Thrive is a free and open source evolution sim from Revolutionary Games Studio that's currently in-development, and a new release has rolled out with v0.6.5 bringing some gameplay additions.
What many people like to compare to the cell stage in the classic Spore, not many games have attempted anything really like this so it's great to see it continue to expand.
One of the major new features in this release is a part unlock system, so some of the organelles are locked behind specific conditions giving you more to actually do to progress in the game. There's also a fog of war on the patch map, which is where you see different biomes / areas in the early parts of the game. Some big performance improvements have come along too including more multi-threading and they say they've reduced overall memory allocations by about 75% during gameplay. You'll also find more tutorials and an expanded Thriveopedia for in-game info.
See their new overview trailer:
Direct Link
See their blog post for more on the update.
The developers also mentioned they're about to update from Godot Engine 3 to 4, so that should hopefully come with various improvements too.
You can grab it free from GitHub or buy it to support the developer on itch.io and Steam.
What I want to see is if moving to G4 will bring any performance improvements and if it will bring any other benefits. Most projects I know, like DevDuck's Dauphin, transitioned early on in production so seeing a game of this scale transition should be an interesting sight.
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