Belgium, it's been a while.

Hey, great to see you're still following us!

If you want to see what's become of development recently, visit our dev forums here:

forum.revolutionarygamesstudio.com

It's invite-only as we wanted to cut down on non-focused talk in development context, but we've set up this forum as an alternative for all the fans who want to speculate. It's only around half the dev talk too, as we use private chat a lot more than in the old days. If you are interested in getting back into things (which you don't have to, it's nice just to see you back), we can send you invites for both.

Elsewhere, we have a Game Design Document for the Microbe Stage which covers all our current thinking. It may take a while to read though:

thrivegame.wikidot.com/microbe-stage-gdd

Hi Poisson! Looks like we've both been resurrected in this new age of progress and dev blogs.

Yes actually, I remember tackling that a while back. I'll see where I saved it.

thrivegame.canadaboard.net/t1392-stage-transitions?highlight=stage+transitions
(4th post down)

Basically, Multicellular starts when you first bind to another cell of your species to form a colony. However, Multicellular has two unofficial parts, the 2D part, and the 3D part. The 2D part is where you are a colony of cells still viewing everything top-down. The 3D part is where you are a multicellular organism swimming in a 3 dimensional environment, with individual cells no longer visible, and now using the Organism Editor each generation. After you reach a certain number of cells you undergo the 2D-3D transition, which will probably be one of the least seamless transitions in the game, but is necessary and we can't find a smooth way around it. It will basically be a couple seconds where you lose control of your organism, the camera rotates and orbits down, the old UI slides off and the new UI slides on.

However as we approach this we'll have to plan it all out properly and put it into the GDD before starting to implement it.

Ah, I remember that thread, it has a lot of useful concepts for when we start working on the colony gameplay.

I suppose this makes sense, dividing up stages based on gameplay. The original distinction for aware wasn't very specific.

So this means ‘multicellular’ is what we used to call ‘early multicellular’, where you can see individual cells?

If late multicellular is merges with aware, I'm not sure ‘aware’ is the best name for it anymore, since plants, fungus, and worms are also covered.

I can't think of a name to accurately describe it which isn't ‘multicellular’, really. Maybe ‘macro-multicellular’?

I'll move this discussion over to a new thread.

So, getting back on topic, hi there Poisson.