Thrive is a free, open-source game about the evolution of life.
From the lowly tidepools of your home planet, you will rise to cosmic dominance. At every step, powerful creation tools and deep simulation mechanics will aid your species’ development. Revolutionary Games is the open-source team of dedicated volunteers aiming to make Thrive a reality.
Our team seeks to accomplish two major goals: create engaging, compelling gameplay that respects our players’ intelligence, and remain as accurate as possible in our depiction of known scientific theory without compromising the former.
Thrive will encapsulate the player in the wonders of science and the universe, allowing them to manipulate the virtual world around them with editors to modify technology, culture, organisms, and entire solar systems. Seven stages are planned – Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space – though for the moment we’re only focusing on the first of these, as the whole project is a massive undertaking.
Thrive takes many games as inspiration, from roguelikes to grand strategy games, but we plan on walking our own path with many game mechanics. Don’t expect a clone.
We aim to explore the possibilities of simulation within a game context, pitting the player against the game environment as they wield the forces of evolution. Players will create and edit an organism on its journey from insignificance to the stars, using multiple creation tools to rise above their adversaries, themselves products of evolution by natural selection in the wider game ecosystem.
By collecting substances from the environment and processing them with a simulated metabolism, you can increase your species’ fitness rating, building resistance against extinction. Less successful evolutionary paths will vanish, and only one may progress through every crucial transformative step towards cell cohesion, terrestrial conquest, sentience, settlements, and space travel. Will you thrive?
For more information on Thrive gameplay, see our FAQ page and gameplay overview.
Thrive is an ongoing development project, and has already seen several releases of the first microbial game stage. You can download these early versions from our downloads page.
The game is and always will be free and open-source. Anyone can contribute as much as they wish provided they have the necessary skills. Visit our Get Involved page to see how you could help. Talented artists, musicians, programmers and experts in any of the scientific fields we aim to simulate are welcome. If you don’t have the skills, and don’t want to learn, you can now also support us on Patreon or by buying Thrive on Steam. We also have an association formed to support the development. You can read more about that here.
You can follow Thrive’s development and join its active community at the various links in the sidebar. Major dev updates are posted to our news page.
