolve resistance to your own toxin, but it would just add in time where the player would almost never use their toxins because they would be afraid of killing themselves while if both could be evolved in one go, you might as well evolve them as a package. The more interesting thing is letting you become resistant to other species toxins as that’s realistic and adds interesting gameplay.

We’ll also definitely make the cyanbacteria take carbon-dioxide and produce oxygen in the next release version. :wink:

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Great to know! And good to see that this game is steadily growing. :smile:

Technically, a method to not kill oneself does not automatically come with the ability to kill others. Most organisms (if not all) have essentially evolved safeguards so even if their toxin changes, it poses no additional risk to themselves, but the first creatures to evolve toxins (ie microbes) would not have this luxury. That said, any creature that doesn’t have this resistance is pretty much non-viable so we’re planning on having it evolve with the toxin like you suggested.

I respect your decision to make this as accurate as possible but don’t forget that this is a game. Sometimes accuracy needs to be sacrificed in order to make it fun. That’s why I suggested that we have different difficulty levels. :upside_down_face:

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As I said we are planning on having self-toxin resistance come with the toxins themselves. Also there are plans to implement Prokaryotes (it’d likely be after this upcoming version). I’d recommend taking your last post and turning it into a new thread of suggestions on how to evolve Eukaryotes from Prokaryotes in the future Microbe Stage. It’ll be easier for us to find it and reference it :slight_smile:

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As I’ve said, we aren’t. In part due to this very reason. I only brought it up because in theory we could simulate it, there’d be no point in it.

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There will be toxins in the game. Self-immunity will be automatic (at least from current discussions). Proto-toxin producing organisms lacking self-immunity will almost certainly not be in the game. Does that clear things up :slight_smile:

It sounds like a great idea and is pretty much what we’re planning on doing. Just don’t expect to see it the next release, there are other things we are working on. Again I would suggest making a new thread if you already haven’t explaining your suggestions in detail, it’ll make it easier for us to view it and consult it.

There are plans to have ways to upgrade organelles. That would make the initial versions of each organelle the proto-organelle and an upgraded version a more powerful version.

Edit: it doesn’t say on the GDD but the upgrades would be a tree and have different paths to go down. Like changing the membrane to a cell wall.

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If I remember correctly from a discussion on the dev forums a while back, “upgrading” means exactly what you gave as better idea: Changing the organelles (I.E. making the flagella longer to allow for a higher top speed (but a lower acceleration)), we just call them “upgrades” because the player will probably use them as an improvement (As in: Why waste mutation points on something that won’t help?).
(I could be wrong though, because I also vaguely remember another discussion where the devs talked about how to balance linear upgrading)

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Not assuming automatic immunity could be interesting though. You could offer different strategies to utilize your poison.

  1. Defensive Poison: You release the poison into the environment while you flee. You will not be exposed if you do it right, no immunity needed.
  2. Poison Delivery: If you inject the poison with a spike, it would contained by the target cell. The released cloud when the target dies is kind of unedible.
  3. Metabolize Poison: Gives you a degree of resistance to your poison. It would be quickly broken down into other compounds which are harmless. Metabolizing poison may be a net loss in energy, but you would avoid damage.
  4. Collect Poison: Poison is transported to a vacuole and stored. You can reuse your poison or even collect poison from other cells without having the capability to produce it yourself. If the vacuole is full, you would start to take damage unless you are also able to metabolize poison.
  5. Resistance/Immunity: Raises the concentration of the poison you can tolerate.

With the options how to utilize and how to defend against poison, you already have a lot of strategies. If you only produce, inject and collect poison, thats a very offensive strategy. Releasing it while having a high resistance is the most defensive strategy. Adding collection to the defensive strategy allows you to “pump” poison out of your cell. If you don’t want to utilize poison, you could get a high resistance and metabolize, making you mostly immune to poison.

Poison is one of the few weapons in the cell stage, I think it warrants some exploration. If you reduce it to one cookie-cutter ability, thats far less interesting.

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