The six days in Genesis are not necessarily literal, it could mean eons and billions of years. God is atemporal, and so, the days in Genesis do not have to be 24-hour days, specially knowing that the day-night cycle in the dawn of the Solar System was extremely unstable.
I do like the idea of a timer or a "where are they now?" section, its a good way to give you your stats & reveal the in depth aspects of a species, maybe its a documentary made by a random advanced future species, maybe if you do well enough its a documentary about that advanced future species' ancestors! evolution takes a long long time, controlling a society & taking it to the stars just doesnt seem as fun to me as a game that focuses merely on the evolutionary process of a species, once it gets advanced enough it wont necessarily be evolution via natural selection anymore, and to me thats the part thats interesting, the solidifying of niches, not seeing human analogues, i mean i know what a human is, i'd rather create turtle gorrillas who are just kind of turtle gorillas & maybe some future species finds them cool but not everything has to be a human society
Does it need to be real evolution? It's clear you're trying to make a better spore something that really does evolution but if it looks like evolution and talks like evolution does it matter?
this view into how the evolution system works is great! this brings a lot of light on how Thrive works! also, have you written a paper on autoevolutology? would be cool to know that thrive gets academic attention 🤩
I like to think I learned to breathe in later videos. I was so focused on not making clicking sounds in this one that I didn't think about the other stuff.
I am glad that I got to work with you, working on this models I learned about insect anatomy which helped me with my speculative project. Thank you for the opportunity!
So you got bored and made a mod for a game just because of nostalgia? Can you please implement a similar mechanic to your game where you have to hunt for some types of mutations by changing the environment, or planet?
@@MrThimato so... You know how different types of planets or even ecosystems have different factors that makes the species living there have some different adaptations? What if you implement a similar type of selection by just having us the player discover said ecosystems and planets, not just being stuck in the demo ecosystem
I have been mulling it over back and forth over the last couple months, actually. Meanwhile, you can always checkout the Thrive Discord, and if you ping Thim in there you can talk to me anytime!
I ran a text-based evolution game that tried to simulate generational niches in different environments. I did it by mutating the existing species to create randomized offshoot species, and then checking how well each living species eats every other species, assigning them a score based on effectiveness in every environment/scenario where they could eat them. This gave each species a list of other species that predate on them in those scenarios - lets say species A and species B both have the ability to predate species C. If A outcompetes B in all scenarios where the species can be eaten, it will be the only predator of C. But if species B is better than A in one of those scenarios, it eats a percentage of species C that the one scenario allows, and both species coexist as predators of species C. The remaining species become the new generation and this whole process is repeated again, applying to all new and parent organisms including plant life, detritovores, herbivores, carnivores etc. I found this system to be quite effective because every new mutation provides a new food source that every other organism can compete against each other to access, so the ecosystem constantly shifts around as species become specialized for different niches. As species gained unique traits and lifestyles, some species would specialize for one food source, whilst others became more omnivorous and generalist in their diets. The main flaw of the system is that it required human oversight to adjust the scenarios based on the environment and how its shaped by the ecosystem, since it was a text game lacking any concrete game mechanics that could simulate those changes made by the species present. I think in thrive, there could be enough of a simulation to represent the altered environment and have that affect species success rate in various situations, but I'm not sure how the system would account for those changes autonomously. Maybe some sort of rudimentary neural network that separates in-game species interactions into distinct categories to compare success, maybe? Or maybe simulated in-game areas populated by species, representing each scenario, where the species performance is tested. Neither seems all that feasible - Using existing world locations for example would not provide the intricacy of measuring two species on how they hunt aquatic prey at night vs day for example, or from above water vs inside of water. The scenarios would become more and more intricate as things such as species size, lifestyle, migratory patterns, etc diverge, introducing complexity as to what counts as a unique scenario to test. For example with large organisms vs small organisms consuming the same food source in different ways due to their body shapes and lifestyles, or consuming colony organisms from inside vs outside of the nest. Nevertheless, i thought I'd share this info because there are some similarities between my system and the system that you have developed, so it could perhaps provide some inspiration for possible additions to thrive in the future.
@@MrThimato i'm not a botanist but my guess would be well aside from the answer that grass mostly has and fields tend to be dominated by one kind of plant. well it hasn't actually been that long since the last interglacial, plants can't actually eat each other. the last glacial period brought CO2 levels down really low which weakened C3 plants enough that C4 plants got to rise and it's the large reason we have grassy plains today. one of the main differences between C3 plants and C4 plants is that C4 plants do photosynthesis differently and have extra mechanisms to concentrate CO2 internally allowing them to thrive in low CO2 environments. But significantly for this debate, these extra mechanisms don't give any advantage as the CO2 levels rise. so as CO2 levels began to rise to normal pre-industrial levels the C3 plants started to come back into their own. There are probably advantages to not bothering with the extra mechanisms for concentrating CO2 I am unaware of. combine this with the fact that plants can't directly eat each other to take out the competition, the rise of herbivores that came to thrive on the new C4 plants, and the short period (only 10 to 20 thousand years ago) since the last ice age and I am not quite sure there's been enough time for a winner to kill off all the competition. plus plants fight dirty both above and below the soil. poisoning the ground to simple area denial, and rooting and growth tactics are just the obvious mechanisms that I know about. anecdotally for example most of the plants I see competing with grass on my lawn have leaves that stay close to the ground and fan out to cover a larger area. a strategy no doubt employed to deny grass that might grow there any sunlight. or they have deeper roots to get at water and nutrients that the shallow-rooted grasses don't tend to reach. or a combination thereof. it seems obvious to me that this is an evolutionary slapfight between these plants that just hasn't wound up in a total win for one side and may never be able to.
in the case of lawns specifically, i would also guess it helps competing plants that we keep our grass cut short. not only do the bulk weed plants have bodies that remain intact despite the mowers attention, being so low to the ground already and tending to have roots that can feed new growth, other seeds have a better chance of finding the dirt instead of being caught and tangled up on long grass blades.
hm maybe as an idea, doing a lets play of the game may be interesting, hearing you comentate about the game and seeing how you play could help players understand it more, persuade/ help reach more people that might be interested, though thats up to you if a lets play would be your thing, also do damaged bodyparts heal?
Also lol at the end of that :p I actually just did some rebalancing on the pqv grr hopefully they are still fun :p. I’ll also look into the loading bug.
I'm glad to see an update I tried for 2 hours over several sessions to get an interesting species going but was never able to progress past the first evolution. Hopefully with the update ill be able to get far enough into the game to see the evolution mechanics at work!
No worries about burnout here, I just found myself weighing doing a video I thought might be fun against "not damaging the brand" of the tiny game I made, which is a foolish reason to not be an idiot on the internet!
It should technically be easier to play as these guys now as you get bonuses for attacking when multiple of your units surround the enemy now, you also get bonuses when there are multiple adjacent buildings.
I just wanted to clarify since I seem to have worried some people: I'm doing fine. I got to spend half a year doing something I'm passionate about. I took this less upbeat tone, not because this game broke me and I'm having a meltdown now, but because I want to avoid doing what I have seen so many times in these kinds of ventures: leadership being overly optimistic and jumping to explain how everything actually went well, instead of taking a serious look at what happened and what could have gone better. This project was my chance to fully take charge of something, and that includes acknowledging if it was a bad move, or should have been done differently, so you can accomplish bigger things in the future. That process includes second-guessing and conflicting thoughts, and I wanted to share those with you so that, if you decide to do something bold, you will know what to expect.
I think people checking the Steam page wanted to see impressive graphics, or at least graphics they could be indifferent about. I've read a lot about how a Steam page needs to be graphically impressive to pull in players, otherwise you might have the best gameplay in the world, but no one would buy the game.
One of the games I've always wanted to make is a spiritual successor to Majesty, but with an increased focus on the economics. A very different take from DR4X...
I loved watching the development of this game and when I got the money I will buy it too. Even tho it isn’t that successful as you wished, you didn’t failed either. I am thankful for you for developing this for us!
I mean it's not really that bad after a month, we shall talk about it after a year and some updates to it, keep the price too, maybe you'll get to break even in the next month
