More Details About My Microbe Game

A preview of the gameplay along with some more info about the game and my plans for it

First I want to thank everyone for the wonderful response to my announcement about making a game. It was heartwarming and encouraging to receive so much positive feedback while starting this new adventure!

So far I have only mentioned that I am making a microbe game, but I haven’t said anything specific about it yet. Since I’m very new to game development, I wanted to be sure that my ideas were actually feasible before sharing details.

I now have the basic foundations in place, so it’s time to tell you more!

Game Overview

The plan is to build a 2D game in Unity with a top-down perspective which will feel similar to a microscope view. Your character is a flagellate, and your primary goal is to survive as long as possible and divide as many times as you can. You’ll navigate a continuously changing soil environment with a variety of predators and hazards along with resources you can use strategically to your advantage.

Here’s a preview of the gameplay so far, keeping in mind this is still very early in development:

The basic game mechanics in place so far:

• Flagellate character controlled by the player

  • Eats bacteria, which cause it to grow larger

  • Divides when enough bacteria are consumed

  • After division, it resets to its original size and the process starts again

  • Player clones become autonomous, wandering and also eating bacteria

• NPC (non-player character) flagellates that wander around and eat bacteria

  • These also divide when they eat, so their population will grow over time

• The first predator (the ciliate in the video) appears once the NPC population is high enough

  • This predator is passive, meaning it doesn’t chase; you just need to stay out of its way

  • Wanders around eating bacteria and NPCs, and divides after eating enough

  • If you accidentally make contact with its mouth, you die and the game is over

A Dynamic Ecosystem

In addition to these active game mechanics, I’m also working on a system that allows bacteria to build the loose soil particles into clusters, which will dynamically change the ecosystem as the game progresses.

At this stage, when bacteria touch particles they nudge them and activate a “sticky” effect, which causes them to stick to other nearby particles. This is similar to how bacteria build soil structure in real life. Over time, as the soil habitat becomes more organized, you’ll start to encounter more diverse life forms and the gameplay will become more complex and strategic.

Here’s a time lapse of the clustering mechanic in action:

protozoaprincess

A post shared by @protozoaprincess

This has been working well in the early stages, however it involves a lot of physics calculations which can cause weird glitches and performance issues, especially as the game progresses and things become increasingly complicated.

The most frequent issue I’m seeing is some sort of fighting that breaks out between particles which causes clusters and sometimes even the NPCs to spin uncontrollably, the game lags out and eventually crashes. I think I know why this is happening, but haven’t figured out how to solve it yet.

I’m certainly in way over my head as a beginner developer, but that’s largely what makes this all so exciting! I may have to slightly lower my ambitions for this system at least in the beginning, but I do still have some more ideas for how to solve the performance issues while keeping the ecosystem development as organic as possible.

Planned Features

The basic foundation of the game is roughly in place, but there is still an enormous amount of work to do before this is ready to launch.

Here are some of the additional features I have planned:

• Different types of bacteria with unique behaviours and positive or negative effects on the player

• More predators with unique behaviours and strategies to avoid or eliminate them

  • eg. Some are passive (just stay out of their way) and some will actively chase you, some may camouflage and surprise you, create currents that pull you in, etc.

• Other environmental elements that can cause status effects, such as plant roots and fungi

• Various neutral NPCs which will also eat bacteria and divide, providing competition for food and possible additional hazards or strategic uses

• Achievements and leaderboards

I’d also like to eventually expand the game to include different game modes, such as time-based challenges, unlocking different characters to play as, and sandbox or simulation modes where you can control various settings and see how the ecosystem responds.

Where and When Will the Game be Released?

I’m planning to publish the game for PC on Steam, and will let you know as soon as I have a store page where you’ll be able to wishlist it and be notified when it’s available.

I may also want to eventually adapt the game for mobile, but that’s much further down the road.

At this stage I really have no idea when the game might be ready to launch. The early stages came together surprisingly fast, but as I add more features the game will become increasingly complex to work on. It’s the same with drawings, really. As a newbie it’s impossible to set any kind of timeline for this, but I’m hoping we’re talking about months rather than years to release an early version.

How to Support Development

If you’re as excited about this project as I am and want to help make it happen, any contributions will go a long way.

Becoming a paid subscriber here on Substack is the best way to help me feel financially secure enough to dedicate all my energy to this project. There will also be some expenses along the way, such as licenses for music/sounds, the Steam fee, etc.

If you prefer to make a one-time contribution, you can send a custom amount through my Ko-fi page:

Other Ways to Contribute

If you’re not in a position to help out financially, you can also contribute by becoming a free subscriber here, interacting with and sharing my posts here and on social media, and recommending it to anyone you think might be interested. Wishlisting the game on Steam once the page is set up will also be a huge help!

The advertising side of things is definitely going to be a challenge for me, so I’m extremely grateful for any kind of help in that department.

Next Steps

The next major milestone will be opening the store page on Steam.

It costs $100 to register a new game with Steam, and I believe it’s also a lengthy process to get started there. At this stage I am feeling very good about the game’s potential, so the next step is to decide on the title and create the logo and other content for the Steam page. Once all that is set up and the page is established I’ll be able to fully focus on development until the game is finally ready to launch!

In the meantime I’ll continue sharing regular updates here and on social media. You can still find me on Instagram as well as Threads and Bluesky. At some point I will likely start asking for help with testing, so do stay in touch if you want to be part of that!

Thanks again for all the positive feedback and support. I’m so grateful to have such a wonderful community with me on this adventure!

Wish you all the best,

Kate