While working on alpha v0.0.1b (you can get alpha 0.0.1a in Discord just in case you are interested, we didn’t go totally public because it’s not ready for the outside world yet 🫣), I’m also spending some time in studying how to move substances between vessels, let them be blood (circulation, food (digestion), air (respiration), and such.

Each subsystem will work in a different way but there must be consistent way to define how things will move inside the network of vessels, especially because there will be freedom for the player to build any kind of layout they want. In addition there are multiple dimensions for each kind of pipeline, which adds to complexity.

It’s really hard to have something consistent and efficient at the same time, but it’s so cool to see the result directly draw inside the game!

Chemical reactions play a crucial role inside cells, likewise in Lifecraft. Many biological reactions would require a lot of time to take place naturally, that’s why enzymes are required to catalyze reactions.

This translates into a simple gameplay mechanics: a special building called catalyzer is a special intracellular building that accepts and enzyme which will define which reactions the building will be able to perform.

Reactions can have multiple input, multiple outputs and even different steps, each reaction will be different! You can see a prototype of a (simplified) glycolysis reaction which will produce energy inside cells!

One of the main aspects of the game is expanding and building structures outside cells.

This can be done through dispatcher which can deliver materials directly to growing zones or to extracellular structures.

In this example we’re building some collagen helices with ribosomes, which are then assembled into collagen flooring and delivered outside (that’s that floating bubble!).

It’s hard to find some bugs when there are fast items which are moving in a tile map, possibly locking some states to prevent other items from moving into same tiles or allowing routing when multiple choices can be made.

To our rescue, it’s possible to slow down time to track down what’s exactly happening under the hood. This, together with some visual hints, helps the whole process.

The cyan tile represents the busy state while the string over the item tells the direction which the item is moving toward and its internal state relative to the current tile.

Living cells are all about producing proteins for all kind of purposes, joining amino acids which are the building block of all the proteins.

Even the structure which gives the shape to the cell (and has a lot of other functions), the cytoskeleton, is made by proteins.

Proteins are usually synthesized in ribosomes and then they assemble in complex structures.

This is what it’s happening right here in the animation! This small network is producing microtubules, which are used to route items on the ground of the cell, in two steps:

• first simple amino acids (round spheres) are crafted into tubulin in ribosomes
• then a red tubulin and a green tubulin are assembled into a finished microtubule