0.3.3 Final

Thoughts/complaints:

1. The health bar looked awful to my eyes when I first saw it, but I have to admit that it works very well when actually playing the game. I don't have any trouble focusing on it (at least outside of the darker environments; it does need to be made lighter).

2. Organelle division is a completely unneeded and unwelcome mechanic. It totally ruins the point of designing your own cell, and it isn't even realistic since AFAIK protists don't spend most of their lives undergoing binary fission (much less swimming around and dodging predators). Why not just have the player collect a certain amount of compounds and then begin the process (i.e. fade to the editor)?

3. I have encountered CTDs both with and without admin privileges. However, they are much less frequent with privileges enabled, so I assume there is a separate cause for them.

4. The oxytoxy bar seems pointless since toxins can be generated directly from oxygen.

5. Toxins are generated much too far away from the cells and don't have any correlation to where their toxin vacuoles are actually located. This makes evading danger much more frustrating and arbitrary. 'Surprise toxin in the face' really isn't all that fun.

6. Engulfing appears to have been removed from the game, so why not remove it from the instructions as well?

7. The GUI does not hold up well. The list of bars is extremely intrusive and the numbers are placed too far to the right of the screen, making them hard to see at a glance. You see that ATP measure beside the health bar? That's where they all should be, and color-coded as well.

8. The absolute worst issue with the game is that there is zero transparency. I can't tell what anything does anymore. Most of the time my ATP is caught at a certain threshold, but oxygen, glucose and ammonia don't seem to go down when I swim. What causes health to regenerate? What do organelles DO? What causes you to divide (it certainly isn't what the tutorial claims)? Here are the three main issues:

    (A) Health only appears to go up when I collect either ammonia or glucose, regardless of how much I already have of those. It doesn't do so consistently- it's either one or the other, and nothing tells me what circumstances change this. However, occasionally my health shoots back up the instant I get damaged, presumably using a stored compound. Why not just make health go up according to a fixed rate of conversion?

    (B) Most of the time my ATP is caught in the early teens, flipping back and forth between two numbers. I originally assumed that glucose was being converted to ATP only when a certain threshold was met and so that canceled out the consumption, but this is not true. I've looked at my compounds and none of them change in the slightest while this is happening. The only thing that lets me accumulate ATP is reaching a certain amount of mitochondria or vacuoles (don't know which) and then I can easily get into the hundreds and never fear starvation again. How can this possibly be deliberately coded in? The only sensible thing to do, like health, is to convert glucose to ATP at a fixed rate according to how many mitochondria you have.

    (C) Cell division does seem correlated with glucose and ammonia, but it only seems to happen when I actually collect those compounds and doesn't care about what I already have. Also, I can see that organelles grow larger before dividing, but what does it mean when the nucleus grows?

Conclusion: This is a very bad release. I don't understand the team's claims of being ready for more outreach. Whatever improvements there are in 3.3, the gameplay itself has regressed substantially and is certainly not presentable to a critical audience. The most frustrating thing here is that most of these problems are easily fixable and sometimes (in the case of the GUI) required more work to have reached this state than they would have to be done properly.

I suppose it depends on how heavily the customization aspect is emphasized in microbe stage. If it's just a prelude game to set you up on the planet than I'll concede cell division doesn't matter that much... but I still think it goes against the most basic element of gameplay: that you design your own creature.

Engulfment is still a thing, it's just that the cell doesn't change colours anymore due to graphical glitches.

You just press it to enter engulfing mode. You should experience some speed decrease in that mode. You do need to be bigger than other cells to eat them, and they can try to eat you if they're bigger than you.

Three more issues:

1. Are the compound quantities rounded from more precise numbers? When a player sees their cell absorbing oxygen, no matter how little, he should expect his oxygen level to rise.

2. Amino acids play zero role in the game right now, and I've never seen the AA bar rise at all. Even if there will eventually be a good reason for them, they needn't have been included in this release.

3. The ingame music is way too soft compared to the menu's.