Devblog #52: More Specialized
It's already time for the second major update of the Multicellular Stage! In the last update, we first introduced the Cell Specialization system. This has now been greatly improved upon by refinement of its calculation, expansion of its effects, and the addition of an adjacency bonus for cells of the same type. We also have an entirely new feature exclusive to the Multicellular Stage in Sporulation, our first new reproduction mode. The Multicellular Stage has also benefited from smaller improvements, such as a shortening of the time required to reproduce.
There have also been many other significant changes to the game, such as a major update to the auto-evo system that makes it run more than twice as fast and produce better species. This is without mentioning balance changes to toxins, oxygen resistance, and all the membrane types. We also made improvements to difficulty settings and UI functions, such as the process panel and new scrolling tooltips.
Multicellular development is well underway now, and that is even with some development time still going towards supporting systems. As such, we're still confident that we'll be able to finish Multicellular Stage development this year. Which is to say, you can look forward to even more 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 1.1.0
See our patch notes for full details, or read on for some of the highlights.
More Specialization
The Cell Specialization system has received significant upgrades. Most importantly, there is now a Cell Type Adjacency effect on Specialization. For each cell of the same type adjacent to a cell, it receives a boost to the bonuses it gets from specialization. This makes it very useful to place cells of the same type together as much as possible, which is something we want to encourage also for the conversion to tissues and organs in the later transition to the Macroscopic Stage. This adjacency bonus acts as a multiplier on the Cell Specialization bonus, so it is not as impactful if the cells aren't that specialized to begin with.
The effects of the Specialization bonus have also been greatly expanded. Up until now, only process speeds were boosted, but now it also boosts pretty much everything else a cell's organelles can provide: storage, movement speed, rotation speed, environmental tolerances, etc. This, for example, now makes it more worth it to make dedicated cells for movement via flagella, or specifically for producing and firing toxins. Finally, the calculation for cell specialization has changed, making a sharper evaluation of how specialized the cell is. In particular, reducing the number of different organelle types in the cell now has a big impact.
Spore Reproduction
We've finally added the first new multicellular reproduction mode! “Sporulation” lets you select any cell type (even ones not part of your normal body plan at all) to spawn in as when you leave the editor (or tragically die and re-spawn). You can then use a new ability to convert that cell into the normal first cell in your body plan at will and grow from there. This allows you to, for example, create a highly mobile spore to quickly find a good spot to start growing in.
For the future, we're also looking at letting you germinate the spore into multiple starting cells instead of just one if it is large enough or has enough storage. This is of course also just the start of new reproduction options, so expect more in future updates.
The Toxin Reckoning
The most consistent topic of feedback recently has been concerns over toxin organelle dominance, and particularly players being hunted down by enormous swarms of small toxin-shooting cells. So, we've spent some time reigning in the toxins a bit from several angles.
Firstly, toxin production speed and damage have both been reduced by about 20% and the minimum time between shots has been increased by 10%. The AI has also been adjusted to try and build up more toxins (based on their Focus behaviour setting) before firing, which should reduce the “bullet hell” feeling.
There have also been some changes on the defensive side. For Multicellular Species in particular, toxins that hit any of your cells now have their damage distributed over all of the cells in your body plan. This means you are much less likely to lose individual cells to toxin attacks unless you are being hit with enough toxins to kill the whole organism. The damage taken from engulfed toxic prey has also been altered so that a higher max HP helps protect against it. Lastly, while membrane types have been rebalanced in general, the Double Membrane in particular has been made into an anti-toxin specialist. This makes it particularly good at engulfing toxic prey.
Additional Features
- Overhauled auto-evo structure to make it much faster and to generate better species
- Improved the performance of the compound clouds by up to 100%
- Limited max oxygen tolerance on the slider greatly to force higher tolerance values only to be available through adding organelles that grant tolerance bonuses to oxygen
- Created pages in the Thriveopedia for each species in the game and made clicking on a species take you to that page
- Added a very easy difficulty
- Tweaked multicellular reproduction speed
- Changed the osmoregulation difficulty slider to a general energy slider which now affects almost everything handling ATP
- Too tall tooltips now slowly scroll up and down to show all of their contents
- Updated to Godot 4.6.2
- Changed game balancing
- Tweaked the visuals of the process panel
A full list of changes is available in our release notes on GitHub.
What’s Next
The previous release was still relatively light on changes and entirely new features for the Multicellular Stage as it was mixed with a lot of work on background systems and some refinements on Microbe Stage features. However, with features like the expanded specialization, adjacency and new reproduction modes, we're definitely getting into developing the main body of the Multicellular Stage now.
As has been previously said, our current development focus is to finish the Multicellular Stage this year. As the stage makes extensive use of the Microbe Stage systems, with our progress so far we are still confident we will reach that goal.
Looking at our Release Roadmap, we've actually already completed part of what was scheduled for release 1.2. In the coming period, work will initially likely focus on features such as more reproduction modes and making membrane type uniform across all cell types.
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:
