Good morning everyone

Hello everyone. I've been following the progress of Thrive for a while now and I've decided that I want to join in with some part of it. I have a mix of skills - writing, music composing, art (digital and handrawn), basic knowledge of programming languages such as C#, HTML, Java and XML (and when I say basic, I mean really basic) and ideas for the greatest game the world will ever know.

Here are some of my ideas that I've collected while learning about Thrive (extremely sorry if they've been mentioned already):

Addictive plants (could be useful if you need to be eaten to spread your seeds)

Music composition tools in the civlisation stages (not like the absolutely useless one in Spore)

In-game diagrams and interfaces that could show things like food webs, which organisms occupy which niche in a biome and the tree of evolution so you can see what creatures branched off from your evolutionary line (I'm the sort of person who loves these things and couldn't live without them to be honest)

Environmental destruction mechanics so that a civilisation that isn't aware of its environment will end up destroying both its planet and itself (of course, if you have space travel you could escape)

An army controller in RTS stages (like the one in a little-known game called Paraworld - search for Paraworld army controller in images and it will be the thing shown on the left of most images)

As I said, I would be honoured if some of my ideas were implemented into the game in some way. And good luck, because this game will be far better than Spore and probably better than any other game that's come before with the amount of detail you're going into. If you need my help in anything, just ask.

Write me a private message for music

Well you seem like a skilled and energetic individual. Welcome aboard!

Welcome!

Welcome to the team Oliveriver!

It's nice to see you have a wide ranging scope of skills. I'm not sure what you mean by addictive plants, could you elaborate?

The music composition sounds great, but I don't think it would appeal to most players, so I would keep it in part of the GUI that can be minimized or hidden.

Diagrams of course are necessary for strategy, but I'm not sure to what extent they will be used for pre-sapience. I would as well like to be able to track my organism's evolution.

Environmental change, I know we will have to a certain extent, but I'm not sure how much.

Army controller - That GUI layout is nice, but we will probably have to go for something different to handle the larger numbers of troops involved.

Willcome!

NickTheNick wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by addictive plants, could you elaborate?

In short, for a plant being addictive is a strategy for survival, and it has obviously evolved because it is so good at helping a plant grow in population and spread around the world (we certainly seem to have helped many of them along due to their addictiveness). Maybe if you are an animal that either accidently or purposefully eats an addictive plant, you could experience withdrawal symptoms, such as the screen shaking, more and more the longer you go without eating another of said plant. If you were actually playing as a plant that evolved to be addictive, there could be part of the AI's code that makes them increasingly likely over a period of time to come back and eat another. This would help to spread seeds much like a lot of other plants do.

And thanks to everyone for such positive feedback!

From AI perspective, making a plant adictive is relatively easy. We just have to boost a lot either the weight for eating the plant, or giving the animal a high fake reward whenever it eats such plant. It's a bit harder to decide how big that boost/reward should be, as it would make the animal not care at all about the adicctivness (if set too low) or live only for the plant (if set too high). Althrough i have to admit that the second thing would be fun seeing.