Video Game / Thrive

Thrive is an Edutainment Game currently under heavy development by Revolutionary Games. The project began sometime in 2009, and is still ongoing.

It was inspired by Spore, originally being Evolutions!, and went through Development Hell for multiple years as it passed through developers and even entire engines.

Contains examples of:

• Apocalypse How: 0 up to 3a if you reduce your planet's population to 0 (nigh-impossible because it increases so quickly), and X if you delete your home planet in the Ascension Stage.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The final goal of the game is to build an Ascension Gate and become godlike.
• Artistic Licence – Biology: Subverted in the case of Thermosynthesis, as this is a real hypothetical biological concept. Non-LAWK ideas will likely all be based off of actual biological hypotheticals, and thus all subversions.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: The Bioluminescent Dot and Vacuole are supposed to be this, but they are Dummied Out. (Actually, they have never been implemented, because the devs couldn't figure out how to implement them)
• Blow You Away: A non-combat (potentially) use: The Vortex Cilia grabs nearby cells, chunks, and organelles by creating a vortex, hence the name.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: Exaggerated. Just about everything in Thrive has a different colour.
  • Compounds/Agents/Variables/Items/"Motives":
    • Glucose and Pressure are white
    • ATP and Temperature are lime
    • Ammonia is orange
    • Hydrogen Sulphide is yellow
    • Phosphate and Mutation Points are purple
    • Iron and Rock are beige
    • Ingested Matter is light pink
    • Toxin is Fuschia
    • Mucilage is slime green
• Eaten Alive: Phagocytosis (aka Engulfment) is basically this, but can only be done by certain membranes (Single and Double membranes), but cannot be used against Cellulose or Chitin cell walls without special Lysosomes. Like everything else, both the player and the A.I. can use it.
  • An upgrade to the Cilia, the Vortex Cilia, allows you to suck in detritus by creating water currents.
  • Lysosomes allow you to digest more quickly, as well as digest Cellulose and Chitin cell walls, depending on the upgrade given.
• Edutainment Game: The game is designed to teach a simplified, but no less complicated (and realistic!) version of biology and other sciences.
• Fog of War: In the Microbe and Multicellular Stages, you cannot see patches that aren't adjacent to ones you have visited or ones which you have visited.
• Fragile Speedster: One of the ways to increase speed is by increasing membrane fluidity, which reduces HP. However, you don't have to do this to increase speed, instead putting up Flagella.
• Friendly Fireproof: The player's cells cannot harm each other (with the only exception being those in the Microbe Stage can harm and cannibalize those in the Multicellular Stage, and vice versa. This is actually a glitch.)
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: this is the function of the Perforator Pilus. Both the player and the A.I. can use it.
  • The Injectisome crosses over with Poisonous Person as it allows you to deal poison damage with the Pilus.
• Item Crafting: In the Awakening Stage, you can craft two Rocks into a Hand Axe, which allows you to get wood.
• Kudzu Plot: inverted, the gameplay is what's complex, not the story. However, as each player creates their own story, it could have the potential to become a Kudzu Plot.
• Leitmotif: Each stage has a song theme, for example the Microbe Stage's theme is a somewhat discordant mix of synths. Each Stage also has more complexity than the previous one, representing the gradual progression from single-celled bacterium to galaxy-controlling God.
• Mighty Glacier: Currently, the only two ways to increase HP are to increase membrane rigidity, however this sacrifices speed (Most players seem to just do this and place Flagella to compensate) or by selecting a sturdier membrane type (decreases osmoregulation costs, but also decreases speed and potentially removes the ability to engulf).
• No Antagonist: the closest thing to one is the A.I.-controlled cells, which are, in theory, just as good at playing the game as you are.
• Poisonous Person: the Oxytoxisome and Toxin Vacoule allow you to create toxins that can harm other cells, but they can do the same to you.
  • The Injectisome, an upgrade to the Perforator Pilus, deals both physical and poison damage.
• Refining Resources: The game plays a lot like Factorio, where you need to create a "factory" that will keep you alive in the harsh environment. A few examples include:
  • Hydrogen Sulphide can be refined into Glucose
  • Glucose can be refined into ATP and Mucilage
  • Iron can be refined into ATP
  • ATP can be refined into OxyToxin and Ammonia
• Resources Management Gameplay: You are going to want to keep one eye on your Compounds half the time, so you don't suddenly starve to death halfway through your life-cycle. Subverted because every resource is replenishable, double subverted because Glucose is gradually depleted from the world with each passing generation, and ALL of them are planned to be depleting...
• Rising Up The Food Chain Game: Played With, but you start as an archaeon with nothing less than a single hex of cytosol, and evolve to eventually become a eukaryote, then an animal, then a sapient, then build tribes, then societies, those societies turn into nations, and then you blast off into space before tapping several star systems for power (or all of them if you so choose) with a Dyson Swarm, and ascend to godhood. Downplayed in at least two ways:
  • You are the first lifeform on your home planet, so you build your own food chain, in a way.
  • You can descend and start the cycle over again,
• And Zigzagged:
  • You can choose to not follow this path (i.e. becoming sapient underwater, as you cannot move to land while sapient. This example nets a bad ending.)
• Technicolor Toxin: Both OxyToxin bullets and poison hazards are pinkish-fuschia
• Tech Tree: From the Awakening Stage onwards, you can research things to get new buildings, tools:, and vehicles
  • In the Awakening Stage, you can unlock the Society Centre and Hand Axe,
  • In the Society Stage, you can unlock the Hunter-Gatherer Lodge and the Steam Powered Factory,
  • In the Industrial Stage, you can unlock Rockets,
  • And in the Space Stage you can unlock the Dyson Swarm and the Ascension Gate.
• Teleport Spam: Exaggerated, as in the Ascension Stage, you have the ability to teleport your entire planet all at once.
  • You can also teleport your whole fleet at once.
• Trap Master: Mucilage can be used by both player and AI to slow down competitors.
• Wizard Needs Food Badly: Not a conventional Hunger Meter, but you need a constant influx of ATP to avoid starvation. You can get ATP in three distinct ways: Glucose (the primary way to get ATP, and can be obtained through Photosynthesis and used via Glicolisis or Aerobic Respiration), Chemolithoautotrophy (which involves Iron), and Thermosynthesis.