Devblog #47: Current Events
Another three months have passed, and another Thrive release has arrived - Thrive 0.8.2 is now available for download!
The headliners for this update include currents, bioluminescence, additional environmental events, a tutorial revamp, and more. Less experienced players can rely on a more comprehensive tutorial to breakdown how to make your organism Thrive; currents will give movement to the waters you inhabit, livening up the world; and players of all skill level will have to contend with meteor impacts and Snowball Earth events.
Many of these features have been requested for multiple years, held back by incomplete concepts, graphics work, and programming focus. The result of their implementation is a more alive, accessible, and beautiful Thrive.
As always the update is available for free with our launcher, or you can support development by purchasing on Steam or Itch.io. We really need your support in order to continue development at the current pace after the microbe stage is complete. We are just a few releases away from completing the microbe stage this year.
Read on for more details, or visit the download page linked below to get the new version.
Thrive 0.8.2
See our patch notes for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
Water Currents
Adding more life into the world, currents have finally been implemented.
Players and other cells will now be affected by currents, pushing in a direction indicated by moving water particles. Currents vary by patches, becoming more or less powerful depending on the region of the ocean you inhabit. Before this update only chunks were slightly moved by currents, but now the currents are much stronger and move other types of things as well.
This makes interacting with your environment more dynamic, and makes predation and movement require more coordination; you don’t want to get caught in a stream while running away from something!
New Patch Events
Glaciation events and meteor impacts - crucial phenomena in the story of life and the planet it inhabits - are now represented in Thrive.
Global glaciation events involves a rapid, widespread cooling of the planet, resulting in widespread freezing. There have been at least three such events in our planet’s history, with one - commonly referred to as “Snowball Earth” - resulting in a significant amount of our oceans being frozen over.
In Thrive, a Snowball Earth Event has a likelihood of being triggered once your planet’s atmosphere becomes oxygenic. All surface patches reach freezing temperatures, have reduced light levels, and spawn in ice chunks in Snowball Events, drastically shaking up life on your planet.
Meteor impacts are also influential events in the history of a planet. Early on in Earth’s history, meteors often introduced important resources to the atmosphere and surface, shaping the evolution of our planet’s climate.
In the Microbe Stage, there are six possible types of meteor impacts which generally impact light availability, carbon dioxide, and introduce resources to surface patches. The most common impact events result in changes to local atmospheric conditions, while rarer meteors can spike resource availability, such as phosphate or radioactive material. Meteor impacts can vary in size, impacting single patches, all surface patches in an entire region, or across multiple regions.
New Tutorial
Confused about an aspect of Thrive? Tutorials will be back the time you play - unless of course you have completely disabled them. Now the default way to turn off the tutorials is to only turn off tutorials you have seen before, which will be a lot better for returning players who may have been otherwise tempted to turn off all tutorials to avoid the first few tutorials you before always had to play through. In general, a lot of work has been put into reworking the tutorials, better explaining our fundamental mechanics.
The tutorial is now more direct, slowly introducing additional layers of information in an approachable manner. Focus is primarily on explaining metabolism, clarifying some common areas of confusion we see in keeping your organism from starving. Additional love has been put into introducing the Auto-Evo Report and Microbe Editor piece by piece, making sure players understand what pieces of information are most appropriate.
Much of this development cycle was put into the tutorial, which has been a source of constant discussion within the team for years. As such, we are itching to put a rubber stamp on the topic and move on. If you have any feedback on the clarity of the tutorial, we ask that you let us know soon. Though, we are no longer going to consider another entire rework, but smaller tweaks can be done.
Bioluminescense
The bioluminescent vacuole has been hanging around in the list of our organelles for almost a decade now always waiting to be implemented. As it was on our microbe roadmap, our lead programmer finally took care of that. So now you can add pretty lights to your cell:
It doesn't do much in gameplay terms but at least it looks pretty, right? It does offer some oxygen resistance, which is also a new feature in this release that completes the environmental tolerances system that didn't have enough time to cook for the previous release.
Additional Features
- More polished environmental tolerances with organelles now affecting the tolerances
- Added resolution scaling options to render at lower resolutions for more performance
- Added a loading screen for stages during which graphics are loaded and shaders compiled to reduce stuttering during gameplay
- Upgraded to Godot 4.4.1
- Added a button to play the game at double speed
- Reordered the organism statistics panel to put less important stats at the bottom and make the compound balances visible without scrolling down
- Balancing tweaks and made AI members of the player species dying affect the population
- Various graphics and GUI tweaks
A full list of changes is available in our release notes on GitHub.
What’s Next
This release has been slightly lighter on new features than the previous one, mostly because we focused more on fixing things and reworking the tutorial. The next release will again be more focused on new features. Though, we are planning on making a small patch release 0.8.2.1 which will make Mac support official and add that version to Steam. We are still focused on the goal of releasing the completed microbe stage this year.
As always remember to join us for our developer Thrivestream later today, where we’ll cover the changes in this release and answer any questions you might have about the future of development. We'll also answer the usual question of what's coming in the next releases. You can visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this update.
Watch the stream:
