Yeah cool I understand. I have high hopes for the microbe stage, I think it’s going to be a groundbreaking standalone game without anything else.
You are right about that. I forgot to mention that there is also the darwinian component where species get their populations randomly altered (to cause new species to appear), but also when some simulated cells manage to kill something or reproduce that also affects the population. So if the player only kills species they can see then that can cause that only the species with transparent colours would survive better.
It should only be possible to take damage when you are out of ATP. So if you have glucose, and your osmoregulation cost isn’t higher than your ATP production, you shouldn’t take damage by just sitting still.
1 Like
There is a Darwinian component, if cells, escape predators, get a kill, or reproduce their populations go up. If they die their population goes down once they hit a certain population they can split off one or multiple new species with new mutations if the pop is below a threshold they go extinct. So in the long run things are tending towards Darwinian evolution. (Also when one does the population drops by 50 per individual death) (and up by 60 when they do something good) However the population numbers we are dealing with are huge , in the thousands. Also the reason things do so well aren’t exactly always straightforward. In 0.4.1 dev builds you see larger bacteria populations and more effective evolution because I improved fleeing and hunting behavior.
Also, the way being able to engulf is calculated is the amount of organelles a species has. So you see bacteria you can’t engulf because they have a lot of stuff in them but are scaled down 50% and have more tightly wrapped cell walls.
Hmmm, is it in the design yet to change this? It’s doesn’t exactly seem like an intuitive way to determine “engulfability”, since it doesn’t match their visual size. Perhaps bacteria shouldn’t have that many organelles? Or, since “eukaryote” cells look so much bigger, the nucleus should add a lot to the size of the cell so they are almost always able to engulf bacteria.
3 Likes
Yeah, a smaller bacterium chock-full of organelles just successfully engulfed me.
Also, one that I previously engulfed released about a 100 units worth of glucose (I only got about 30, but the entire cloud looked like a hundred). This was right after I started a new game, so I assume it’s just a balancing issue.
1 Like
30 glucose, is what you got no matter how it looked , we try to keep our clouds visible, so they look big and spread out sometimes but dont contain as much as you would think, and i think that part is fine. (especially considering a flagella is 7 atp per second), you need to get rewarded for your kills.
I never got anywhere near that much when I engulfed bacteria other times. And, as I said, the glucose conversion is way too efficient.
We plan to totally change how death works. No more exploding into clouds.
I’m talking about how many compounds other cells are carrying inside of them. But since your plan is eventually to start everything off as a single basic cell (if I understand correctly), they should start with the same amount of compounds, correct?
Well, looks like the next release is going to have some interesting mechanics. It’ll probably be bad for balance but that’s what the playerbase is for. 
I may have misinterpreted how biomes will work. Can you travel to different ones at will, or are you just sent to a new one after leaving the editor?
There’s going to be a patch map and species can spread between the patches. You’ll start as a single hex of cytoplasm in a hydrothermal vent, the only life on the planet, and by the end of the stage the world will be filled with ~3000 species of microbes or something like that. Should be pretty cool, though will take several patches to get all the mechanics in and polish it up.
3 Likes
I just opened the game and, for no apparent reason, everything seems to be going twice as fast as before. It’s either too fast or was always too slow up until now (feels like the former; I can’t even dodge toxins like this). I assume it’s a framerate issue?
I think you might be experiencing what was discussed here:
Huh. After watching that video, it appears that it really was just performing slowly before. I have a pretty high-end computer.
1 Like
Looks like it’s not just me then. I wonder if more people are having this issue, but don’t realize the game isn’t running as it should.
@hhyyrylainen: The speed in that video is the intended one, right?
Which video are you talking about? The last dev podcast has some gameplay running at the correct speed.
The one Rathalos links to in that thread. Here:
EDIT: Actually, even that doesn’t seem to be going quite as fast as my game did.
This is how it should look:
Then mine must have been going too fast. Don’t know what to say.
Ooh, nice stage cutscene 
3 Likes