Devblog #51: Onward to Multicellular
It's finally time for the first major update of the Multicellular Stage development process! We have a new cell specialisation feature allowing you to really take advantage of the multiple cell types you can make for your Multicellular species. Additionally, you can now control the growth order of cells, giving you far greater control over the course of life as a Multicellular organism. There are also several smaller additions and improvements to the stage, making it overall more fun to play and building a foundation for future development.
Though our work is focused on the multicellular Stage, we also have some more general changes, such as a new environmental tolerances UI, updates to water currents and bigger pieces of ice in the ice sheet patch. That's not mentioning the many bug fixes, balance changes and and performance improvements.
This is just the first step of Multicellular Stage development, and a lot of time near the start of the year was spent on maintenance and the fixing of issues from the 1.0 release. Which is to say, we can hopefully show you even more progress in the next update!
As always the update is available for free with our launcher, or you can support development by purchasing on Steam or Itch.io. If you already own a copy of Thrive, you can also get the soundtrack. We really need your support in order to continue development at the current pace past the Multicellular Stage.
Read on for more details, or visit the download page linked below to get the new version.
Thrive 1.0.1
See our patch notes for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
Multicellular Stage
As development is now focused on the Multicellular Stage, it is no longer marked as a prototype and the “you are entering prototypes” warning has been moved to the Macroscopic Stage. With that, there have been quite a few additions and improvements to the Stage. Similarly to how you can set the duplication order of cell parts in the Microbe Stage, you can now set the growth order of cells in the Multicellular Stage. Significantly, the first cell in your selected growth order is also the “core” cell of your organism which the rest of the cells turn around.
Another improvement is in the algorithm that translates the multicellular editor design into the actual in-game multicellular colony shape. The latter now visually matches much better with the design you actually made. Unfortunately, there is still the fundamental problem that your multicellular design is made up of perfect hexagons on a hexagonal grid, while the cells you make can have pretty much any shape and size. So most likely there are always going to be designs that cannot be translated to a real physical shape with good accuracy.
There's also a variety of other changes to start making the Multicellular into a more complete and fun experience. Firstly, the environmental tolerances system now functions for Multicellular species. You can set the tolerance sliders in the tab in the main editor. The effects on tolerances from cell parts are averaged across all cells.
Smaller changes include turning speed being increased for all colonies (which includes Multicellular species) and growth speed being increased in Multicellular. We hope these change make the stage more enjoyable to play. Finally, we felt the transition from a colony at the end of the Microbe stage to a single cell in the Multicellular stage felt odd, so you now start off with a species design made up of 3 of your starting cell type.
Cell Specialisation
One new Multicellular Stage feature of significance is cell specialisation. Now, cells will get a bonus to process speeds based on how much of the cell is made up of just one type of organelle. So the more focused in function a cell is, the more powerful and easier to fuel with ATP it becomes.
The intention here is that you create separate cell types for separate functions and processes that you want to perform in the species as a whole. This is similar to how in real life you see different cell types focused on photosynthesis, storage, movement, etc. This is expected to form the basis for other mechanics in the Multicellular Stage.
Technically this feature is not Multicellular Stage-exclusive, it applies to single-cell microbes as well. But obviously, those have to balance cell specialisation bonuses with needing to fit all the functions you want to have in one cell. The Multicellular Stage then allows you to break this limitation, allowing you to have many different functions while still maximising the cell specialisation bonus. We hope this demonstrates what may be a very real advantage multicellular species have over single-celled species.
New Tolerances GUI
This new UI was first created quite some time ago, but the effort eventually stalled out. Recently, another contributor picked it up, and pulled the feature over the finish line. Not only are the visuals new, but it is also easier to use. In particular, Pressure tolerance is easier to manage, and modifier numbers are clearly shown. You can also clearly see the offset effects on the sliders caused by organelles in your cell(s).
Additional Features
- Updated to Godot Engine 4.6
- Added an option to change the GUI scale (mostly meant for reducing the scale)
- Initial multicellular body plan now consists of 3 cells
- Updated biome current settings to have much more varied currents across different patches
- Multicellular freebuild now starts with the world oxygenated and the starting patch is on the surface
- Fixed realism bug with ATP transferring between the cells of a colony (and in multicellular)
- Fixed straight edges appearing in compound clouds
- Improved compound cloud performance by adjusting the math
- Made balance changes to various patch events
- General balancing and other improvements to auto-evo
- Multicellular growth rate is now not limited to the same value as in the microbe stage, instead it is multiple times higher like it was supposed to be set originally
A full list of changes is available in our release notes on GitHub.
What’s Next
With this release of Thrive we are moving officially into the Multicellular Stage development as planned. So while our main focus will be to finish the multicellular stage this year, there will still be some Microbe Stage improvements as well when volunteers make them. As the Multicellular Stage uses quite many Microbe Stage mechanics, we think we can finish it this year and many of the improvements for the stage will also help the Microbe Stage. This release was a bit of a gentle easing into the Multicellular stage, but for the next release we plan to get into the features that will make Multicellular feel special.
Join us a bit later today for our developer Thrivestream where we'll celebrate the release on the stream, but also answer the usual question of what's coming in the next releases. (Questions can also be asked in advance in this thread). You can visit our feedback thread to give your thoughts on this release.
Watch the stream:
