There is a game made by carykh that simulated the evolution of walking and jumping and other things done by muscles as they change where they attach and how frequently they contract. I’m not saying those kinds of games shouldn’t exist, but I’d much more enjoy a game where I press w to go forward.
The skin is always the surrounding tissue around the body. It can do other things as well but it doesn’t have any other main purpose. We don’t call the inner lining of the stomach a skin. The skin can be thin but there is no animal without a skin with muscles exposed to the air and there is no skin that is inside the body behind the other tissues.
Not to mention it would change every time you change the anatomy of your species. Its like switching every letter in your keyboard and trying to type again.
Acclimated how?
I think muscles is the least random thing that can mark the transition between multicellular and aware. Before muscles we had sessile species such as trees and sponges. These species don’t have any body plan. A sponge can get twice as large and it would repeat the same tissues over and over again. Similarly, a tree can have any number of branches. The parts such as leaves can have a symmetry and a standard shape, but the overall creature doesn’t have any shape.
But species with muscles do start to have a body plan and that is a major change. If you evolved and adapted to having 2 legs, you can’t afford to have 4 legs every few generations sometimes.
Plants move towards light and whatever but the player doesn’t need to control that. If you are sessile, the amount of interaction you have with the environment almost none, so it would be fine if the player doesn’t see what is going around and focuses on what happens to the homeostasis of the tissues, similar to keeping all those compounds at a certain level in cell stage.
Now I will tell what I think about muscles. We shouldn’t focus on muscles and focus on joints instead. The player should decide on how each joint can bend, you know, hinge joint, ball and socket joint, whatever, and the procedural animation should decide on how that species can best move with that body given the constraints. Every limb should have muscles assigned to it and a slider should determine the strength of that limb. Stronger muscles should be larger and if the species doesn’t have feathers or whatever, the muscles, alongside the legth and places of attachment to each other of the bones, should determine the outer shape of the creature for body segments that don’t contain organs.
The slider should have a minimum muscle strength limit. There is no reason to have a limb and not have a muscle for it. Structures like a chickens comb shouldn’t be treated like a limb
As for species with hydrostatic skeletons, they don’t have joints. If their body consists of a single limb they should wiggle like worms or slide like snails. If they have limbs, the procedural animation should move them like jellyfish or whatever would make sense. The octopus bodyplan is the non benthic version of a starfish
The strength of a limb shouldn’t be determined by how many muscle metaballs are placed around it, because, why do that? It is so much simpler to move a slider and call it a day. Why would you want to simulate antagonist and agonist muscles? Will Thrive be a game where I can’t go forward when I press w, and I have to painstakingly try to ensure that my creature can stand upright by pressing the right buttons on the keybord, some of which pull a limb to the same direction?
Why make it complicated in the first place? It would be very simple if muscles are unlockable only in the late multicellular when you stopped placing cells and a single metaball or stylised meta cylinder made a limb.