Questions from a Developer/Developers

Current Game
21

That’s great to hear. Endosymbiosis was one of the more complicated phenomena we were going to represent and the system itself was really a bunch of things going on at the same time in an attempt to influence player behavior, so glad to hear that it’s working pretty well in your experience.

Reading through the majority of posts, the most consistently mentioned boring part/issue is engulfing an organism and having basically no incentive to pay attention to the rest of the game until the editor button is pressed. What do you guys feel more often: that heterotrophy is unrewarding, or that it creates stretches of time where there is basically nothing to do?

  • Hetrotrophy is too hard; chunks are unrewarding
  • I engulf one organism and then basically wait until the reproduction meter fills
0 voters
1 Like
22

I feel like both are a little true. Waiting for meters to fill is slow and stretches where there’s no one slower than me to eat aren’t super fun either, especially if I’m low on glucose. If the local population is high and I built my cell like a sensible person would both can be fun, especially if I added some vacuoles so the limit to how much I can ingest is high and the time I can survive without is high. That’s great gameplay, and a good reward for playing the game well, I don’t know what to do about the times when it sucks a bit though. Possibility I though of is if you eat a creature that will supply you enough stuff to enter the editor you can skip til then, but as combat gets more interesting and we enter multicellular that will be a bad idea, so im just not sure. Maybe… Get good?/j

2 Likes
23

depends on how long i wait for auto evo to make big, viable cells that i can eat. so, if i want to get to a specific point, option 1, but if i’m just taking my time, 1 for the first couple tens of rounds, then 2 after i manage to start eating the big cells in one bite.

1 Like
24

Another question: what areas of the game cause the most confusion in you guys, or have caused you the most confusion in the past?

4 Likes
25

I think I used to be confused by the way Autoevo would basically say your species is doomed even if you’re just doing fine. It should no longer be the case anymore since the “is your species succeeding” system is no longer based solely on population change.

3 Likes
26

Honestly, similarly to aah, the way auto-evo could/can sometimes just slice your population in half over a minuscule change was quite confusing to me.

3 Likes
27

Also I found it quite confusing that if you came across a dying microbe of your own kind, their chunks would dissapicate in like a second instead of letting you engulf them.

4 Likes
28

For me, I think it would be trying to find a species in the Auto-Evo results screen. While the new Auto-Evo results page appears more intuitive, In my most recent playthroughs, I still have trouble finding the organism I want. And now that the Auto-Evo results screen is more visual, it tends to lag my computer in later turns.

I also actually liked how the previous version of the Auto-Evo results page gave information about where the organism in question migrated and broke down its population in each patches. Maybe in the future have a hybrid version of the Auto-Evo page, or have the extra info visible as a togglable button?

Additionally, I agree with Nie and aah about the confusion of how Auto-Evo changes your species population.

Another thing that confuses me is sometimes another species will look exactly like me (same color, same organelles, and same membrane type), but it is only different because of membrane rigidity and behavior. Maybe adding a glowing effect around other non-species organisms would help with this issue.

3 Likes
29

How often does that happen? I don’t ever recall seeing a doppelganger species which would be completely indistinguisable from the player species based on their appearance.

2 Likes
30

It depends. Sometimes I don’t see any doppelgängers at all, and then suddenly there is one. I definitely saw at least one in my last playthrough.

2 Likes
31

Perhaps species should be forced to change their colour upon speciation?

2 Likes
32

Another quick question. As a prokaryote, what metabolic strategy do you often gravitate towards?

  • Predominantly Glucose
  • Predominantly Iron
  • Predominantly Hydrogen Sulfide
  • Predominantly Photosynthesis
  • Predominantly Preying on Other Cells
  • Thermosynthesis
  • Radiotrophy
  • Other
  • A Genuine Half and Half
0 voters

Do you guys change strategy as you become a eukaryote, or do you keep specializing around the same metabolic strategy?

  • Change Strategy
  • Remain the Same
  • Not Particularly One or the Other
0 voters
2 Likes
33

“Radiotrophy”? Did I miss something, since I don’t recall there being a prokaryotic equivalent to melanosome?

2 Likes
34

Good point - Whoops! Ignore that one.

2 Likes
35

Also I presume half and half refers to builds with multiple major energy sources?

2 Likes
36

Yup. Not so much having just a few pieces of another metabolism, but genuinely building an organism that functions very well on both. I personally usually go with a rusticyanin and glucose build that lets me survive on one if I don’t have the other, for example.

2 Likes
37

I used to use such dual glucose-iron builds in the past when I had more trouble surviving.

38

I always tend to use photosynthesis for not dying and then use predation to reproduce faster. (Kinda late)

1 Like
39

I wonder if we could make a “what sort of mixotroph you are?” poll one day…

40

I wonder how many people would choose “All of them/Everything” in such a poll.

1 Like