Organism-Mode Speed and the Gap between Evolutions

I searched the forums for an answer to this but could not find any relevant answers, and I cannot remember if this was discussed on the previous forums.


In Organism-Mode Gameplay the general structure will be:
Birth -> Control -> Reproduce -> AUTOEVO -> Repeat

But assuming the player takes control of an Organism the moment it is born and continues until it reproduces for the first time (or would there be other times that the player will go to the next Generation). That still leaves 20-30 years for a human-like creature. Day-Night Cycle for an Earth-like planet couldn't possibly be forced to equate to 24 hours of real life gameplay and it would obviously be impractical for a player to endure over 175200 Hours of Gameplay for one Individual/Species. Even assuming sped up gameplay for Organisms with a slower "Thinking/Brain Speed".

So the real question is, for the sake of gameplay. How fast will the day-night cycle be sped up, and how many days/gameplay-hours equate to one year in an Organism's Life?

GamerXA wrote:

I searched the forums for an answer to this but could not find any relevant answers, and I cannot remember if this was discussed on the previous forums.


In Organism-Mode Gameplay the general structure will be:
Birth -> Control -> Reproduce -> AUTOEVO -> Repeat

But assuming the player takes control of an Organism the moment it is born and continues until it reproduces for the first time (or would there be other times that the player will go to the next Generation). That still leaves 20-30 years for a human-like creature. Day-Night Cycle for an Earth-like planet couldn't possibly be forced to equate to 24 hours of real life gameplay and it would obviously be impractical for a player to endure over 175200 Hours of Gameplay for one Individual/Species. Even assuming sped up gameplay for Organisms with a slower "Thinking/Brain Speed".

So the real question is, for the sake of gameplay. How fast will the day-night cycle be sped up, and how many days/gameplay-hours equate to one year in an Organism's Life?

I thought this had been discussed before. At the very least, if it hasn't, I've at least felt a bit of an undercurrent of it being discussed in previous conversations. What I gathered, anyway, is that Thrive is about-stealing Scio's signature- simplicity, science, and playability. Turns out he didn't just put that there for the fun of it! Haha
But seriously! In order to make this work, Thrive requires a balance. We don't want this stage to be unrealistically fast- at least from the players perspective- because that takes them out of the game and robs them of a sense of accomplishment. At the same time, we don't want it to be too long, or players would easily become bored, or frustrated.
So, before I start throwing around numbers, I think I should clarify that regardless of anything (and keep in mind I'm tired) if anyone thinks that I'm too far in one direction or the other, call me out, because I want Thrive to be fun.

So-
One thing I'm trying to keep in mind is that in this game, unlike Spore, players will be evolving at a pace that they, accidentally or purposefully, dictate. If a player is unable to nudge their creature towards sentience because doing so would make them unfit for their current environment and risk extinction, they would naturally take much longer to evolve out of the current 'Mode' they are participating in. As such, each player would have a fundamentally different number of hours played. Keeping this in mind, I think we should pinpoint a 'range' of time that players would be okay with spending in each stage, attempting to take into account time differences based on evolutionary challenges.

Microbe: 1 - 6 Hours
Multicellular: 1.5 - 6 Hours
Aware: 2 - 6 Hours
Awakening: 2 - 6 Hours
Society Stage: 2.5 - 8 Hours
Industrial: 2.5 - 8 Hours
Space: 1 - ∞ Hours

I don't know how okay these are. A part of me wants to say that it's too much time for each mode, but... at the same time, I personally wouldn't mind spending that much time in a well-made game.

Unicellular Gameplay should probably be the shortest stage, despite being so prevalent in the evolution of life on Earth. Due to the relative simplicity in a somewhat flat environment and the limited editor (at least when compared to the OE or the TE), I doubt the majority of players would enjoy the Microbial Stage as much as the Space or Multicellular Stages.

The Organism Stage would probably be the longest stage (with the exception of the infinite Space Phase), possibly upwards of 30 hours (assuming the Player takes their time). The part of the game after Sapience but before Space Exploration would have the most balanced Gameplay time.

Of course the Player can either rush towards the goal for the Next Stage or spend as much time as they wish on any given stage. Though I suspect that from the start of life on a planet, to launching Space Exploration, it would take 60 Hours of Gameplay.


But Primarily, my main question was how long a time IRL would it take to grow as an In-Game Human-like Organism, from an infant, to the point where the player can reproduce as the same individual?

GamerXA wrote:

I searched the forums for an answer to this but could not find any relevant answers, and I cannot remember if this was discussed on the previous forums.


In Organism-Mode Gameplay the general structure will be:
Birth -> Control -> Reproduce -> AUTOEVO -> Repeat

But assuming the player takes control of an Organism the moment it is born and continues until it reproduces for the first time (or would there be other times that the player will go to the next Generation). That still leaves 20-30 years for a human-like creature. Day-Night Cycle for an Earth-like planet couldn't possibly be forced to equate to 24 hours of real life gameplay and it would obviously be impractical for a player to endure over 175200 Hours of Gameplay for one Individual/Species. Even assuming sped up gameplay for Organisms with a slower "Thinking/Brain Speed".

So the real question is, for the sake of gameplay. How fast will the day-night cycle be sped up, and how many days/gameplay-hours equate to one year in an Organism's Life?

Maybe we should do what I've seen in most games with day-night periods--have a minute in game time be a second in real time. That gives us a 24 minute day-night cycle. I'm not sure how many days we should have a lifespan, since we probably want to keep a single generation below a half an hour to keep the game moving, yet still last a few days. Maybe we should have a 12 minute day-night cycle instead (based off Earth's rotation period, other planet times would vary). The only problem I have with that is the day seems too short, but again, we need to keep the game moving.

Using my method with the half-second time frame and having the lifespan be a half-an hour real time, if your creature had an 8 hour sleep time your lifespan would be a little under 4 days (I'm guessing we'll make time skip when your creature is asleep, so I took 8 hours of the day out when I did the math). For a 24 minute day/night cycle, it would be about 2 days.

Again, the math is based off of an 8 hour sleep period. Are we having the sleep periods be variable, because that would change the times.

All right- I've been thinking about this (actually I was just pondering it yesterday before this thread came up) and I've decided one thing- each generation should be a year (that planet's year) and each year should consist of either 8 or 12 days. This gives time for four seasons, playing a couple of days in each season. As for real time, I agree that generations should be short, but playtime should be long- we want people to experience the game, not overlook it. We can figure tout the length in real time of each year by estimating how many generations it takes to move from one stage to the next (the minimum number) and dividing the real play time we want for that stage by the generation count.

~sciocont wrote:

All right- I've been thinking about this (actually I was just pondering it yesterday before this thread came up) and I've decided one thing- each generation should be a year (that planet's year) and each year should consist of either 8 or 12 days. This gives time for four seasons, playing a couple of days in each season. As for real time, I agree that generations should be short, but playtime should be long- we want people to experience the game, not overlook it. We can figure tout the length in real time of each year by estimating how many generations it takes to move from one stage to the next (the minimum number) and dividing the real play time we want for that stage by the generation count.

I'm liking this. When I put my idea up, I wasn't entirely happy about it. I just have a question: are we going to have lifespans vary between species like in real life? In my opinion we shouldn't, at least for the player.

tklarenb wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

All right- I've been thinking about this (actually I was just pondering it yesterday before this thread came up) and I've decided one thing- each generation should be a year (that planet's year) and each year should consist of either 8 or 12 days. This gives time for four seasons, playing a couple of days in each season. As for real time, I agree that generations should be short, but playtime should be long- we want people to experience the game, not overlook it. We can figure tout the length in real time of each year by estimating how many generations it takes to move from one stage to the next (the minimum number) and dividing the real play time we want for that stage by the generation count.

I'm liking this. When I put my idea up, I wasn't entirely happy about it. I just have a question: are we going to have lifespans vary between species like in real life? In my opinion we shouldn't, at least for the player.

Lifespans will vary in how many generations the species usually live. An elephant might live four generations, while a rat might live for half of a generation. It doesn't really matter how long they live, since you'll always mature within one generation so that your species can reproduce, and you'll usually want to switch bodies after every generation.

So what about species with extremely short lifespans that have several generations in a year, such as flies? Will they still get the year longlifespan treatment, or will we have to have a work around?

Poisson wrote:

So what about species with extremely short lifespans that have several generations in a year, such as flies? Will they still get the year longlifespan treatment, or will we have to have a work around?

That's more what I was asking too.

tklarenb wrote:

Poisson wrote:

So what about species with extremely short lifespans that have several generations in a year, such as flies? Will they still get the year longlifespan treatment, or will we have to have a work around?

That's more what I was asking too.

Remember that the smallest playable orgs we have are at least 10 cm in measure. This means that the smallest life span will probably be about 1/4 of a generation. They will reproduce within a generation, but not evolve.

~sciocont wrote:

All right- I've been thinking about this (actually I was just pondering it yesterday before this thread came up) and I've decided one thing- each generation should be a year (that planet's year) and each year should consist of either 8 or 12 days. This gives time for four seasons, playing a couple of days in each season. As for real time, I agree that generations should be short, but playtime should be long- we want people to experience the game, not overlook it. We can figure tout the length in real time of each year by estimating how many generations it takes to move from one stage to the next (the minimum number) and dividing the real play time we want for that stage by the generation count.

I'm having some difficulty understanding this, presumably just because I'm numerically challenged (lol) but if you are not too busy, which I would understand, would it be possible to get a rephrasing of this? Perhaps in the form of a table, or something? Haha, sorry!

Zetal wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

All right- I've been thinking about this (actually I was just pondering it yesterday before this thread came up) and I've decided one thing- each generation should be a year (that planet's year) and each year should consist of either 8 or 12 days. This gives time for four seasons, playing a couple of days in each season. As for real time, I agree that generations should be short, but playtime should be long- we want people to experience the game, not overlook it. We can figure tout the length in real time of each year by estimating how many generations it takes to move from one stage to the next (the minimum number) and dividing the real play time we want for that stage by the generation count.

I'm having some difficulty understanding this, presumably just because I'm numerically challenged (lol) but if you are not too busy, which I would understand, would it be possible to get a rephrasing of this? Perhaps in the form of a table, or something? Haha, sorry!

Scio's saying that a generation will last an in game year. The real time length of a year will be determined by seeing what the minimum number of generations is to progress to the next stage (sapience or whatever we're doing). Then, we'll take the minimum play time we want for the organism stage and divide it by the number of generations from the last step.

For example, say it takes 10 generations to evolve to sapience, and we want gameplay for the organism stage to last 3 hours. So, we take the 3 hours divided by 10, giving us 18 minutes for each year/generation.

Hopefully I'm interpreting this right and it helped you interpret it!

@scio-I really like this idea!

Thanks, that's just what I meant!

~sciocont wrote:

Thanks, that's just what I meant!

Okay, now that that's settled, about how long do we want a day, and in turn a generation, to last in real time? The time for my example, I feel, is way too short for an 8-12 day year, a day would go by in less than two minutes. We can't have a day too short, because else the player will quickly get annoyed if, for example, they're creature is nocturnal and sleeps every two minutes when day comes around. We can't have it too long either, or else you'll play as a single generation for what feels like an eternity.
I feel the absolute minimum we can have a full 24 hour day is ten minutes, giving 5 minutes for day and 5 for night. I'd prefer longer, but then the times for a full 8-12 day year quickly get way too long. The only solution I can think for that would be to shorten the year to around maybe 4-5 days. Whatever we do, I think the max time for a single generation should be an hour. Thoughts?

tklarenb wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Thanks, that's just what I meant!

Okay, now that that's settled, about how long do we want a day, and in turn a generation, to last in real time? The time for my example, I feel, is way too short for an 8-12 day year, a day would go by in less than two minutes. We can't have a day too short, because else the player will quickly get annoyed if, for example, they're creature is nocturnal and sleeps every two minutes when day comes around. We can't have it too long either, or else you'll play as a single generation for what feels like an eternity.
I feel the absolute minimum we can have a full 24 hour day is ten minutes, giving 5 minutes for day and 5 for night. I'd prefer longer, but then the times for a full 8-12 day year quickly get way too long. The only solution I can think for that would be to shorten the year to around maybe 4-5 days. Whatever we do, I think the max time for a single generation should be an hour. Thoughts?

Generation time being one hour, then a 12 day year would take 5 minutes a day, and an 8 day year would take 8.5 minutes per day. That seems like a good amount of time for me. That means that, if we want a minimum of 30 hours of playtime, we'll need to become sentient from a base organism in 30 generations. That might seem like a very quick evolution, but players will most likely know exactly how they want to turn out and build towards it every generation. They'd probably evolve the ability to breathe air the first generation, more muscular fins the next, etc. After you get out of the oceans, it's actually pretty easy to get smart.

A full generation should last for quite a long amount of time, possibly along the line of 4 hours. And a balanced day should be with 24 Earth-Hours being equivalent to 12 minutes, and if we have 5 days for a season then we would get a year at around 4 game hours (and 20 in-game days). Of course for a human-like Organism this would be equivalent to 80 gameplay hours for a generation, so we would have to have a faster growth rate or some other solution.

But perhaps we should have a slider in the options menu for the player to control?

GamerXA wrote:

A full generation should last for quite a long amount of time, possibly along the line of 4 hours. And a balanced day should be with 24 Earth-Hours being equivalent to 12 minutes, and if we have 5 days for a season then we would get a year at around 4 game hours (and 20 in-game days). Of course for a human-like Organism this would be equivalent to 80 gameplay hours for a generation, so we would have to have a faster growth rate or some other solution.

But perhaps we should have a slider in the options menu for the player to control?

I think an hour is plenty long enough for a generation. (read my post from previous page If you haven't already)

~sciocont wrote:

GamerXA wrote:

A full generation should last for quite a long amount of time, possibly along the line of 4 hours. And a balanced day should be with 24 Earth-Hours being equivalent to 12 minutes, and if we have 5 days for a season then we would get a year at around 4 game hours (and 20 in-game days). Of course for a human-like Organism this would be equivalent to 80 gameplay hours for a generation, so we would have to have a faster growth rate or some other solution.

But perhaps we should have a slider in the options menu for the player to control?

I think an hour is plenty long enough for a generation. (read my post from previous page If you haven't already)

QFT. 4 hours is way too long. You'd have to play for nearly a month just to get to sentience with the minimum number of generations. With a 1 hour system, it would take you maybe a couple of days.

@scio: I'm happy with your plan, and wouldn't be disappointed if this is what we go with, but do we HAVE to have the year be 8+ days? I agree we should have a year be several days long, but I don't think it has to be so many. If we lowered it to four, you'd have fifteen minutes for a 24 hour day split into 7.5 minutes for day and night--about twice the time for an 8 day year. I'm saying this not just because I would like days to last longer, but the day has to align with gameplay too. If we're having creatures be nocturnal/diurnal, having a short day means the player is going to constantly have to pause to sleep. Playtime should take precedence over the number of days. I think more people would rather have a year with only a few days over a year with a bunch of days having to sleep all the time. If we're not doing that and just having a bar for sleep or not having sleep at all, then I'm perfectly happy with this concept.

After typing the above rant, I just realized something going along with my sleep point. Won't part of the day be skipped when the player is sleeping? In that case, we could go with more days than 4 and still have the fifteen minute day, since part of the day will be skipped and won't count towards real time. If we took out 8 "hours" of game time (5 minutes) when the player sleeps, that would still give the player 10 minutes of playtime between sleeps, meaning we could have a 6 day year.

Yeah, you'll be safe when you sleep, and you'll just go to sleep and wake up immediately feeling quite refreshed.
8 days minimum is there because planets are likely to have seasons, and I think playing one day per season is too little. We can extend generation time to 80 minutes if that sounds better, so that with 8 days you'd play 10 minutes a day.

~sciocont wrote:

Yeah, you'll be safe when you sleep, and you'll just go to sleep and wake up immediately feeling quite refreshed.
8 days minimum is there because planets are likely to have seasons, and I think playing one day per season is too little. We can extend generation time to 80 minutes if that sounds better, so that with 8 days you'd play 10 minutes a day.

That sounds good.

~sciocont wrote:

Yeah, you'll be safe when you sleep, and you'll just go to sleep and wake up immediately feeling quite refreshed.
8 days minimum is there because planets are likely to have seasons, and I think playing one day per season is too little. We can extend generation time to 80 minutes if that sounds better, so that with 8 days you'd play 10 minutes a day.

I think this sounds good.

For sleeping, the player's Organism should awaken if there is enough noise/disturbance to awaken it. But otherwise would skip to the usual time of awakening (Or a short [2 second] dreaming?).

Another important point is how many generations will it take to reach any particular goal, and by extension, how much change will be introduced from the last generation. Enough evolution/mutation would need to be provided to give a slightly different experience than the last generation, but small enough to not seem jarring.

~sciocont wrote:

Yeah, you'll be safe when you sleep, and you'll just go to sleep and wake up immediately feeling quite refreshed.
8 days minimum is there because planets are likely to have seasons, and I think playing one day per season is too little. We can extend generation time to 80 minutes if that sounds better, so that with 8 days you'd play 10 minutes a day.

I guess I'm sort of outnumbered and a little late to the party, so to speak, but I have to say that I don't really agree with sleeping being a safezone at all times. In nature, many organisms are at their most vulnerable during sleep and ignoring such a huge behavioral and biological influence on how creatures evolve and act seems like misstep. That's just my opinion, however.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think players should have to watch their creature sleep; just an imitation of it that takes place during a loading screen. A random number would be generated, and based upon that, a player could either be 'safe' or in danger. The number would be influenced by behavioral and biological factors that would determine a players safeness.

Zetal wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

Yeah, you'll be safe when you sleep, and you'll just go to sleep and wake up immediately feeling quite refreshed.
8 days minimum is there because planets are likely to have seasons, and I think playing one day per season is too little. We can extend generation time to 80 minutes if that sounds better, so that with 8 days you'd play 10 minutes a day.

I guess I'm sort of outnumbered and a little late to the party, so to speak, but I have to say that I don't really agree with sleeping being a safezone at all times. In nature, many organisms are at their most vulnerable during sleep and ignoring such a huge behavioral and biological influence on how creatures evolve and act seems like misstep. That's just my opinion, however.

Edit: To clarify, I don't think players should have to watch their creature sleep; just an imitation of it that takes place during a loading screen. A random number would be generated, and based upon that, a player could either be 'safe' or in danger. The number would be influenced by behavioral and biological factors that would determine a players safeness.

Maybe a creature has a minimum level of disturbance required to wake up, based on how rested it is and how long it has been asleep (I picture the required level of disturbance as being sort of a bell curve, but I'd need to do some more research to see if this holds true). The game will check for anything that has a chance of disturbing the creature enough to wake it before it is rested. If there is a chance, it goes on to randomly decide if it happens or not. If so, the creature is awoken at some time during the night (or day) to whatever disturbance is happening, be it an earthquake or being attacked, or raining while it is not in suitable cover.

The reason for sleep being safe is that somebody will be pretty pissed if they wake up dead for no apparent reason.