How it plays
You are one cell in a pond. You choose how you feed: on light, on nutrients dissolved in the water, or by eating smaller cells. You swim after your food and grow, but a single cell can only grow so far, as in real life. To get bigger, the players join into one body, each cell still steered by its own player and feeding in its own way. It is a co-op game for one to four players, and the bigger predators that come in waves can be beaten only by a body of several cells.
- Three ways to feed. Photosynthesis needs light and nutrient together and stalls in the dark; absorption lives on nutrient in the water; engulfing hunts smaller cells and is the fastest. A body that mixes them does best.
- Together, not against each other. Everyone in the room is on the same side.
- Real biology, simplified. Where the game bends the science to be playable, it says so.
Playing it
It needs a keyboard, so it plays on a desktop, not a phone. This is a very early version: each player has one cell that swims with the arrow keys or W A S D to the light, the nutrient plumes or, for engulfers, the small drifting prey they can swallow, and grows until it reaches the most a single cell can. A cell that finds no food goes hungry and can die, a dark spell puts the light out for a while, and holding the space bar rests a cell so it loses nothing. Predators and joining into a body are still to come, and nothing is tuned.