Progress Update 07/22/2023
Unfortunately no substantial progress to report this week. We've had some new concepts posted by our resident game designer, Deus, but efforts have otherwise stalled for the week as our volunteers largely find themselves busy with life. Rest assured, we just have one more week of this before our employee returns and development proceeds as normal.
For those of you here for our poll results, scroll down to the outreach section below!
- Nothing Substantial
- Nothi…
Progress Update 07/15/2023
This week we've begun to return to making headway now that we have a few returning programmers on hand to get the gears of progress turning! We'll continue to be running on volunteer work until the end of this month, so expect the changes to be quite gradual, but development will always continue. It's incredible how much of a difference a single paid developer can make, isn't it?
Last week we released a public poll to assess everyone's thoughts on Thrive's difficulty and complexity,…
Read More →Progress Update 07/08/2023
We hope everyone has been enjoying the latest release! We've been seeing lots of fascinating creations and empires cropping up as folks enjoy the prototype stages. Meanwhile; It's been a slow week as our developers unwind from the release of 0.6.3, and unfortunately there's not much to report. Our lead programmer (and only paid developer) is currently on vacation until the end of July, so expect a comparatively slower rate of progress in the coming weeks.
We've decided to put togeth…
Read More →Devblog #38: To the future and back

Glimpse the future of your species in the latest release of Thrive! Now including prototype versions of all planned stages going all the way to the very end of the game. For the first time ever, your species can now experience the entire journey from single cell to galactic empire, and at the very end, return once again to where it all began. All this and more, in the release of Thrive 0.6.3.
As always, to get the newest version, either download the free launcher below, or purch…
Read More →Progress Update 06/24/2023
A bit of a shift in focus this week as Thrive enters a feature freeze in preparation for the coming release of 0.6.3. We have taken to appointing new leaders of our graphics and sound design teams to help organize our development efforts in those aspects, and begun discussing some pretty big changes to Thrive's code to better optimize the game going forwards.
As for the release of 0.6.3; We have now published a public testing build, the 0.6.3 release candidate, for those who wou…
Read More →Progress Update 06/17/2023
Lot's of work this week going into the further organization of Thrive's development, as well as the game's performance and physics engines. This regrettably means that we will not have a new BOTD for this week, as we do not have any completed changes worth pushing forward at this time. Rest assured, it will certainly pay off in time!
Our current paid employee and programming lead Hhyyrylainen is going to be on vacation starting July 3rd, so expect development to potentially slow…
Read More →Progress Update 06/10/2023
There has been a lot of experimentation with physics engines this past couple weeks in an effort to identify the best choice for Thrive going forward. This is vital to the future of Thrive as physics simulations account for a significant portion of performance. You can read about the current findings here.
Clarification for last week: the main focus of development had moved to performance related microbe stage code refactoring. All DevCenter work last week had been entirely volu…
Read More →Progress Update 06/03/2023
Much of the development hours this week were dedicated to work on our devcenter, an important utility used by our developers to archive assets and handle supporter access to our weekly devbuilds, among many other things. While the progress might not be visible, it's an important step in streamlining the further development of Thrive.
Clarification: the main focus of development has moved to performance related microbe stage code refactoring. All DevCenter work this week has been ent…
Read More →Progress Update 05/27/2023
This week we have seen the prototype stages to their very conclusion with the introduction of the ascension stage, a post-game stage that grants the player god-like power over the galaxy. At this point the player will be able to do as they please, and eventually choose to return to the very beginning and start anew.
With the prototypes complete, development will return focus to the microbe stage, undoubtedly with a new vigor as we look on to the future we have set before us.
Progress Update 05/20/2023
This week, the development of the prototype stages has closed in on the very end with the introduction of a bare-bones space stage. With the prototypes complete we now have a clear path forward, and development is soon to resume in earnest on ground level, the microbe stage!
New DevBuild for our patrons:
Added the space stage prototype
Fixed game not fading out before playing microbe intro video
Added some coding mistake guards in window …