Yeah that’s what I meant by mapping your muscles to the movement buttons, as in selecting movement as an option instead of individual mapping them yourself. Having this connected to procedural animation could have the creature balance automatically.
Perhaps a more abstract approach of having the player choses if a muscle acts before, after, or during a selected group would work better? Like you could group muscles together and have them go before or after other groups or individuals. And if you want more control you can select specific delay times.
Well if you were say an active predator that just got into multicellular, you would need better methods of movement since flaggela wouldn’t cut it anymore. The player could create a fin like structure with a muscle cell near the base to push the cell along, or an eel like design that uses muscle cells on the sides to slither across the map. These could easily be added apon in multicellular by making the fin wider laterally, or adding extra muscles at the top and bottom for better lateral movement. Even the movement of dragging yourself across land can be done with only three muscles, leaving ample room for experimentation.
This is my sketches for what I am talking about, I even made a sketch for walking creature, it was a bit more difficult but hopefully automatic balancing would keep this curb from being too steap, if not then walking might have to be taken with a different approach.
Ok but how many muscles would you need? do they need to be angled? How do you keep a player from completing the requirements before even getting to macroscopic? Is a muscle anything that can squash and stretch or is it more specific then that? How do we keep a player from simply slaping som muscles on there and not thinking anything more about the subject?
But that’s the best part! Being able angle your plant will also let you control it’s growth and I think that would be interesting, being able to creep over trees or nearby food as vines, or gently angle your venus fly trap towards a potential meal.
Centipedes beg to differ
As I said before what i meant by “you map the buttons to the arrow keys” is that you select movement or something for the muscles and the game uses your settings for them as a blue print for a procidural animation. Balancing would work the same way where the game auto makes adjustments to keep your creation from falling over, possibly using how your creature looks in the editor as reference. This also makes more sense since living things, or atleast humans, makes many micro adjustments to stay stable, so it wouldn’t make sense for balancing to be static.
Sense of balance - Wikipedia
The same reason why we have a cell stage, it’s not that at the moment it’s complicated, it’s that, as time goes on, it’ll get very complicated. And it feels like the best continuity between stages because I don’t really know how we would add procedural animations to early multicellular and would allow players to make things like proto mouths, multicellular movement, interesting defense mechanisms, and other things that requires cells moving separately before macroscopic. Though I do not know how early multicellular creatures moved, so I’m not sure if this a realistic progression tree or not.
But then how do creatures move before that? Once again I don’t know how multicellular life evolved, but I’ve heard the people mention that the world looked like a “worm world” in the begin so I assume creatures were still able to wiggle. Since how else were species that hunted other species able to get to them? And what I mean by “muscles” and “muscle cells” is any way a cell is able to squash or stretch itself inorder for the rest of the body to move.