Lifecraft

Lifecraft is a survival game in which you start from a simple cell, striving to survive by assimilating resources from a sort of primordial broth.

Through evolution you will be able to slowly become a more advanced organism which will have to deal with all the benefits and drawbacks of it: you will need more energy, more complex resources and you will have to manage more high level processes (eg. digestion, circulation) to survive: you’ll become a fully fledged organism composed by many subsystems which must cooperate in a perfect balance.

Each subsystem will have its own quirks and way to be managed, finally forcing you create synergies between all of them.

In addition to this there will be external or internal interferences given by possible diseases: viruses, bacteria, wounds which must be healed and so on.

Once the rule for this micro-world are set, the gameplay possibilities are endless!

Features

Burn: energy is a crucial aspect of the game, you will be able to produce ATP, which can be considered energy stored in a battery, through glycolysis and even mitochondrial respiration! Energy will be used to power building both inside the cell and outside the cell.

Evolve: evolution will let the player discover new elements of gameplay which will make the organism more complex but able to become larger and larger! Starting from circulation and leading to brain and neurons. There will be some utility evolution steps which will be used to give you better tools to optimize all the logistics.

Grow: you start as a small organism and soon you will need to expand to make room for more structures and access better and novel resources in the outside broth. This will be done by expanding chunk by chunk wherever you want through production of the required scaffold and tissue materials!

Supply: once the organism will be large enough, transporting things between building with microtubules won’t be enough. In addition there’s no way to directly transport materials outside cells so circulation will be fundamental. You will need pumps, arteries, veins and capillaries to supply or take away materials.

Defend: viruses, bacteria, fungi and parasites. There are a lot of dangerous things outside! It will be necessary to defend against these threats by using your immune system to defeat them!

Survive: a working organism requires some parameters to be stable in their correct ranges, this is called homeostasis. Temperature, oxygen, pH are all parameters that will need to be regulated to avoid perishing.

Heal: what happens if the organism gets wounded? It will need to heal, possibly through hemostasis to stop bleeding, and then through regeneration of tissue.

Breathe: most of the energy used by a living organism is produced by cellular respiration which requires oxygen and produces carbon dioxide. To breath in the former and breath out the latter you will need respiratory tissue connected to your circulary system.

Digest: at the beginning of the game, simple resources will be necessary but later in the game you will need to digest complex resources (food) into basic elements, you will need teeth, stomach and intestine. You will also need to synthesize a lot of enzymes which are used in the whole process.

Dispose: well, everything that is not used as a resource is useless and possibly toxic to an organism. That’s why you will need a way to filter out toxins with kidneys, but also get rid of useless materials through other ways.

Think: at some point the organism could want to automate management of the subsystems through finer regulations, that’s where neurons come into play: with sensors and logic you would be able to set specific rules which will make behavior of the organism automatic.

Roadmap