CELL TO SINGULARITY
LURKING IN THE DARK
EXPLORE: Deep Sea Life
Descend through all five ocean zones to discover what lives there and how it survives.
With little or no light, scant food, freezing temperatures, and crushing water pressure, you begin to wonder: Why live there at all?
I'm the director of the Explore TEAM, whose mission is to create GAME EVENTS for the Cell to Singularity Universe—as many as we can, as good as we can, as fast as we can. The explorations are deeper dives into topics of high interest that air for five days and then rerun weekly in rotation with other events. As with the main game, these interactive mini-documentaries unfold one click at a time.
The video introduces me and my team as we announce our first season two event, about deep sea life: Lurking in the Dark (premiering April 19, 2023). Lorri (writer/director), Olga (technical artist), Lillyan (producer), and Annamaria (game design/programming)—nicknames team LOLA—are at the heart of the team with occasional help from other "Cells" team members.
Explore game events are deep dives into topics that unfold one click at a time. The round generator ("Sunlight Zone") produces currency ("Nutrients") that you spend to unlock trait nodes ("Whale Power").
As you progress through the game, nodes become more expensive. The game strategy is to figure out how to unlock them faster. Players have five days to beat the game by reaching the last node, earning three badges along the way.
Cells superfan Toasted Meeps has created this entertaining 10-minute speed play of the whole event (spoliers, obviously). I love the commentary!
Take a look at all the generators, trait nodes, icons, pricing, and narrative writing for LURKING IN THE DARK!
A Coevolution Love Story
Explore: Pollination
My second live event in the Cell to Singularity universe premiered December 21, 2022! A Coevolution Love Story: Explore Pollination will replay periodically in 2023.
Join the journey of bees and flowers, an inseparable pair that evolved together. Can their mututal attraction survive treachery, deceit, and the sudden entrance of a powerful new suitor who breaks all the rules?
This 130-million-year COEVOLUTION LOVE STORY begins in the early Cretaceous period, with the first primitive flowers and a sand wasp that changed its diet, its body, and eventually its very identity.The first bees evolve from this vegetarian wasp and quickly establish a win-win partnership with flowers: pollination in exchange for food. It becomes a long, complex escalating game of gifting, bribery, deception, and even murder (!) that some intertwined pairs take to mind-boggling extremes.
The game play echoes their complementary evolutionary strategies—speed running with efficiency (bees) and resource management (flowers), with the pushes and pulls of both cooperation and competition in the mix. The looming question: Can this fragile marriage between a plant and animal last?
What do flowers desire? What do bees need? Their complementary survival needs are about to intertwine this plant and animal in an ongoing, 130-million-year love story.
Andrew, Emily, and I introduce A Coevolution Love Story to the "Cells" fans. We show a little game play with dev commentary about the topic of pollination, the narrative design choices, game play strategies, and the lovely, lovely 3D garden that grows more beautiful with each unlock.
Toasted Meeps has, once again, distilled my five-day game event into an entertaining and informative 15-minute visual feast. SPOILERS, obviously, but super fun to watch after you've played.
Life After Apocalypse
Explore: Mass Extinction
LIFE AFTER APOCALYPSE is a limited time exploration game that takes players through the five biggest mass extinctions in Earth history as they ponder:
- What forces of geology, climate, and biology push life to a breaking point?
- How can up to 97 percent of species vanish forever?
- Could it happen again? Can we predict or stop a sixth extinction?
- Will homo sapiens, the only surviving human species, become extinct?
- If so, what species could rise to dominate the planet?
Our very existence is at stake—"our" meaning: all life forms on Earth. That's an excellent reason to explore extinction events of the past so that we can understand our anthropocene present and imagine our potential future.
The LIFE AFTER APOCALYPSE exploration will repeat periodically for players of Cell to Singularity, the "Evolution Never Ends" hit mobile game. It will alternate in series with explorations on The James Webb Space Telescope, Fungus Among Us, The Big Questions (philosophy), The Price of Trust (money), and A Coevolution Love Story (pollination).
A dramatic and very entertaining 15-minute play-through of the game (spoilers!), which normally takes five days to play. Great caption commentary. Thank you, Toasted Meeps!
Neptunian Guy posted a two-part stream from start to finish of the game, crunching this five-day event down to about an hour and a half (using time warps). What I love about this video is that he takes the time to read the text and think about it, along with the art, and the game strategy. Well done!