Since Thrive strives (pun intended) to become a hyperrealistic representation of wildlife living and evolution, I really hope predator/prey battles don’t become just RPG fighting like in Spore.
Picture this: you’re playing as a herbivore, now currently drinking water at a pond at the rainforest. Only thin stripes of sunlight pass through the treetops, leaving deep shades all around you. Suddenly, you hear in your left headphone cup bushes being slightly shaken. Similar sounds play around you constantly, however this sounds louder and more defined. You don’t think much of it since you haven’t played in this situation before. Then, a breeze blows in your direction, revealing a grey smell cloud in the darkness, the indicative color of an unknown smell, where the stronger shaking noise seemed to have come from.
Before you can react, a predator jumps from the bushes, your screen starts pulsating red around the edges, the usual information bars and stats dissapear and are replaced by one big red health bar at the bottom, and everything seems to be in slow motion. You try to start running immediately, but the predator reaches you before you get too far. It bites into your front limb, with the increasing blood loss being shown in the bar. A line of text appears at the top of the screen: “Click and hold on your opponent to defend yourself!”. You move your cursor pointer over the attacker, making its body appear as overlaying smudges of different colors as you pass the cursor across it, indicating the parts reachable for different defense methods, blue for tail, green for limbs and red for mouth. You click on the attacker’s head, entirely red, sending your character’s tusks to the bite. The bite will last as long as you hold the mouse button. Immediately a red bar also appears over the predator, dropping slightly. The predator lets go of your limb and your bite ends automatically. You go to click on it again, now on its side. The area is reachable by your limbs and tail, so the two bubbles correspondent to the two options appear above where you clicked. You go for the tail. You had designed your character with spikes on the end of its tail, resulting in great damage. Your character quickly swings its tail to the predator, piercing its guts. It’s very effective! Its health bar drops further. You keep the mouse button pressed, so your character swings the tail back and goes for a second strike. Critical hit! Your opponent’s health bar drops below half, at which point it gives up and walks away, dissapearing back into the darkness.
The battle is over and the interface goes back to normal. For some time, your speed will be compromised due to the wounded limb, and from now on, that species will have a red smell cloud visible for you, an indicative of hazardous species.
This is the vision I have for Thrive.