It’s… essentially what Macroscopic is now. Though, the two sub-stages may be merged.
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Macroscopic doesn’t have “cell groups” or “supertissues” planned through to my knowledge.
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Okay. Welp, I tried.
I suppose that makes sense, but the problem I see is this:
Even if it’s accurate to real life, and makes sense as a division, an entire stage or sub-stage devoted to ‘jellyfish and plants’ is not going to be particularly fun to play.
I’m not a game dev, and I don’t know how the Macroscopic stage is going to be developed, but if we’re limited to such simple and generally inactive designs before Aware, it seems like the only significant content is going to come from playing sessile creatures, which are also stuck at Macroscopic and generally difficult to design good gameplay for.
And worms, anything along the line to becoming “animals” before the existence of a more complex brain. Remember, the transition Macroscopic → Aware is planned to be the development of a complex centralized nervous system (as stated in the opening message), not “any nerves at all”. I guess the endpoint of macroscopic might be something like the Urbilaterian, or something slightly more complex than that.
Before reaching that point, you would still be swimming around, eating things. The previous stages show you don’t need a brain for that. And it would still be different from those earlier stages because now you are in a 3D environment, and you have a different editor.
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I suppose it would basically end up being Microbe, but 3D. I suppose that… works. Would you be able to have predation without a complex nervous system? It’s permitted in Microbe for gameplay necessity, but again, at this large of a scale ‘gameplay necessity’ becomes ‘a significant deviation from actual evolution’. ‘Swimming around, eating things’ is basically how Microbe works, but it still sounds like it falls short of what a stage should be. Microbe’s meant to be small, and it still has a ton of depth. That depth would be scaling up exponentially over the stages, no? (Also, Microbe’s swimming-around-eating-things isn’t quite hitting correctly right now anyhow - you, yourself, rarely are the one getting eaten in the current build if you aren’t deliberately handicapping yourself.)
Also, what are you even eating in Macroscopic? Compound clouds presumably will no longer exist at that scale because they’re a gameplay abstraction even at the low levels. If you move forward too fast, and aren’t autotrophic, then you’d just starve, without any plants to eat. Perhaps there’d always be ambient plankton on the surface, so you’d be able to at least exploit them… hm.
I’m having a hard time articulating my problems with Macroscopic. I will also note that this is severely off-topic as we’ve moved from discussing the name to just discussing the stage itself.
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With the current shedule, it’s most likely that a signifacant part of multicellular’s and macroscopic’s depth will only be coded in sometime after those stages are fully released.
The discussion has strayed from the original topic, but I still want to suggest a few names for the stage.
“Formation” - We lay the foundations of our body plan, tissues, organs, etc.
“Amorphous” - We play as sponges, jellyfish, Ediacaran biota, and other amorphous creatures
“Unformed” - Same thing
“Tissue” - I don’t really like this option, but nevertheless - this stage is where tissue mechanics are introduced
“Structured” - Our creature transforms from a bunch of cells into a full-fledged structured creature
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I am afraid the stage name has been already set…
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Shouldn’t the topic be closed then?
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Might be, as the “contest” has definitely finished now.
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