Lifecraft - out now on Steam!
A downloadable game
We're proud to announce that Lifecraft will be out today on Steam! Thanks for the support and feedback you gave us in these months. Let the journey begin!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1839930/Lifecraft/
THE GAME
The game 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.
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.
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.
Development log
- Lifecraft out today on Steam!Apr 16, 2024
- Lifecraft Beta #3Nov 29, 2023
- Lifecraft Beta #2Nov 09, 2023
- Lifecraft Beta #1Oct 12, 2023
- Lifecraft Alpha #6 - v0.0.1fDec 29, 2022
- Lifecraft Alpha #4 - v0.0.1dDec 06, 2022
Comments
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This is a gem! Really interesting game! wow! Cant wait top see where it goes!
wen awelbul to dowlod the game
i can t dowlod
i was here before this game was popular
is there a mac or linux build?
the game is already compiling both for macOS and Linux but in this testing phase we're only deploying Windows build for a matter of time management. If you want a nightly build for another OS come to Discord and we'll provide you one!
Awesome sauce thank you!
i cant download the nowest werzio
Saw this in the Something Awful Forum's Management Game thread, it is really fun!
YOOO LETS GOOOO LIFECRAFT UPDATE
It's a miracle that a game about micro-organisms can be visually appealing
Hello, this game is really cool! I can't figure out how to get the pickers to take stuff out of cytostomes, though!!
Real fresh take on the production optimization/automation genre. Stoked to see how this continues to develop.
pls make demo on steam
Hello! I was just looking through some itch sandbox games and found this. i really wanted to play it. so i tried it and downloaded it. however, it wont run!
here is the log for convinience
[data] recipe cytochrome is a ribosome recipe but it contains non aminoacid as input
[data] unknown structure specified for recipe: none
[data] recipe hemoglobin_subunit_alpha is a ribosome recipe but it contains non aminoacid as input
[data] recipe hemoglobin_subunit_beta is a ribosome recipe but it contains non aminoacid as input
[data] generating dummy recipe for uniporter_glucose
And thats when the game just dosent run!
Can i be recommended any solution to this problem?
Hi! we're sorry to hear this, would you mind joining our Discord so that we can investigate your issue better? This is the first report we got of the game not running on Windows
Okay I AM VERY SORRY for not replying. I have been on a very long break from itch.
I redownloaded it. But now I have upgraded my pc. It was running win7 with a Pentium dual core. It sucked. Now I have a "not much better but it is good for now" Intel i5-3rd gen. Now the error is gone. Thanks for taking the trouble!
Okay I AM VERY SORRY for not replying. I have been on a very long break from itch.
I redownloaded it. But now I have upgraded my pc. It was running win7 with a Pentium dual core. It sucked. Now I have a "not much better but it is good for now" Intel i5-3rd gen. Now the error is gone. Thanks for taking the trouble!
Grabbing a decoupler from an assembler crashes the game.
We're aware of this! We already fixed it in an internal alpha which is available on Discord if wanna try it. We're sorry for the incovenience
Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
lysosome is like a garbage collector of the cell
cool! I hope there will some sort of an update soon because my game crashes when expanding, and some times can't be picked up or moved after they've been dropped.
The lack of a tutorial feels like a feature, forcing you to experiment with all of the materials around you, I'm in love with this game- Though the bugs get a lot annoying, especially when there is no Auto-Save. :(
But for an Alpha it's quite thought trough. Building can get a bit annoying, but once you have storage it's fine.
Once the minor issues are fixed it will be perfect!
10/10 Will MEAT again.
You can pick the bugged item by putting the cursor at the item's lowest position when it bobs up and down (just click fast enough lol), or by pausing the game before deconstructing.
Can you please help us find the crash and fix it? You can send us your save file on Discord: https://discord.gg/TwsNSCHaN8
Thanks, My discord name is Mechatroneer. I will send it as soon as it happens again, because the first time it happened was before I saved, thus there is no save-file to give (Hours of work gone lol.).
"Hours of work gone lol" 💀💀💀
Lifecraft is a Great game The music is very relaxing and I can spend hours chilling out making a creature. I love the Complexity and how big the game is even though it's still in alpha. My only issue is that there's no guide or tutorial after your creating energy, and I understand that everyone says that and that a guide is coming in the next update. Other than that I don't have any issues with the game.
I'm glad your still making games after 11 years! I hope the game does well, and your doing well (irl). Also your games inspired me to learn to program and make my own games.
-Den
meat'ndustry
I got here from twitter (pop at random while scrolling)
I'll try the game when I have some free time, looks like my cup of tea.
I've given this a few more plays and have started to grasp the mechanics. However there are two issues that I've been having. The first is that the energy supplier radius doesn't seem to be supplying the bigger cytosomes all the time. I don't know if they don't work in parts of the radius, or if they need to be replaced or what.
The second thing is that I saved and exited so I could change the options file, for the ui scale, and when I came back in all the floating bits were gone. Which kind of put a stop to my game since I hadn't gotten my resource collection automated entirely yet. I started a new game and the bits were gone there as well, though they did start spawning in. No spawns on my saved game though.
Anyway besides those issues this is great, and I'm definitely looking forward to where you take it.
I had the same issue with the bits not floating around on my save file , found out I had too press resume for them to spawn again.
Oh yeah, there they go. Well that saves me from having to restart.
Hello. Your game seems very promising and great. I share thought that texts are small. I can't find a way to automate, I place a small cysostome (in first, and it's pumping), picker and microtube to a ribosome (even with a starter), but nothing happens as cysostome don't react anymore after 30 seconds... I can't detroy small cysostome.
That's because the cytostome is oxidized, you need to break it down with the hammer tool (2), grab it with the hand tool (1) and place it again. It's a mechanic it's being worked on, but for now it works that way. Bigger cytostomes don't oxidize, but need energy to work.
Ok thanks a lot, but 30 seconds before oxidization, it's just to catch 1 or 2 elements.
Meanwhile I didn't achieve to automate like picture of quickstart.
Oxidation is unit based, not time based. A cytostome will fetch like 40-50 items before stopping so it's possible the issue is somewhere else, are you actually removing the items from the cytostome? It only has capacity for a single item inside so you must use a picker to empty it as soon as it's filled
Ok useful to know. But I replicate what I've seen on your trailer Youtube, Cytostome stops at first. I tried to connect behind, in front, but It doesn't go though microtube. Another bug, after loading my save, all ribosomes... don't display anymore production ("E" fonction place), but still effective as assembly process is showed in right-panel.
Hello! Just tried this game yesterday. This is one of my favorite genres in general, the start was a bit slow since the guide wasn't available yet but I could figure it out after some trial and error. Something I noticed was that the crafting recipes on the right overlap over some other text box that shows information in the bottom right so it's hard to read, it's probably because of my screen resolution but well, it'd be nice if there's an option to scale it or hide some of the Interface. Overall the game is looking really great! really looking forward for it.
Hello, thanks! You can tweak many interface parameters in the options.json file, change resolution and UI size. While playing F10 switches between windowed and full screen mode. Hope this helps!
Not quite what I meant, but that does help seeing the recipes. It would be nice if the tooltip moved so it didn't overlap the recipes when the recipes got too large though. Or maybe change where the recipes are located.
Yes that window is totally at an embryonal state of development, there will be options to show/hide and possibly change the size and position, we used it based on a normal 1080p resolution which maybe it's not the case for you. But it will be fixed, don't worry!
Hello, Linux version has some errors:
Assertion Failed at /home/jack/Documents/lifecraft/pix/pix/io/FileHandle.h:152
Ошибка сегментирования (Segmentation Fault)
Probably you've used your path to file. A possible solution is to replace the full path with a short one (./pix/pix/io/FileHandle.h)
Hey!
We tested it yesterday on a clean Ubuntu VM and it worked flawlessly.
Could it be a permission problem? As the executable is creating files in its own directory, or maybe some problem with UTF8 paths. If come to Discord we can try to investigate and solve the issue! 😊
Oops, that really were permissons problems. Thought chmod -R (for recursive) would work. My way to "fix": chmod +x $(find /path/to/lifecraft-v0.0.1b-linux)
I need a game manual because the game is too confusing for me and the others or you can give a tutorial to the game.
yes we're aware it's a little bit overwhelming, we added a quick guide to this page and working on an in game guide.
Thank you
i'm running into an issue in the windows version where i can't construct my first ribosome after crafting it. i place it in what should be a valid location, and it continues existing as the miniature item. any idea what the issue might be?
It's possible you just have to use the other mouse button, one button is to pick and drop items, the other is to place structures.
I finally figured out how to actually build a ribosome, and then I couldn't get it to do anything. The game looks really neat, but it desperately needs instructions. Not even a tutorial. Just a readme with how the buildings work.
tôi nghĩ, tôi cần hướng dẫn
Check out the new quickstart guide in this page
I tried playing your game but I think it desperately needs a tutorial of some kind. Right now it's very hard to tell what to do to get even something basic to work or what my goals are. As soon as I start the game it's a bit of information overload with all the recipes and evolution view unlocked as well. A more scaled down demo with a well-crafted tutorial might help people get a better idea of what your game is trying to go for. It looks neat so far, I like the ideas presented in the description, but it's hard to understand gameplay in the build right now. Hope this feedback is helpful. :)
Thanks for your feedback, we know that it's a little bit overwhelming at beginning, we're currently working on an in game quick start guide to help players getting bootstrapped 🤟. We focused on having a working core play mechanics first!
how do i combine multiple items?
Have you tried combining 2 ribosome subunits (the only red non spherical objects in the void at the start)? You need to gather them from the void (blue) and drag them one on top of the other on the ground. That's where it starts.
yeah i did but it wont let me place the object because it just stays in its mini form
did you try using the other mouse button to place it as a structure?