GodzillaShadow75's Application

Hello to everyone here on the Thrive forum. I have joined to express my ideas about this game. I have always been disappointed with how Spore turned out, I still wish it was the 2006 version previously shown -_-. Anywho, I am VERY excited about this game and what it will become. I have no idea how I could help, and if I do it might not be much, because I am not the most free person available, but I do wish to express myself through these forums. I plan to mainly put my focus into biomes, environmental factors(extinctions, disasters, resources), and the creature/awareness stage because that stage is what I will probably spend most of my time in game on, I feel it would be the most fun stage because personally, I adore the animal world, they have always been a fascination of mine. I want to help figure out things such as flight(I really want it to at least be long distance unlike Spore, I would adore realism with this), predator/prey relations, how animals interact with society(in case there is a civilization or tribe that comes into contact with your wild animal), how the food chains will work, and the process of evolution.

I have no experience developing games, but I just thought my ideas would help once I am an official member of these forums.

Thanks for reading!

GodzillaShadow75 wrote:

Hello to everyone here on the Thrive forum. I have joined to express my ideas about this game. I have always been disappointed with how Spore turned out, I still wish it was the 2006 version previously shown -_-. Anywho, I am VERY excited about this game and what it will become. I have no idea how I could help, and if I do it might not be much, because I am not the most free person available, but I do wish to express myself through these forums. I plan to mainly put my focus into biomes, environmental factors(extinctions, disasters, resources), and the creature/awareness stage because that stage is what I will probably spend most of my time in game on, I feel it would be the most fun stage because personally, I adore the animal world, they have always been a fascination of mine. I want to help figure out things such as flight(I really want it to at least be long distance unlike Spore, I would adore realism with this), predator/prey relations, how animals interact with society(in case there is a civilization or tribe that comes into contact with your wild animal), how the food chains will work, and the process of evolution.

I have no experience developing games, but I just thought my ideas would help once I am an official member of these forums.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to Thrive!

Sadly, "idea people" are not needed right now at all. As you would expect, a large amount of people apply as "idea people" and as such there's not a high demand for them, not to say you aren't important though! Additionally, the "creature" stages likely won't be worked on for quite some time, too. Don't feel bad, though! I am like you and don't have much talent for helping the game develop (though I plan to learn lua soon), though I follow the game's development closely and help wherever I can, which you can do too.

If you want, the subreddit is good for discussing ideas or asking questions, too. So, you can show off some of your ideas there.

If, at some point, though, you get good at art (if you aren't already) or learn Lua or C++ (what Thrive is being coded in), you should be able to help out a lot.

Glad to see another person found Thrive!

Scottnov wrote:

GodzillaShadow75 wrote:

Hello to everyone here on the Thrive forum. I have joined to express my ideas about this game. I have always been disappointed with how Spore turned out, I still wish it was the 2006 version previously shown -_-. Anywho, I am VERY excited about this game and what it will become. I have no idea how I could help, and if I do it might not be much, because I am not the most free person available, but I do wish to express myself through these forums. I plan to mainly put my focus into biomes, environmental factors(extinctions, disasters, resources), and the creature/awareness stage because that stage is what I will probably spend most of my time in game on, I feel it would be the most fun stage because personally, I adore the animal world, they have always been a fascination of mine. I want to help figure out things such as flight(I really want it to at least be long distance unlike Spore, I would adore realism with this), predator/prey relations, how animals interact with society(in case there is a civilization or tribe that comes into contact with your wild animal), how the food chains will work, and the process of evolution.

I have no experience developing games, but I just thought my ideas would help once I am an official member of these forums.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to Thrive!

Sadly, "idea people" are not needed right now at all. As you would expect, a large amount of people apply as "idea people" and as such there's not a high demand for them, not to say you aren't important though! Additionally, the "creature" stages likely won't be worked on for quite some time, too. Don't feel bad, though! I am like you and don't have much talent for helping the game develop (though I plan to learn lua soon), though I follow the game's development closely and help wherever I can, which you can do too.

If you want, the subreddit is good for discussing ideas or asking questions, too. So, you can show off some of your ideas there.

If, at some point, though, you get good at art (if you aren't already) or learn Lua or C++ (what Thrive is being coded in), you should be able to help out a lot.

Glad to see another person found Thrive!

In terms of art I am eh... People say I am good but I don't feel that way.

Quote :

In terms of art I am eh... People say I am good but I don't feel that way.

Ah, I see. You should try making some art of Thrive and posting it here to see.

Not really sure about that, it'd most likely be just creature concepts. I can't do backgrounds for anything either.

GodzillaShadow75 wrote:

Not really sure about that, it'd most likely be just creature concepts. I can't do backgrounds for anything either.

Why is it exactly that you have to actually have to be able to contribute to the game to be able to post on these forums(I hate reddit and will never go anywhere near it in my lifetime by the way)? I had an old account but I lost the password and all I know of the username is it had PerfectOrganism in it, but that was not the full username, that account had access to post, but that was before this whole applications thing.

We don't want just anyone turning up and writing anything they want. The majority would probably be unhelpful and just make pointless suggestions, which would just annoy the debs. That is why you have to apply and prove you'll add something useful and not just waste our time. (I'm not directing this at you.)

StealthStyle L wrote:

We don't want just anyone turning up and writing anything they want. The majority would probably be unhelpful and just make pointless suggestions, which would just annoy the debs. That is why you have to apply and prove you'll add something useful and not just waste our time. (I'm not directing this at you.)

The thing I am trying to say is, I would like the ability to post like my previous account had.
There is no reason to just brush over ideas (even the stupid ones, despite how much I hate those of which), If it annoys the devs just ignore it. I am sure there would be some great ideas for NPCs, biomes, weather patterns, etc. If the majority of people are unhelpful, that should apply to basically every game I have ever played, which basically thrived on the community suggestions (even the stupid ones) because it points out to the developers what the people do or don't want (and I really do not want to even touch Reddit[which includes the Thrive SubReddit], I hate that website with a passion). The fact I am nowhere near a high level artist does not help either, because that means I cannot contribute and thus am not able to post.

This here is literally one of my best works, and it is REALLY bad.

Okay, I'll be straight with you: the forum doesn't work very well any more for development, which is why the dev team barely uses it any more. Back in the day, when your old account was around (you were PerfectOrganismil, btw), things worked very differently here -- the forum was essentially a fan forum, and almost none of the discussion going on actually contributed to development. Shortly after you left, things started changing and getting more serious. Almost a year ago, we closed the forum off and set up an application system, to try and keep discussion on the forum productive. The essential problem is that this game has a lot of prospective features that people (including us devs!) love to discuss, but only has a few features (right now) that can be actively worked on. Everybody has fun talking about things, nothing gets done. Then, we devs moved most dev discussion off the forum, so now the forum is used mostly for people to apply to join the team, or soapbox, or whatever.

If we give you the ability to post anywhere, we have no reason not to do the same for anyone else, and we would have to turn this whole forum into a fan forum again. Managing a fan forum is annoying work and quite different from managing a dev forum. We decided to instead move fan discussion to reddit. But I'm starting to agree with you about reddit, so we might change things around sooner or later (not by removing our subreddit, but by adding a non-reddit place for fan discussion). If we figure out some issues with administrating this forum (by which I mean the forum this post is on), we might set up a subforum to allow fans to talk all they want without spamming the devs with noise. Or, since we've been considering (slightly) moving off this forum altogether, we could leave this entire forum as a fan forum and have our development forum elsewhere.

So, we do think a lot about ways to foster fan discussion while at the same time allowing development to progress with minimal hindrance. We don't have an ideal solution, but we've been working on ways to make the forum better for development, and to make the subreddit better for fan discussion, and we've also been looking for better systems to use for dicussions between the dev team members. We currently use Slack a lot. Ideally, we'd have a publicly-viewable but posting-only-for-devs chat-room/forum system, and have a separate place for fans to bug us and talk amongst themselves. If we find a good forum system for the devs, we could probably open this mostly up for fan discussion again.

Oh, and in reply to your last point: this is the reason the application system doesn't work that well -- people using one skill to get access to the forum, then posting about other random stuff once they're in. If you didn't use your musical skill to get on the team, then you wouldn't go ahead and spam the music department with shitty compositions. This should be the same for ideas. If you showed as much work on your ideas as Oliver, for example, does on his music, then you'd be worth having on the team for ideas. But this takes much more work to judge, because everybody and his dog has ideas that they think are good, so we need to go through much more chaff to find the few best "ideas people". That's more work than is probably worth.

Anyway, I've brought up the idea of starting a new dev forum and opening this one more with the other devs. I'll keep you posted.

moopli wrote:

-snip-

Alright. To be honest I wouldn't spam you with my shitty art, too self conscious about how horrible it is.

By the way, can someone explain to me what is wrong with reddit?

There are a few things: Primarily, it can get distastefully immature and superficial -- since low-effort comments (reaction gifs, one-line witticisms, image macros, lenny faces, etc) are easier to read, people are generally more likely to read and upvote through several low-effort comments than a single long post. That filters them to the top, which is self-perpetuating. When you have enough moderation (through either having low subreddit activity or having a big and accountable mod team) then you can afford to be vigilant enough to keep quality high. Thing is, even if we police our subreddit well, conditions will likely only get worse since the face which reddit presents to non-redditors, an immature and superficial face, tends to only attract people who don't really care about the "quality" of their comments. In some ways, it's worse than 4chan, and moderators of subs have to fight ever more vigilantly to keep their own communities from descending into petty childishness.

So far, we don't really have to worry about that. We're a tiny sub, and we'll brush off or delete the small amount of crap that finds its way in among the questions etc. We'll just have to hope that we never end up on the front page while all the mods are asleep, because that would make the army of average redditors, in all their juvenile glory (and I mean their behaviour -- grown people can and certainly do act like pissy adolescents on reddit), descend upon us and treat the sub just like they treat any random default. Which would suck. I don't wanna keep thinking about this right now, it makes me sad.

moopli wrote:

There are a few things: Primarily, it can get distastefully immature and superficial -- since low-effort comments (reaction gifs, one-line witticisms, image macros, lenny faces, etc) are easier to read, people are generally more likely to read and upvote through several low-effort comments than a single long post. That filters them to the top, which is self-perpetuating. When you have enough moderation (through either having low subreddit activity or having a big and accountable mod team) then you can afford to be vigilant enough to keep quality high. Thing is, even if we police our subreddit well, conditions will likely only get worse since the face which reddit presents to non-redditors, an immature and superficial face, tends to only attract people who don't really care about the "quality" of their comments. In some ways, it's worse than 4chan, and moderators of subs have to fight ever more vigilantly to keep their own communities from descending into petty childishness.

So far, we don't really have to worry about that. We're a tiny sub, and we'll brush off or delete the small amount of crap that finds its way in among the questions etc. We'll just have to hope that we never end up on the front page while all the mods are asleep, because that would make the army of average redditors, in all their juvenile glory (and I mean their behaviour -- grown people can and certainly do act like pissy adolescents on reddit), descend upon us and treat the sub just like they treat any random default. Which would suck. I don't wanna keep thinking about this right now, it makes me sad.

Okay thanks for the answer