There's actually no place to donate. We appreciate the gesture, but we're doing this voluntarily, so we don't accept money. If you were able to donate some more programmers and artists though, we'd be ever grateful!
EDIT: We did address kickstarter two Deblogs ago (http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/devblog-2-new-cell-membrane/).
Depends on the stage -- we plan to have the later stages of the game be RTS-like, though of course 'RTS' covers a large range of possible kinds of gameplay.
Edit so this is more substantive:
In the part of the game where you switch from a single organism to controlling a group of social organisms (the dawn of language, technology, and civilization), the game will probably play a bit like a simple RTS, you give orders to the members of your tribe, get some to hunt, etc. Probably quite similar in basic gameplay to Banished. From there, though, it only gets more different -- as your society gets larger, you stop being able to give direct commands to every single unit, and instead you order groups around, or, say, order a new city to be built instead of ordering each village to build a building.
That trend will probably continue, until in the later parts of the game you might simply command a general to advance along a front and watch as reports of battles come in.
My name /really/ is Nicholas, but Nick saves a second of typing.
About 5 years ago, I googled "What Spore should have been", and this exact thread brought my attention to Thrive. It was probably a good thing that I read the wiki first before the forum, because it was full of concepts and designs that instantly sold me (and the past forum was quite disorganized and aesthetically impaired).
The Overall Team Lead is technically ~sciocont, but he doesn't participate with the project anymore. I don't want the responsibility of Overall Team Lead, so I keep the Co-.
Yeah you can check out how the game looks and play it here http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/
Basically things are going really well! Huge progress has been made (like the cells actually look like cells) and hopefully, ~maybe / keep your hopes down, the microbe stage might be properly playable before ~too~ long~~ whatever that means. Which would be huge. That's a real watershed for the game as we get to discover if it's actually fun or not! (I think it will be fun).
Anyway if you've got programming skeeeels apply to join the team and help you. If you don't and you have programming friends get them on the team.
There's also the community forums http://thrivegame.freeforums.net/
which is a great place to hang out and chat with people about the game. The devs hang out there a lot and it's a cool place to share ideas / give feedback.
We're switching the engine to a new custom one made by one of the developers, since most of the current developers didn't know how to work with the old engine that well anymore. The developer making this new engine (hhyrylainen) has documented it really in depth and it's helped with making it easier for new programmers to learn and adaptable for the features we want to add to the game. If you want you can read more about it here: http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/devblog-13-engine-dilemma/. That was a while back so there've been updates since then but it summarizes it pretty well.
I can't remember where it was but I answered this somewhat recently. And the answer is that to reach a state where each stage is almost fully done will probably take a decade or two. But to have a fully playable game with all the stages will probably take only a bit over 5 years or so. It's going to be a long ride but we will be releasing new versions with new features along the way so there won't be a sudden full release, just incremental updates.
Regarding your second point about the mac version: if you know any programmers with a mac send them our way, http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/get-involved/
Yeah, have a look at this page. If you can do any of these tasks then we'd love to have you on board.
If you also happen to be a programmer with professional experience then that would be just dandy, (or if you know some people like that let them know).
Otherwise you can treat Thrive like a learning experience. Ever wanted to learn to 3D model or compose music? Why not take this as an opportunity to learn those skills while making something useful for us.
The development forums are by invitation only. You can apply on the website if you have skills that will help with the development.
The community forums are open to all, if you have any trouble there then please get in touch.
Currently the first stage, the microbe stage, is being built. It's going pretty well. You can download it here if you like
http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/
Currently there's not any gameplay but I'm hoping we can get some included soon. It's going to be really interesting to fight as microbes.
Working on this stage is going to take a loooong time but progress is being made.
The team is great and there's some really talented people working hard.
The only prototype I could find (no I'm not even kidding):
https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/482846/
The Evolutions! design document too, just to show how different the concept was to Thrive:
http://evolutions.jamaica-focus.com/d/Evolutions!_Structure.pdf
EDIT: After reading through the chronic headache-inducing teams list in that document, I'm appalled they didn't even consider having a sound team.
Urho3D does indeed seem similar to what you have. I would imagine having one engine that already includes bullet etc. would be more bug free and easier to maintain that the custom bundle that you have. Urho3D is also one of the few git repos I actually have successfully built myself. (The same cannot be said of Thrive.)
The "easy" engine of the FLOSS world is Godot. It should be more usable for the less technical people. And again it's a complete solution meaning hopefully less bugs.
I trust your judgment of course. I just don't want to lose a promising free (libre) game to a proprietary engine.
What happens if you directly run Thrive.exe? You can find a button in the Launcher options to go to the folder where it installs the Thrive versions. Also could you try downloading the Godot Editor from: https://godotengine.org/download and seeing if you can run that. If that doesn't run, could you please head over to the Godot bug reporting section and tell them that the engine doesn't work on your computer?
Also the exit code can be useful in determining if you are experiencing the same issue as some other user.
I *think* 0.5.1 updated to Godot 3.2.2 mono, so that could be the problem (0.5.0 used 3.2.1 mono). Unfortunately this would make it pretty complicated to maintain mac builds by using an older Godot version. I think we'll pretty quickly jump to Godot 4.0 once that's available, so in the long run it's not really possible to have multiple versions of the game code compatible with different Godot versions.
Could you help us out by trying out the Godot editor on your macs to see if that works? https://godotengine.org/download/osx if the editor doesn't work, then there isn't much we can do, and it's up to the Godot developers to fix things.
Also what you could do is run the game from terminal to perhaps see a message why it doesn't run.
If you happen to stumble upon game developers willing to volunteer, please send them our way: http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/get-involved/ to help speed up the development
It's still all here, but it was removed from the main page a) because it took up too much space and b) because concept art in pride of place on the main page screams vapourware (see the comment above).
Per your second point: I don't know about you, but I think it's pretty obvious even without concept art that the game's nothing like Call of Duty. We certainly want to inspire, but showing definite progress is more inspiring than (albeit beautiful) concept art.
Fantastic, we'd love to have the help. Could you fill in an application here, that would be great.
http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/application/
We don't need much detail, just some idea of your skills, experience and areas of interest. Then we can send you some invites to the dev forum and the slack group, so then you can join in the discussions.
Look forward to working with you.
Other than any suggestions anyone else has, here is everything that's still left to do:
Transfer the domain (replacing http://revolutionarygamesstudio.com/index.htm )
Create a better intro video, featuring gameplay, concepts and prototypes animations (like Tritium's in place as a placeholder, just with actual recorded game footage spliced in)
Finish the GitHub API integration on the Releases page
Have the team leads register so they can post updates
I think if I wanted to do a rewrite I would use Java. I am much more proficient in it and I personally know more Java devs that could possibly be interested in helping out.
Looks like there are some libraries I could use which happen to be open source:
If you guys were not interested in going that route I understand. But it might be something I dig into. If I got permission to port the code and assets that is.
Making a fan fourm would help solve the problems /u/moopli mentioned about reddit. If we decide to set up a fan fourm it would probably be best to use the same host as thrive's website along with the same software(wordpress). We could also do the same for the dev forum as would be easier to manage and customize than the current dev fourm. P.S. It would also solve the issue of comments getting randomly deleted on the current fourm which happened multiple people before including me as at least one post I recently made(unless it's the mods who are doing that as I also reposted that here).