Design a cell, then let evolution take over.
An artificial life game set in a petri dish. Build an organism out of parts, drop it into the dish, and watch its descendants eat, fight, breed and change over the generations.
Every organism thinks with a neural network brain of its own, and that brain decides when to move, attack, eat and mate. Those decisions are not scripted. Brains that work are passed on to the next generation, mutating a little each time, and brains that don't die out.
You shape the starting point. After that natural selection takes over, and many generations later the creatures in the dish may look and behave nothing like the one you made.
Spikes for attack, flagella for speed, receptors for sight, membrane for armour, vacuoles to store energy, symbionts to cooperate, and a nucleus that sets how big the brain is. Every part costs energy to keep, so a stronger body runs out of food sooner.
Choose from a range of visual styles for your cells, or paint a design of your own tile by tile.
Pick out any organism to see its body, its stats and its neural network, with each choice shown as it makes it. A population chart tracks which lineages are winning.
Each level sets the dish against you: plenty of food and no enemies, a famine, armoured predators, a fast-breeding swarm, several rival species at once, and finally a dish that is running out of food. Keep your lineage alive long enough and the level is yours.
Set two similar species against each other, pit predators against prey, seed several dishes from the same organism and watch them drift apart, or fill a whole grid of dishes with your own designs.
The records screen keeps your lifetime bests: the oldest organism, the longest lineage, the most kills and the smartest brain you have bred.
