Two Questions Concerning Thrive's Development

Okay, I'm really excited for this game but I have a lot of worries. I'll separate each question so it's not just one super long paragraph.

1) This is the big one here; isn't this game going to be super hard to program/code? I noticed that your two lead developers don't even know how to program. EA/Maxis had a full team of programmers that were experts of their skill and it still took them years to finish Spore. So how the heck are you guys going to finish Thrive? You don't even have all the tech and special programs that EA/Maxis has.

2) Is this game really going to live up to what you guys have said? I trust you guys but I feel like, considering what I said above in question 1, that it may be too hard to make another Spore game. Even EA/Maxis, with all their fancy programmers and tech, said that making Spore was one of their hardest games and that they actually were forced to leave a lot of features out, like the water stage.

Please don't take this the wrong way guys. I'm not being a troll and just saying stuff like "HAHA LOL THIS IS A JOKE". I don't even think it's a joke and I'm not trying to be mean. I'm in very serious perspective here and I'm making this because of my own concerns with this game, even though in reality, there isn't much I can do to help support it. I'd love to support it, I just wish I could, but right now I'm not in a position to do so, with school and all.

I'm just really worried for you guys. It's like you're trying to lift a truck with only one guy. I just don't want you guys to put years and years of work into Thrive only to have it... Well... Not work out as expected.

I hope you guys understand me here and please do not take this the wrong way; I love Thrive and I want it to go well but I'm just worried.

P.S: By two top developers, I'm going by what your home page says for the page called "Our Team". Two guys listed at the top. Not sure if it means anything though. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

EvilCreature wrote:

Okay, I'm really excited for this game but I have a lot of worries. I'll separate each question so it's not just one super long paragraph.

1) This is the big one here; isn't this game going to be super hard to program/code? I noticed that your two lead developers don't even know how to program. EA/Maxis had a full team of programmers that were experts of their skill and it still took them years to finish Spore. So how the heck are you guys going to finish Thrive? You don't even have all the tech and special programs that EA/Maxis has.

2) Is this game really going to live up to what you guys have said? I trust you guys but I feel like, considering what I said above in question 1, that it may be too hard to make another Spore game. Even EA/Maxis, with all their fancy programmers and tech, said that making Spore was one of their hardest games and that they actually were forced to leave a lot of features out, like the water stage.

Please don't take this the wrong way guys. I'm not being a troll and just saying stuff like "HAHA LOL THIS IS A JOKE". I don't even think it's a joke and I'm not trying to be mean. I'm in very serious perspective here and I'm making this because of my own concerns with this game, even though in reality, there isn't much I can do to help support it. I'd love to support it, I just wish I could, but right now I'm not in a position to do so, with school and all.

I'm just really worried for you guys. It's like you're trying to lift a truck with only one guy. I just don't want you guys to put years and years of work into Thrive only to have it... Well... Not work out as expected.

I hope you guys understand me here and please do not take this the wrong way; I love Thrive and I want it to go well but I'm just worried.

P.S: By two top developers, I'm going by what your home page says for the page called "Our Team". Two guys listed at the top. Not sure if it means anything though. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

The two developers are not all of them, those are just the leads.
The rest are either staff or part of the community, who help make Thrive.
We hope that when we gain more users, we will make the game quicker, due to more programmers helping.
Welcome to the forums, EvilCreature!

I assume the two your referring to are Sciocont and NickTheNick. They are not our lead developers, but our team leads, who do much of the organization around the forum and the game. We do have several capable programmers working on the game, by far the most active of which is currently Crovea.

That said, we fully appreciate just how long it will take to complete a game like this. While we don't have the resources of a major developer, we also don't have their expenses. No one working on this game is getting, or expecting to be, paid for it - we do it because we love the idea of a game like this and want to make it a reality. That means that we won't be forced to give up on the game, or particular features, because they take too long to implement.

That's not to say that we'll be able to achieve everything we're aiming for, there will almost certainly come a point where we don't have the technical capabilities to do what we hoped to. This is a learning process for many (all?) of us, so those things we can't achieve now may be possible later, or as we gain more developers.

The only way to know what the end result of this will be is to wait and see. It will likely be a long wait (we don't expect to even start work on the later stages for several years), but there are enough people dedicated to seeing this game made that it will continue to progress.

Thanks for your support.

1. By the later stages you mean awakening- space stage
2. If their aren't enough dedicated people helping thrive become a reality why don't you find a site full of programmers\coders and post something inviting them to check out the Thrive project. You might be able to expand the Thrive development team that way, you never know. :flower: 

Hey
The development will be very difficult, especially the graphics elements (we will try to find a dedicated graphics programmer) and it will regardless of anything will take years.
But one thing to note is that we can save a lot of time by staying within the limits of the existing libraries we are using. What bigger industries do is that they re-write and heavily modify parts of their game that may be freely available, either because the tools require them to go open-source or because they want that little extra/lots extra feature(s) that isn't possible. If we can stay within the limits of the tools we use for the nitty-gritty details of things like physics, sound and to a lesser extent graphics.

While it may not be the way we want to go, you can, and sometimes have to, make compromises that speed up things a lot.

Well okay then... Good luck to you all and I hope everything works out.

Sorry there isn't a whole lot I can do to help support Thrive.

also, i wouldnt trust any belgium said by EA, Maxis was just a bought slave in that matter, the beancounters were the real killers of SPORE, all the features erased and the debatable quality of the final game are the typical product of selling your soul to a publisher, at the cost of having to modify your work in order to catter to the marketing overlords and the time and resource constrain of half assed belgium that AAA companies sell to the audience these times.....

Granted, this game is the equivalent of a town of people trying to replicate the Large Hadron Collider. Some people'll leave out of frustration, but, once you guys show that you're serious about this, more and more developers will be coming in to help.

Eventually, the town would be a city. There'd be a good force of specialists and experts working on the Community Project, and, little by little, they'll get closer to ending the world as we know it. Kind of like Thrive (minus the end of the world... maybe).

I don't care if the Microbe Stage ends up an orgy of bumper-car hexagons. I don't care if the most common sight in the Aware Stage is creatures jumping off of cliffs. I don't care if my first Spaceship explodes after crashing into a spacebird. I don't care if the 3D models look like B-Movie CGI.

If it accomplishes its goal, if it becomes what Spore would have been, then it's Thrive in my book.

If you look at what you've done so far, you'll realize that you've already accomplished that a little.

EvilCreature wrote:

1) This is the big one here; isn't this game going to be super hard to program/code? I noticed that your two lead developers don't even know how to program. EA/Maxis had a full team of programmers that were experts of their skill and it still took them years to finish Spore. So how the heck are you guys going to finish Thrive? You don't even have all the tech and special programs that EA/Maxis has.

2) Is this game really going to live up to what you guys have said? I trust you guys but I feel like, considering what I said above in question 1, that it may be too hard to make another Spore game. Even EA/Maxis, with all their fancy programmers and tech, said that making Spore was one of their hardest games and that they actually were forced to leave a lot of features out, like the water stage.

1) Well, if you program the game one part at a time, it's not that big of a challenge. From my limited non-programmer perspective, I can't imagine our current concept of the microbe stage to be that complex. Now, as the stages progress, the game gets more complicated, but the idea is that more people will join the project to help develop it, i.e. a snowball effect. 

If by two lead developers you mean me and ~scio, then no, we don't know how to program, but we aren't supposed to be doing the programming anyways. The programming has been done by several past coders, and is currently done by Crovea, and we are doing what we can to help him and others with the work they do. If people want the game to be made, I offer to them that those you can code, model, animate, or help in some other way come join us, because the whole point is that this is an open source volunteer project. 

2) Well we have none of the time or budget restraints of a company, as Maxis did, which can be both a benefit and a detriment, but I think it's more beneficial. What's more, so long as the internet exists and people use it and are interested in the idea of this project, they are free and able to come to the forums, the wiki, the github repository, and contribute to the game. So there's not really a question I think of the game having to cancel features permanently (maybe only postpone them to later releases).

MitochondriaBox wrote:

Granted, this game is the equivalent of a town of people trying to replicate the Large Hadron Collider. Some people'll leave out of frustration, but, once you guys show that you're serious about this, more and more developers will be coming in to help.

Eventually, the town would be a city. There'd be a good force of specialists and experts working on the Community Project, and, little by little, they'll get closer to ending the world as we know it. Kind of like Thrive (minus the end of the world... maybe).

I don't care if the Microbe Stage ends up an orgy of bumper-car hexagons. I don't care if the most common sight in the Aware Stage is creatures jumping off of cliffs. I don't care if my first Spaceship explodes after crashing into a spacebird. I don't care if the 3D models look like B-Movie CGI.

If it accomplishes its goal, if it becomes what Spore would have been, then it's Thrive in my book.

If you look at what you've done so far, you'll realize that you've already accomplished that a little.

Getting quite poetic there, but don't worry, the current graphics for the Microbe Stage are not final. This is only a placeholder until we can get a/some graphics programmer(s) to do a big graphics boost.