CHAPTER SEVEN: A Change in the Train’s Engine
After releasing 4.3 and many progress updates, the developers agreed to switch Thrive to a new engine again.
At this point they’ve already had some experience with switching engines and rewriting their games, so this would be an easier task.
The engine chosen was Godot, because it’s much less laggier than Leviathan and its also less prone to crashing.
Some other history includes new members of the development team joining, including DonGororo (did I spell his name correctly?) and Uniow. Before that time, Untrustedlife, once an active programmer for Thrive, sadly announced his departure from the project because he wanted more time to pursue his own creative desires.
Aside from all of that hhyyrylainen was one of the few active programmers left. Oliveriver was still involved in the project, and so were other devs as well, even if they were relatively inactive.
In response to the suggestions made by the community, hhyyrylainen made a thread in the forums to showcase progress for the godot beta version.
The thread was met with high reception, with others noting that the game ran very smoothly and it wasn’t as prone to crashes as the other releases.
So it was settled, the game was going to switch to the new engine. After about two months of programming, the dev team had finally made the 5.0 release. It had a ton of features, and was a lot quicker too.
In that time Thrive had set up a patreon too.
Development is accelerating faster than ever now, and who knows when the microbe stage will be completed? The 5.1 release is already more than halfway done and the versions after that look to be completed at relatively the same pace, if not faster.
The dev team is also as large as ever, so this may help with the consistent releases of Thrive.
CONCLUSION
The game hasn’t even completed the microbe stage yet and it already has an essay’s worth of history. When the game reaches Ascension and gains a lot more popularity, no one would probably believe that the game spent more than ten years in the microbe stage.
The story of Thrive is a story of persistence and perseverance, of developers who were tasked with the seemingly impossible and still managed to make it further than anyone expected it could. When this game is finally completed, it’s development story will go down in the history of gaming forever.
So, what will happen next? Will Thrive finally reach the Aware stage and gain immense amounts of popularity? Or will it stay in obscurity, having with little to no devs as the game’s idea fizzles out?
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