Devblog #6: Ask Us Anything

Hey, veyraa! Welcome to the forums. It's completely okay that you posted here; I also didn't like Reddit when I first started using it because of its super confusing interface  (it's not that bad really, its just different from what I was used to). 

The artwork you are talking about is, sadly, not mine (I'm more of a paint on canvas type of guy). It was actually made by a variety of different people back in the ole days. Some were made by ~scio (who is unfortunately not with us anymore) and many other who come, art, and go.

Hope you enjoy your stay, and if you have anymore questions feel free to ask!

Thanks you two.
I am somewhat disappointed that I do not have the people responsible to chat with, though from the sounds of it, that may be selfish?
Either way, I will be listening to the full Thrive ost in a bit...

> Are there any plans for how the transition between stages, particularly from multicellular to aware, and aware to the next one (name escapes me), and if so what might they be? I apologise if I forgot a step, my memory is not the best.

I'm hopeful that the transitions will not be noticeable transitions at all. For example, from Multicellular to Aware, the cutoff would probably be considered when you get a nervous system of a certain degree. I'm inclined to think the cutoff is effectively meaningless, because as your nervous system improves you will slowly develop a larger capacity to have more instinctive behaviours, more complicated ones, and eventually learned behaviour, and onwards to sapience. So there's not a big transition per se, but just some points along the timeline that we use to describe what mechanics are like at a certain point.

> Can you allow your creations to auto-evo on their own to take a step back every so often, almost like in plague inc. where your disease can mutate without your direction? Perhaps an option in the editor to randomly assign mutation points along the lines of the auto-evo system?

You will play as a member of your species within a certain population. Other populations of your species can evolve to diverge from yours, and if there isn't enough movement of genes between them, they will most likely quickly diverge into separate species no longer capable of interbreeding. We like the idea of having auto-evo also give you suggestions for what to do with your particular population, for example, in easy mode, and it would be a simple change to have auto-evo simply evolve your species for you (simpler, too). So, yeah, we could do it.

> Where do you foresee the project being by this time next year, or by the end of the decade? You've asked us how far we think the project will get, how far do you think it will?

I think, in a year, we'll be working on multicellular, and maybe a little on other stages too. In 4 years, I predict we'll be working heavily on Aware stage, and probably lightly on Awakening, Society, Industrial, and Space -- mostly not directly on playable game mechanics, but on putting together the algorithms etc that the stages need to be built upon.

I think, that by getting through Microbe stage we'll have put together an engine and dev process that does a good job of enabling a lot of progress, and we'll have enough content that we could afford to let programmers branch off onto particular things they really want to work on instead of focusing everyone on microbe stage features. So, if we do manage all that, then I think we're well-placed to get the whole thing finished.

1. I don't fully understand. Do you mean someone messing with the code without permission? If so, I think we have that covered, because everyone contributing to our GitHub has to have their changes approved by an accepted developer, and many of our devs have their own copies of the repository anyway.

2. You submit an application, we approve you if we think you're the sort of person we want, you get invited to our development forums and maybe the Slack group if you're a programmer, you disappear within a couple of days for no apparent reason and we feel sad. That's how most of the applications have gone unfortunately, which is why there are so many programmer introductions on the dev forums but so few actually stick around. We get a pretty good number of people applying to join now, it's getting them to stay that becomes the problem. Of course, you can circumvent this system entirely by submitting a direct code change on GitHub, which is I think what you're getting at.

3. Not possible to answer. Thrive is effectively seven games in one anyway. It might happen far in the future, but that's not something to consider at the moment. Right now Thrive is the priority.

More questions to answer! Woo!

1. It's certainly a possible career path. I've always wanted to be an author, but based on my current academic performance I'm heading for something mathematical. Music could be more of a hobby. Quite soon I'm planning to start promoting myself as a freelance indie game composer (I'll be moonlighting for Thrive...) and seeing if I can get some side income from it, at least for the time being. Truthfully I don't know if I can be considered good enough to warrant pay, but I'll only reach that point through experience.

2. There are a load of projects I'm in the middle of right now. Very few are close to completion though.

I'm genuinely touched. Thanks for making my day a bit brighter.

Yeah, being an author is kind of a risky thing. I'm certainly not going to count on it.

In the past I've mostly written science fiction, but (shameless plug) I've written other things more recently. Don't expect anything public for a while though - it's going through at least three rewrites first.

If I value my dignity, I'm waiting until it's finished unfortunately. Reading back through the first couple of chapters is just painful. But I'll keep at it, hopefully.

I'm conscious I've suddenly become the centre of attention here...um...TheCreator , on a scale of 1 to 100, how awesome are you?

To whoever wants to answer:
Have you heard of AlphaGo? Isn't it a bit worrying to see how AI is able to surpass humans and do stuff that even its creators haven't thought of? Do you think it will become something like Skynet from "Terminator" or "The Matrix"?