Multiplayer

What If We Have A Battle Royale Mode Where 100 Cells Are Dropped In And Have To Fight And Evolve To Be The Last One Standing…

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What if you made a multiplayer mode where you and a friend are racing through the stages and growing stronger and stronger until one person’s species wipes out the other’s species (or one species just dies off) from the planet, (or maybe during the space stage a ship could escape and start a new colony on a different planet. Then both sides than have to build something like a radar to detect where the other species fled to).

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Here’s a very simplistic way to add multiplayer functionality to Thrive, without needing live netcode.

  • At the start of the game, everyone receives a Primum thrivium that can evolve separately from every other strain. Perhaps the first gameplay step is skipped, and you are sent directly to the editor to make your first mutation. That would solve the problem of everyone having the same species and being unable to meaningfully compete.

  • NPC species splitting will happen as neccessary to maintain a balanced ecosystem - a high-player game will have less NPC species split off.

  • One can encounter another player’s species if they live in the same patch, but they won’t be directly controlled by the other player. Sure, microbial dogfights are fun, but that would mean making the game server-friendly and the chances of encountering another player’s avatar cell (the only awesomeness to result from it) could be written off. Instead, AI-controlled instances of other player’s cells are spawned as if they were an NPC species. Identifying their species name will also reveal the player that owns them. In addition, hunting another player’s cell should not detriment them too much (likely much less than the population cost for actually dying) to avoid targeting. Microbes don’t go “Hey, that cell’s possessed by my pal Nick. I’m going to hunt em’ so I can get more points.”

  • In short, the most major things that are networked are decisions at the species level done during the editor step - mutations, migrations, that kinda stuff. Reporting player deaths/reproductions and their changes in population are what happen in the gameplay step. This method, where all the gameplay is instanced (in MMO-talk) per-computer, allows multiplayer Thrive to very easily extend all the way until Awakening. (which could be a final win condition, because we all know diatoms hold the record for population)

  • Speaking of scoring, there are multiple ways to create a leaderboard, so we can track the competition inherent in nature. Microbe stage already features one metric of success - population count. If we want to have a bit more fun incentives, the multiplayer scoring system could also award bonuses for “fastest reproducer” or “most mutation points spent.” As later stages get added, “intelligence” would also be a way to track how close one is to winning the multiplayer game by reaching Awakening.

  • TL;DR - No actual PvP gameplay, instead everyone plays their own game of Thrive in the same world, where some species happen to evolve according to the whims of a human, rather than the internal auto-evo system. You can compete for points or just enjoy Thrive with your friends also interacting with your alien ecosystem.

Or nuke the planet in a holocaust

Thats an easy way to screw over your pal nick

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Imagine being on the cusp of intelligence when suddenly you see nuclear bombs descending from the sky completely obliterating your race lol. Seriously though, I feel like multiplayer would be a cool thing, and it might make Thrive more attractive as people can collaborate more and it would just be fun playing with your friends. I’ve been thinking about multiplayer for a while, and I’ve tried to brainstorm a feasible concept that could work for all stages. Warning that this could be a long post. Here is how I think multiplayer could work:

  • Gameplay in the Microbe Stage is almost identical to singleplayer, the most obvious difference being other cells controlled by other players, of course. Everyone starts off the same, as single hexes of cytoplasm, and spawn in the same patch and within a close distance of each other. I’d imagine people would scatter sooner or later, but if someone wants to find their friend later on, the other could just give them their coordinates and patch. To know if it is another person that is controlling the cell I think highlighting the cell when the cursor moves over it is the best option.

  • The Microbe Stage would pretty much go on as usual. Multiple lineages would spring from the first stock that included your friends. If a player reproduces and enters the editor, I think a population of their previous generation would change along with them offscreen, maybe randomized between 10-50%. AI species also have a chance to evolve into another species when they reproduce. This would kind of make the game into more of a real-time strategy, but I think if there is more stuff to do in the environment there would be less time spent in the editor and more time actually trying to survive. I feel like there should at least be a 5 minute gap between editor sessions.

  • Then the main problem arises when it’s time to go into Multicellular. As the developers have stated, the big problem with multiplayer is the fact that you could still be a single-celled organism when another could be a spacefaring race. Huge time gaps for evolution would just make multiplayer impossible. I think I might have a solution for this: a “complexity scale”. Now you might be thinking, “Oh no he wants to add the complexity meter from spore and limit our imagination!”. This is definitely not the same thing, and it only applies to multiplayer. Here’s how it works:

    1. The complexity scale is of course a scale, perhaps one literally shown on the screen during gameplay. Complexity Points are what it scales. Every organelle-and every structure later on in the game-adds one or more complexity points to the overall “complexity” of the organism. The middle of the scale represents the average complexity, which is the mean average of each player’s complexity. The left of the scale would represent simpler player organisms, and the right would represent more complex ones.

    2. Initially it doesn’t affect gameplay at all, as everyone would be single-celled organisms and roughly at the same level. But as the game starts to transition into Multicellular, the scale will begin to change things up. The structures needed to become a multicellular organism are costly in terms of complexity. Players are fine as long as they are in the middle of the scale, but past a certain point, maybe like 20 points ahead of the average, they will be forced to slow down. Adding the adhesive and signal proteins themselves will make players go past the limit. But what kind of nerf am I talking about? Well the complexity scale affects mutation points. Players at the head of the game will receive less mutation points in the following editor sessions while those lagging behind will receive significantly more . This gives them the opportunity to catch up with the others and become multicellular with them. The player with the most complexity can still evolve, but very little and with a debuff. Players with the least complexity will evolve a lot faster than normal and with a buff. This will happen for multiple editor sessions until the scale naturally balances out and everyone is pretty much multicellular.

    3. The complexity scale can be applied throughout all the “creature” stages, and maybe even the “nation” stages, balancing out the competition with each big transition. With some fleshing out and balancing, I think this concept could be really effective at eliminating the time gap problem and making multiplayer Thrive a fair game.

  • To “win” the game, there should probably be a points system, maybe measuring how many organisms you killed or how many times you reproduced, among other things. The first person to reach the next stage would get a lot of points. Whoever ascends first gets a ton of points but that doesn’t necessarily mean they won. Whoever has the most points by the time someone ascends, they win, acknowledging that they were the best survivor, that they thrived. This could also go hand in hand with the complexity scale. Maybe having more complexity points means you have more leaderboard points.

  • There would also be a sandbox mode, maybe after the main game is over, everyone has the option to ascend and they can just play around and show off their saved creations and create more solar systems, organisms, tech, architecture, and more (can you create and save a culture?). Basically everyone messes around with the galaxy together. Then everyone dies. The end.

While I did read through a lot of this, and like several of the ideas, the one that caught my attention was the sandbox mode. Playing as ascended deities with your friends is definitely something I want in Thrive later on, even if its a separate game mode.

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Me to… i first discovered spore in a TED talk, and the version of the space stage then was a sandbox mode, which actually looked fun. But of course someone had to change it.

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Link me thine TED talk OoferDoofer

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjOjIC7usbjAhVHtlkKHTPQDUMQtwIwAHoECAgQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ted.com%2Ftalks%2Fwill_wright_makes_toys_that_make_worlds%3Flanguage%3Den&usg=AOvVaw0p3OuvgirWn4sciFY_WnS2
her it is. I hope it works

If enough people are playing at the same time, is there a multiplayer option with diffrent severs, also can your microbe on the servers be saved? so you won’t have to restart all the time

Depends entirely on how multiplayer is added, see our FAQ: FAQ | Revolutionary Games Studio

it may still be fun, like EVE?

EVE is an MMO, those are even harder to make than what even a full multiplayer through the normal route of Thrive would be to make. And our FAQ only talks about that we might add like a cell battle arena mode, to make a multiplayer mode that is actually even somewhat easy to program.

maybe there could be a multiplayer mode where you are in an oversimplified civilization/industrial stage where the goal is to have power over an entire continent or planet?

At that point it should work more as a spin-off than a gamemode, so it can be properly fleshed out and take liberties to become its own thing.

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let’s make a spinoff then, sing le spinoff song!