01
why it came alive
Before any art and before Unity, one question had to be answered: could an ecosystem driven only by its conditions produce failures that are interesting, and that you can learn from, as plain numbers in a terminal? If the simulation was not worth watching as numbers, no amount of art would save it. So the game started there, headless, and only became a game once the numbers held.
02
what it became
You wake from cryosleep in one dome on a nameless, sterile rock. There is no tech tree and no build menu telling you the right answer. You set the conditions: the air, the warmth, the light, the water. Then life decides whether to take. Seed cyanobacteria and watch them green the soil and breathe oxygen into a dead atmosphere, or push too hard and watch them bloom, crash and rot. You walk the dome, carry vials of microbes, plant sensors where the floor feels cold. And someone was here before you. They did not make it.
// underneath
A real ecosystem runs under the glass.
The game sits on a headless simulation in pure C#, with no Unity in it. The dome you walk through renders what the simulation decides.
- 01deterministic
Same seed, same world.
Each tick is a pure function: the same seed and the same interventions give an identical trace, every time. That is what makes save, replay and bug reproduction honest.
- 02conserved
Nothing appears from nowhere.
Carbon and oxygen are conserved across the air, the living and the dead every tick. A closed dome behaves like one.
- 03explained
Every collapse has an autopsy.
The simulation logs its causal chain, so a collapse can be walked backward to its cause and turned into a lesson. Below is a real run, unedited.
// the rules of the dome
Life you don’t script.
The game is a bet that life should be emergent. You set conditions, never outcomes, and the dome does what ecosystems do.
No tech tree, no build menu. You set the air, warmth, light and water, and the ecosystem blooms, balances or collapses on its own, never on rails.
Gas exchange, carbon cycles and tolerance limits are grounded in the real thing, just sped up so a season passes in seconds. Time is the only abstraction.
Nothing dies for no reason. Every collapse has a real cause, walked back and explained in plain language, with something you can actually do next time.
You read the dome with your eyes and your instruments, not a god-view dashboard: walk it, carry the microbes, put a sensor where the air feels wrong.
03
the salvage trail
What this project took from the pile, and what it put back.
← borrowed from the yard
Its script and gameplay rules are written in Inkwell: the briefing, the branching passages, and the rules the game is held to.
left behind for the yard →
The simulation was pulled out into its own engine with no game in it: pure C#, deterministic, versioned, and ready for the entries after Zero.
Its first real story. Writing a game that needed briefings, branching scenes and beats at once is what shaped Inkwell.
where it stands · now
A vertical slice, not a released game. The headless simulation, the first-person dome, sensors, the winnable spine, the in-game autopsy, and the Proof with the Voice are all built. What is left is proving it plays: a full run from arrival to Proof, collapse and retry, pacing calibration, and standalone and performance checks.
Proprietary and private · no build to play yet.