Stage transitions?

This is a fine place (other mods may disagree with me). In the future, you can place threads about every stage simultaneously under the "Future Game" subforum without specificaly placing it in a stage board if you're concerned.

The Multicellular transition is the most fleshed out at the moment, and the idea as far as I'm aware is to simply open up a new editor for the player, and add new camera angles. Ultimately the goal is to make transitions smooth, without immersion breaking cutscenes or the like. When it comes to interacting between stages, that's a point of contention. The general consensus among developers is "to a certain extent, but with restrictions". For example, you can encounter aware creatures during awakening, there will likely be a mix of microbe and multicellular creatures, but when it comes to the microscope...well...grain of salt time.

There may be a time when players could do that, but my guess is that the programmers will have different priorities for most of the later stages. There have been some interesting discussions about genetic engineering though, so perhaps such a stage blurring will be important to some cool industrial mechanics. That being said, industrial is far away, and while the general ideas are fairly set, there will certianly be problems and important inspirations that crop up in the interim.

I hope this was a bit helpful, and team members with more experience than I probably have more useful answers.

Not stupid at all! As I said, there've been discussions in the past. To elaborate on my meaning, the genetic engineering that I've seen discussed would revolve around using a cell editor to make a super-disease or a parasite or some such, so depending on what level of detail things like that end up receiving, it may happen.