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Post by typhren on Feb 23, 2018 0:56:48 GMT
First id like to say i just recently came across this project you guys are working on and i think its a really great idea. I hope that everything works out and the game can continue to be devleloped and realize its dream.
i initially didn't think i really had any skills to contribute to the development but i was thinking about the game earlier and had a idea i felt might be worth sharing.
The idea is that when you die (or perhaps die repeatedly/enough of your entire species/strain) your current organism should be set back one iteration/evolution. This wouldn't be too crippling to game progression, but it would represent failed evolutionary paths, as they do occur in real life. Allowing the player to take different evolutionary paths to something hopefully more successfully, and prevent points in the games where players might find them selves really stuck from poor choices and be tempted to start over or quit.
i think it would be neat once your a good way through the game, to look back at the offshoots of your species ancestors that didn't make it as far as your current and on going species. This would leave players with a sense of accomplishments and perhaps nostalgia for the journey that was faced along the way.
This is definitely a work in progress concept that will likely take re-balancing and adjusting of mechanics when/if it ever made it into the game. But i think it could be a seed of a great idea.
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Post by Omicron on Feb 23, 2018 11:19:33 GMT
First of all: Hello Typhren, and welcome to the Thrive community forums.
Now, on to the topic: I feel like this could be a great way of making it more fun to look back at later, but maybe it would feel a bit frustrating in-game.
Maybe we could have something where we force the player to remove something small in their creature, to not have an entire failed generation. This should of course require a lot of balancing, but I feel like that isn't my strongest point.
(Also, we now have a reason to add microtransactions in the game, just pay $5 to not go back a generation and truly "leave players with a sense of accomplishments")
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Post by typhren on Feb 23, 2018 21:25:49 GMT
I wouldn’t incloude micro transactions.
Part of the very ideal of the game was free, no cost ever, open source community project.
I do agree that it will take balancing and reworking to implement. But I made this post just to suggest the concept.
Also I would say that having only a minor change would under mind the effect a bit. If their 99% the same as what you did and succeed as it won’t really feel like a full off shoot.
But again I’m totally open to the community coming and modifying this idea into something that could be applicable to the game and fun addition.
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Post by frogonunicycle on Feb 24, 2018 17:09:57 GMT
(Also, we now have a reason to add microtransactions in the game, just pay $5 to not go back a generation and truly "leave players with a sense of accomplishments") Hi Omicron, thanks for your interesting feedback on the discussion.  The devs and myself are probably on the same page for this. Thrive was made to be a free to play game that everyone can enjoy without the hassle of AAA games these days. I would like to bring to your attention, the recent EA incident involving StarWars Battlefront (tm). Please look at this link. Microtransactions, first of all, ruin the realism and fluidity of a game of Thrive. When you have microtransactions, you slow down the natural, organic pace of a game. Games are meant to be a wholesome experience, where the progress is determined by your natural skill, intellect, decisions and luck! Microtransactions prevent this by allowing players to buy into easier situations with microtransactions. Microtransactions also can be addicting to certain people. For example, microtransactions are basically small transactions of money (micro-transactions if you will), which are similar to casino games like slots~ And we all know how addicting that is. So how about we avoid microtransactions, Sound good?  |
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Post by Oliveriver on Feb 24, 2018 17:33:00 GMT
You’ve touched on an aspect I think we might struggle with - how to make the player’s gameplay impact their species’ success. It would be easy to accidentally make a creature’s effectiveness come solely from its design, and while we want this to be a big factor (designing a species that’s successful enough to out-compete the simulation’s efforts at bioengineering is perhaps the main goal of the game) it does question the utility of actually playing as that creature. If your success or failure is determined only by your species’ design, what’s to stop you playing terribly with individual organisms with no repercussions? How can we give the player agency and make their gameplay choices meaningful? This is an interesting answer to those questions. We need some sort of penalty to your species as a whole for dying as an individual. Before I thought that might come from reducing the population each time you die, but that invalidates the accuracy of the simulation by introducing artificial constraints. I think your idea is better, though it could still be improved upon. I’m not sure how well it fits into the planned method of evolution (you’d have to ask tjwhale for that) and it won’t lead to a risk of the player losing by playing badly, which I think is necessary. Anyone have any thoughts on this? Also guys I think/hope Omicron was joking about microtransactions. |
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Post by typhren on Feb 24, 2018 18:41:11 GMT
I see what your saying, about try to put some sort of penalty in the game. I do agree that some reworked and evolution of this concept could potentionally fill atleast a part.
However you said you didn’t want game to be purely about design, as it would somewhat undermine plaigbas a creature. Further that there’s still no significant draw back to playing badly.
I would suggest to not try too hard to limit people from messing around a bit. Being able to be a little whacky and have some silliness with out permentatly killing their save file.. This is the foundation of YouTube videos (free advertisement).
But at the same time I get that the point of the game is to be realistic so your not looking for silliness. So I still stand that this idea could help.
Let’s say some one was feeling a bit whacky and decided to put a extra arm or head or something where it shouldn’t really be. They gotta feed this part of their body and if it doesn’t help by some random reason it’s gonna make it harder for them to survive. And yes I think if your dieing a lot, presumably taking control of another member of your species, your gonna go extinct at some point. Especially since the AIs of your species gonna be facing the same issue. I think at exctinction instead of game over it should be set back a few paces where the player can make different choices instead of starting over. It will provide those off shoots to look back as well.
But I think it still holds to realism because in life mutations happen, that’s drives evolution and a lot of the time those evolutions are bad, most in fact. It’s very rare when a mutation at random is actually what’s needed to survive better. This method would hold true to that somewhat. Granted in the game it will be people making semi rationale decision and not random errors in DNA, so evolution as a game would be prone to have a little less failures.
Also maybe a additional thought to add, instead of coming out of your evolution spore style with your whole species having the new evolved thing, it should just be you. And you have to survive long enough to mate and have lots of successful children to sucesully and pass on the good mutation. This would prevent the player from playing really badly and progressing, but stay real to life and not be too crippling. But I am aware we would not what to end up with a scenario when people feel like they have to go mate 50 times after each evolution, the goal isn’t to make THAT kind of game 😂.
So community ideas and re-working still required
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Post by Oliveriver on Feb 24, 2018 19:17:06 GMT
Obviously this won’t be a permadeath game, except in perhaps the proposed hardcore difficulty. You can save as you go and load an earlier save game if your current run collapses and you want to go back.
And yes, there needs to be some room for silliness. Maybe instead of tying species success to only the plauer’s death, we also somehow incorporate a metric of how well they personally collect resources and retain health, or whatever other statistics we can think of. Then it’s not so much a matter of doing badly leading to a loss, but doing well making a win more likely.
But anyway, this is getting slightly off-topic to your original idea.
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Post by typhren on Feb 24, 2018 19:49:32 GMT
Fair point, I guess to get more on track and maybe to put it more simply.
You had mentioned just now going back to a older save, and moving forward from their.
I suppose my idea at a basic level is to replace that with this evolution respawnig, setting you back. So you can look at your failed save files as ancestors/off shoots integrated in your play through
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bur
Multicellular
Posts: 22 
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Post by bur on Feb 24, 2018 23:08:46 GMT
I always thought it would be cool that if you die, instead of respawning with the same organism (or a previous iteration as suggested), you would be able to select one of your decendants to play with. Or if there are none, your closest living relatives.
A sort of semi-permadeath I guess.
This way the penalty of death would simply be that some design choices of your creature were made by auto-evo. This would also possibly steer poor players towards a more succesfull creature design and/or teach the player what works.
A big bonus of this idea IMO is that it's realistic and feels more organic and less gamey.
Sorry if this is off-topic, but I thought it fit into the theme of the thread.
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Post by typhren on Feb 25, 2018 0:59:30 GMT
I think your comment fit just fine in this topic
I do think your idea has some potential too.
Maybe it could be modified to work with mine/hybrid or maybe the community will prefer one or the other.
Either way I think it’s a valid idea to share, I like the idea of their being speciation of the organism the player is playing through. That’s the ultimate concept behind my idea, and yours if I’m understanding you properly.
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Post by hhyyrylainen on Feb 25, 2018 9:31:25 GMT
I think the death penalty needs to be quite small. Otherwise the best tactic is to just play really carefully in order to not get set back by dying.
I think a suitable number of generations in the cell stage would be around 20-30 so with this method dying just 10 times will make it take you 1/3 longer to finish the stage. And there probably isn't a lot of different options for moving forward so you will be just annoyed by having to redo the same addition of agents to your cell multiple times.
That's why I support the idea of the player's death just subtracting from their total population and their performance changing the simulation parameters on how "smart" their species acts (how well they use the organelles their cell has). And that way the effectiveness of their species is in part determined by how well they play, but a bit more on the design of their cell.
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Post by xolorhusd on Feb 25, 2018 16:49:43 GMT
Perhaps a penalty of less mutation points? And a player who is successful gets more. Think of it as maybe having a wider gene pool to select from, as more individuals in your specie are fit to survive, and propagate their adaptations. Where as someone who dies often represents less fit for the enviroment at its current state, meaning that competition for suitable mates is more difficult.
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Post by crodnu on Feb 25, 2018 17:29:36 GMT
I think we could have each species have a number of population, determined by the cpa and the amount of times died during the game. If your population reahes 0 you have to pick another species (which could be the one you had previously, assuming it didn't go extinct). I think if you die a lot, you could get even more mutation points, because the survivors of an evolutionary bottleneck are supposed to be more fit, however, after that, while the species recover its biodiversity the mutation points in the editor should be lower (maybe we could even implement a biodiversity system similar to the one in this forum game, made by developer Aiosian_Doctor_Xenox?) |
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