How I define terms
- Scenerios: Like the scenerios in Sid Meer’s Civ games. They take place in their own map, they can have different game rules, they may include mods.
For example, there may be a “War of the Worlds” scenerio where you play either as earth or the martians, you have a pre-designed species, pre-designed units (martian tree legged robot/tank), the game starts in industrial stage for earth and space stage for mars, the game ends with the conclusion of the war, only the solar system exists, you can’t go to other systems.
I support for the ability to design scenerios, but I don’t think they should replace adventures.
- Normal event in the game
This sounded like a scenerio, but reading again I notice that it is a normal event in the game instead of a scripted one. A mass extinction due to meteor strike is already planned, right? The only difference here is that the player is warned before that happens.
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Planet editor: This is used at the beginning of the game to design a custom planet with a particular size, distance to star, axial tilt, number of moons, etc.
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Ascension planet editor: You can change a planet with god tools and to add random mountains during the ascension stage. Some of that functionality would exist in space stage. This editor can also be accessed through thrivepedia. These planets can’t probably be used for adventures, because they didn’t form naturally, and won’t be seeded to the galaxy. Unless you want to play an adventure in a planet made from pure gold and unnatural planets become a thing.
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Adventure editor: This is used to edit a city. You can add NPCs that interact with the captain, you can design the interior of buildings where adventure takes place and you can add new buildings
The exteriors of buildings can be seen before a city becomes an adventure city and you can go see them up close. But you wouldn’t be invented into a building unless you had a reason to be there. The number of buildings that can be added should be limited but the insides of all the buildings should be editable.
I disagree with the requests for an adventure editor being a disappointment. You can go to an aware or awakening planet and interact with the species there, there is nothing underrepresented in the base game in that case. But more complicated events can happen in cities, and we don’t see those in first person mode, player designed levels can be used for that.
And what is the alternative? How do you make adventures without using an editor? AI can’t write stories and open Thrive to turn them into adventures, no need all that when human input can be used.
If you meant the ascension planet editor, I agree that unnatural planets shouldn’t be seeded to the galaxy. If you meant the normal planet editor, it doesn’t add new variety.
- When can adventures be added to the game?
While the space stage is being made, after the ascension stage is completed, or in a DLC[1]
- Planet generation
The player’s computer isn’t used for designing the ecosystems in the game. I think it is only natural to extend this to geology.
The same amount or more planets are pre-added to Thrive’s game files and seeded to a player’s galaxy when they start the game.
While a player plays a Thrive game, they create a planet within the rules too, so those planets can be seeded alongside the pre-generated planets to other players’ galaxies. And these planets can be at any point in development, they can only include the nature or be the home planet of a space empire.
- How are they played?
In space stage, a planet that belongs to another civ asks you help. You go there with your captain and start the adventure. It is possible to have the same thing for society and industrial stages too.
Adventures can only happen in other civilisations’ cities, because the adventure designer can’t know how many houses you built or how are they designed, but that can be known for other civs because their cities exist in Thrivepedia.
An adventure can be loaded after you make contact with that city, come within communication distance or the coordinates can be given to you by a civ that discovered that city. If you refuse the adventure, it is unloaded and a different adventure can be loaded in the same place.
An adventure can take place in a planet that hasn’t entered space stage or is uninhabited, but there needs to be an explanation for why you end up in there. Perhaps there was an outpost of a space civ, but it was abandoned, and now strange signals are coming from it.
- Requirements
I think there shouldn’t be adventures that force one species as a captain, but your captain may need to have a certain biology or equipment. You can’t infiltrate a building through the ventilation system if you captain is a 10 meter tall giant. There can also be requirements for crew, those that can’t join an adventure can wait behind. Only adventures you can play one way or another should be loaded.
There may be a requirement of having good relations with a civ in order to get quests from them.
Adventures can be loaded randomly every 5 minutes, or be triggered by other events in the galaxy. There can be story arcs that take place in multiple planets.
- Designing adventures
A small number of adventures should be designed by devs or community members and added to the game for being played during the early days of Thrive galactic adventures when not a lot of adventures are designed yet, so that the players can see what they can include when they start designing an adventure
Most of the adventures would eventually be designed by players. They would design what a player’s captain and crew has to do in order to win or lose an adventure.
- Adventure diagrams
There can be more than one outcome for an adventure. Here is an example adventure diagram
In a planet, adventure (1) is loaded, and there are multiple results of that adventure, not just win/lose. Each result leaves the city in a different state, in one of that states adventure (1.1) can be loaded, (1.2) in the other, and both of them can have follow up adventures that come after them.
Why do I suggest this? Because I think modding can create some good results. A player can, instead of opening the thrivepedia and designing an adventure from scratch, open an existing adventure that has 8 parts and write an alternate history for it, changing the events after the 5th adventure, and this series can be liked more and downloaded more than the original series.
- More than 1 adventure for a city
If another adventure was loaded in the city, adventure (1) and the ones that come after it wouldn’t be loaded.
But if there is a very unique planet in thrivepedia that has sapient simpsons and lots of players have designed adventures there? What if you want to play two such adventures?
There are 4 options. After you complete an adventure, you may reset your progress to play another one, which sounds like time travel, the same planet can appear more than once in the galaxy, which sounds like evolution lost its creativity, or duplication may not be allowed, which may be unsatisfying.
Maybe the best option is to allow for episodic adventures that have the same state at the beginning and the end of adventure. No change occurs and nobody references past events. And when you do decide to have an adventure that changes stuff, the rest of the previous adventures are locked and you can now only play adventures that take into account this change.
- Adventure states
Each adventure requires the city to be in a particular state in order to be loaded. If you damage some buildings, the adventure can’t be loaded until they are repaired.
Adventures should take place in a single city because new colonies can be added to the same planet.
The default state has no adventure. You can land and see the buildings but if you try to speak the citisens they will refuse to speak or say something anyone can say. Maybe chatgpt can create that speech. You can see a logger and it can tell you about its profession. But an adventure creator has no way of knowing these smalltalks so the characters that appear in a story should only appear once you start the adventure.
When you complete an adventure, the city is now in the exiting state. In that state, all the NPCs still remain in the planet. If you visit the planet again (not a new adventure) the NPCs can say “thanks for helping us” or whatever the adventure’s designer wrote them to say in that state.
An episodic adventure ends in the same stage it started. But the map can change in any number of ways during the adventure, if it returns to the original state.
- Exiting the planet during the adventure
You park your spaceship in the city during the adventure. But you can always go back there to get some stuff (unless you are jailed and have to escape) or exit the adventure, losing it.
Adventures may also need you to use your spaceship. For example you can join a space race and then go back to the planet to get your reward.
- Adventures without a city
Space stations or spaceships can also have adventures that take place in them. They would have adventure states like a city.
I’d like to point out that some adventuresque things can also happen without adventures. You can send your spy (level5) to a mission in a civ(difficulty: level 5) to have a 50% chance of gathering an information about a corruption scandal which can be used in a trade agreement (blackmailing) or released to its public to increase unrest and make them more likely to declare independence, without ever knowing what is contained in that information. Adventures may not be connected to the wider events in the game (help bart simpson pass a math test) but they can still be satisfying to the people who play them because of explicitly showing what is happening.
- Adventures that take place in more than one place
An adventure can start in a city and end in another city. In that case the adventure state includes more than one place. But if this exists, I think there should be an upper limit.
- Official lore
Lore, if it exists, can use adventure mechanics.
- Recommending adventures
The player can manually download adventures from the sporepedia, and they would be loaded in the galaxy. But I think AI can do a better job at this.
After playing an adventure, the player is asked to rate it. The AI tries to maximise three things
a) The next adventure shown in the galaxy will be clicked and entered by the player
b) The player will not quit halfway through, or at least will return back
c) The player will give the next adventure a good grade
At first, adventures that get a good rating overall can be recommended, and as the player plays more adventures and gives more feedback, the suggestions would become personalised.
- Adventure rewards
Rewards could be money or xp. An adventure with high rewards has these qualities
a) It has high average rating
b) It has a lot of content, it filled its complexity meter
c) Players usually fail to do something in it, and try again
that’s not very different than a post ascension update ↩︎