So, I was wondering about what implies for the player to become the first animal to leave the water and to explore the solid ground.
What would imply for the player? Would it mean that he is playing the “most common ancestor” of the game’s equivalent of mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds and so on? Would he become the basis of all the various species after him?
In that case, it would be very interesting: I don’t know how Thrive will try to handle the Aware Stage editor but in the real world, most vertebrates skeletal and muscular structure share a lot of similarities because of this. You can also see this in Avatar, where a lot of animals have six limbs and a similar respiratory apparatus (except for the Na’Vi because yes). That’s because nothing grows from nothing, and animals had to adapt using whatever their body provided to obtain their advantageous mutations.
How do you think the game and editor will handle this? In the aware stage will people have to account for the anatomies that they created during the previous stages or will they be free of this for the sake of Gameplay? Would you like something like that?
(To be clear, I’m a nobody with no science degrees or anything like that. I really like spec-evo from a very superficial point of view so please correct me if I said dumb stuff)
The plan is to not force the player to leave water, but to indicate that they will be unable to progress their species further unless they are able to go on land. During the awakening stage (if not earlier) the player will be encouraged to go onto land. This would help guide the player’s species to become one of the earliest on land.
Plant-like species will need to have spread onto land before animals can live there permanently. There will need to be something in the code to ensure that macroscopic sessile creatures go to land early. Other than that, it’ll be random whether and when creatures adapt to surviving on land.
All the creatures on land will evolve from whichever creatures move there. This will probably just be entirely dependant on the auto-evolution system, as it currently is with microbes. The player would probably choose more effective adaptations for their species, allowing them to progress faster than most species. If this leads to higher population of their species, there would be more offshoots from their species than others. Aside from this, there will probably be nothing to define the species the player evolves to go on land as the ancestor of most dominant land animals. If other creatures that come up from the sea produce more dominant offspring, they will probably become the ancestors of most land animals.
As for the creatures’ anatomies, this will probably be noticeably related to whatever they evolve from. It takes a lot more to evolve new limbs than to adapt existing ones. So, once effective skeletons are evolved in a species, the layouts will generally be similar in their ancestors millions (even billions) of years later.
They would also need a species to split off and evolve for survival on land. In most playthroughs, the continents would be completely barren for a long time after forming. The great oxygenation would have to occur first, and the atmosphere fill with oxygen (and ozone) to allow life to survive at the surface. I suppose it wouldn’t even be necessary for plants to be on land before animals, as creatures could feed on phototrophic microbial mats on the shore.