Progress Update 7/11/2020
This week we discussed about gameplay, we wanted to figure out how Thrive should feel, and that encompasses many issues and areas of the game. From difficulty to cell speed and resource absorption, making all these factors feel right is not easy, so our Game Designer tried to figure these out and discuss about it with the team.
Answering these questions is only one half of the issue, the other half consists on tweaking these features until they work and feel as intended and that…
Progress Update 7/4/2020
When we first designed the patch map there was a consensus about not showing an actual map of the world to the players, after all cells don't know anything about geography. But this idea has been questioned lately, and today we have several concepts to explore this new approach.
There's even a planet generator prototype! It's very early in development and it can't be implemented in game since it's, well, just a prototype but these are our first steps into terrain generation. Finally…
Read More →Progress Update 6/27/2020
This week has been slower than usual, most work was on small issues and also discussing how to balance gluttonous cells, i.e. big cells with too many organelles.
New options related to autosaving have been added, letting the user deactivate it and also choose how many saves they want to keep.
There has been some work on the ThriveDevCenter to improve user management and also link it with the launcher to make automated dev builds possible.
Regarding balancing, some options ha…
Read More →Progress Update 6/20/2020
Saving is getting fleshed out, there's a new saving and loading menu accessible from the main menu and the game itself. ATP bars have been improved too, now segments can be hidden and there's a new palette so they look better.
There are more patch map concepts along with a detailed explanation for them, including a couple of past concepts you've seen already in other updates.
- New saving menu
- Progress on ATP bars
- Nothing Substantial
Progress Update 6/13/2020
Today's highlight is ATP bars. The original idea behind them is that they showed how much ATP each process and organelle produced or consumed so the player had a better idea about their cell's viability and built better organisms. These new ATP bars match that concept and they even allow you to hide individual segments to see what happens when one or more processes are inactive or to compare different builds.
There's also a concept for a similar feature, the Processes menu, which sh…
Read More →Progress Update 6/5/2020
Saving is finally working, those donating to Hh's patreon can download a new dev-build and test this new feature. There have been some changes on the spawn system too so it doesn't spawn too many cells at once.
Compound clouds use a new blending mode so they look better, removing newly placed organelles in the editor now refund MP's and we also discussed how to make Photosynthesis more fun.
- Saving implemented
- Changed the spawning system so it doesn't spawn too many cel…
Progress Update 5/30/2020
There's more progress on saving and work on another features. Chemosynthesis, movement and respiration have been buffed so they are now more efficient. And we also have a new auto evo prototype based on some of Tjwhale's old work.
There are new concepts for the patch map as well, focusing on how to arrange patches in a hierarchy when a bigger patch contains them.
- Progress on saving
- UI Improvements
- Fixed spawn system not removing spawners on patch change
Progress Update 5/23/2020
As usual, we discussed what new features are going to be in the next release. We want to make a bugfix patch before a bigger update, but we aren't sure how easy that would be, so for now we can't tell if that's going to be released.
Meanwhile, we also worked on rebalancing the game for the next patch, implementing a saving feature and also made some very cool effects for cell deaths and iron chunks despawning. And finally a new developer, Nokk joined the team!
- New Scre…
Devblog #24: And Godot arrived
It's been only two months since we started the last engine change, and today we are proud to announce our newest release: Thrive 0.5.0!
Yes, it only took us two months to rewrite the whole game in Godot. So what does this new release bring and what's so good about this new engine? Well Godot is user friendly, has a lot of documentation, an active community and no missing important features. In other words, it makes development on Thrive easier, meaning that with this (hopefully) t…
Read More →Progress Update 5/9/2020
We are getting closer to the next version, in fact the 0.5.0 public beta is already here! You can download it from this thread and test it. Let us know if you find any bugs or have any issues. We also set May the 16th as a provisional release date, there are a few remaining issues to be fixed, but as you can see Thrive 0.5.0 will be ready soon.
We have a new launcher version and a new Godot pck tool too. The later one is for managing Godot pck files and it can be used fo…
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