This week has been slower than usual, most work was on small issues and also discussing how to balance gluttonous cells, i.e. big cells with too many organelles.

Today’s highlight is ATP bars. The original idea behind them is that they showed how much ATP each process produced or consumed so the player had a better idea about their cell’s viability and built better organisms. These new ATP bars match that concept and they even allow you to hide individual segments to see what happens when one or more processes are inactive or to compare different builds.

There’s more progress on saving and work on another features. Chemosynthesis, movement and respiration have been buffed so they are now more efficient. And we also have a new auto evo prototype based on some of Tjwhale’s old work.

We are getting closer to the next version, in fact the 0.5.0 public beta is already here! You can download it from this thread and test it. Let us know if you find any bugs or have any issues. We also set May the 16th as a provisional release date, there are a few remaining issues to be fixed, but as you can see Thrive 0.5.0 will be ready soon.

Last week we took our first steps on particles and today we have some fancy effects to show you! We worked on new ways to represent toxins, currents and new environmental effects. Eventually every biome will have its own particle effects and lightning, making the game prettier than ever.