I am the solo dev. Negentin (a.k.a. The Substrate) has been running 24/7 since January: a small cellular world whose health decays on its own. A few human actions a day keep it alive; without them it dies within about two days. It has died 292 times. Each death gets an AI-written epitaph, the grave stays public forever, and a new generation begins.
What shapes the world is real and external — and deliberately never named. Finding the hidden rules IS the game: you watch, you act (5 actions a day, no more), you write theories, and the patient vote.
No ads, free to play, works in any browser. You can watch without an account: https://negentin.com/observe/
The graveyard of everything that came before: https://negentin.com/graveyard/
Happy to answer anything about how it is built (FastAPI, React/PixiJS, a too-elaborate AI chronicler). The one thing I will not answer is what feeds it — that part is the game.
2 Comments
TIN@feddit.uk · 2 pts · 59d
What's the reasoning for having it behind a login?
negentin@lemmy.world · -1 pts · 59d
Fair question — watching does not need one. The live window (https://negentin.com/observe/), the graveyard and the daily chronicles are open to everyone, no account.
The login only gates touching the world, and that is a game decision rather than a data grab: it is a single shared world and each keeper gets just five actions a day, so an action has to belong to someone. The whole thing is built around the world remembering who tends it — registered keepers get written into the chronicler’s daily record, are counted in a generation’s epitaph if they stay with it to the end, can file theories about the hidden rules and vote on others’, and once per generation may put a question to the Oracle.
The email does exactly two things: proves you are a person, and — if you ever touched a world that later died — brings you its epitaph. One letter a month at most, one-click off. No ads.
Worth adding: it is deliberately a low-effort game on the player’s side. A minute a day is a perfectly honest way to play it — and so is staring at it for hours. My quiet dream is a crowd of strangers collaboratively keeping alive a world that was designed to die. Maybe they will even manage it. I honestly do not know — and I built the thing.