I thought it would be interesting to share how each of us found this intriguing game and how it has affected you. I see many familiar faces on the forums and would love to hear your stories.
I’ll start. I found Thrive while searching for a "better spore mod.’ I came upon a steam forum where someone asked if Spore would receive a sequel, the forum, as with all steam discussions very quickly degraded to random gibberish and people yelling insults at each other the further you scrolled down. But one post caught my eye, someone had linked a youtube video called Thrive Promotional Video, I was immediately immersed and found my way to the Revolutionary Games website.
The more I read, the more excited I got, I became addicted to the idea of Thrive and started researching everything about it. I read Oliveriver’s article which led me digging even further through the game’s history, 2005 Spore showcase, 2009, Evolutions!, Sven, it was very good drama. Once I read just about everything relevant about the game, I decided to actually play the game (lol).
Let’s just say… it was not what I expected, at the time Thrive was in version 0.3.1, although I read from the FAQ that Thrive was largely incomplete, and logically I knew this was very impressive already compared to earlier versions, but subconsciously I still felt depraved. This was before the legendary progress explosion by hyyrylainen and untrustedlife and the github commits were weeks apart.
I wanted to help, but at the time I was maybe grade 6 on the piano? Everything I drew looked like balloons and the most advanced thing I ever did with programming was making a first person camera in Unity with the delicate art of dragging and dropping standard assets. I am above average at math, so I decided to improve upon my drag and dropping skillz.
I started learning C++, it was hard, but not the crazy monster-demon that people make it out to be, the hardest part for me was classes and pointers, to this day I cannot properly incorporate these things on a large scale into my code. But I progressed pretty fast due to my motivation from Thrive. I burnt myself out a few times, and even left the Thrive forums for months at one point. But I never left for good, I always came back each time I left. I never stopped programming though, I found other things to create and programming became a hobby.
Although not as explosive anymore, my enthusiasm for Thrive has never completely died, I really hope I can attain enough knowledge to contribute to it one day.
What is your story?
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