You are a cellular predator. You decide to evolve a nucleus, only to discover that, actually, that’s a terrible idea, and you’re very bad now. You’re not quite so bad that your species goes extinct, but you’re still doing terribly.
What would solve your problem here is some sort of evolutionary backstep. If your evolution turns out to have been terrible and to have made you worse, yet not so bad that you go extinct, you can go one step backwards to your previous evolutionary state. Cumulatively, this costs you two mutation sessions (the one you spent to get into the mess, and one lost one that you can’t take when you’re getting yourself out).
But how is this different from just devloving the offending parts? Two things:
If it’s not in the cell editor, then it’s something you can activate in-round, so you don’t have to sit through an agonisingly slow and difficult run.
It lets you devolve a bad nucleus.
In-universe, this is the evolved form of the species dying out and the species returning to an earlier state.
honestly, I think a better option would be to be able test run your species, since the vast majority of problems can be solved by going into a test map and asking, “ok do I die immediately?”
jumping back an evolution step could be an option for easy and maybe normal runs while being blocked for hard runs but I’m not 100% on this implimitation of it. perhaps it could jump back a state before that addition takes place, like going back a previous save, and can only be used when you’re doing bad in easy or doing bad and hasn’t used it a generation before in normal, while in hard it can’t be used at all. This of course also being implemented with the test area so hard mode would assume you were taking full advantage of that instead.
Also the nucleus should have transitionary forms which could be removed, since the transition currently is way too abrupt. This should also help you get a nucleus without dying immediately.
Making a feature to go back an evolution would be extremely difficult programming-wise. Instead I’ve opened an issue that there should be a tutorial telling the player that they are allowed to load a previous auto save if they have ended up in a situation where the made changes are bad and they need to go back.
In one of my runs, the UI glitched and didn’t give me an ATP warning when I maxed out my flagellum length. I decided to test it in-run and was put into an unwinnable situation.
If this is the intended solution to an unworkable evolution, then A. yes, it should be tutorialed, and B. the game should autosave in the editor instead of the moment you enter the round.
I believe it does both, the moment you enter the editor and again the moment you enter the round. I believe it holds the last 6, so you can go back a couple of rounds.
I can’t recall exactly, but the bell that rings in my head says ‘maybe not’. Unsure.
Definitely needs to be in the tutorial. Perhaps there could even be some special UI element in the Load screen which shows your two most recent autosaves, one from run start and one from editor start.
It does both, when you enter the editor and when you enter the swimming around part per stage. So each evolution cycle has 2 auto saves created for it.
Did it actually glitch or where you at a situation where the ATP was enough to survive while being stationary? That case doesn’t trigger the big warning that you are going to die.
On the game over screen there’s the load game button, and saves are by default shown with the latest files first so the first two saves will be from when you got to the swimming around part of the stage and the one immediately before that is from when you entered the editor last time.
That’s still possibly perfectly normal functionality: if the ATP level was above minimum survivability you wouldn’t have received any other warning except the red text on the ATP bar itself.
From what I’ve seen the atp balance bar doesn’t really account for what your cell needs to do to survive. The calculation assumes you have all the compounds you need to live, as long as you can live for some amount of time in some kind of state it thinks you’re ok.
In the latest release there are now GUI controls to switch to equilibrium mode for the balance and there’s also a dropdown to select a limited resource mode to see for example what happens if you don’t have any iron or glucose to the ATP balance.