ALIVE
Watch a hundred people settle a world no one has walked on
About
ALIVE is a simulation you cannot play. A hundred people wake in a world that has never been walked on, and you watch. Before a run you choose the number of founding souls (10, 50, 100 or 200), the shape and size of the land, and four dials: Drama, Violence, Wars and Monsters. A seed fixes the world, so the same seed and options give the same run.
Nobody is told what to do. Every person scores each possible action against what they need, what they are good at, what their trade favours and who is nearby, and urgent needs such as thirst override the rest. They forage, hunt, fish, farm, build, trade and research. Over the years they are born, age, make friends and rivals, fall in love, grieve, split into peoples, go to war and sometimes die out, while monsters and storms move through the world.
The camera zooms in to 3x, follows individual people, and lets you click one and read their thoughts. A day lasts two real minutes and a year eight, with real sunrise and sunset, moon phases, weather, and sun and moon light on the sea. The game can run at ten times speed, and it drops to normal speed on its own while a boss monster is among your people.
What is in it
- A hundred people wake in a world nobody has walked on, and you only watch
- Each person chooses actions from needs, skills, trade and who is nearby
- Ten ages of technology, from Kindling to The Modern, with twenty trades
- Five world sizes, from 86x60 tiles to 260x180, and five world shapes
- Day and night, moon phases and weather, with sun and moon light on the sea
- Monsters, tornadoes, tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes
Screenshots
How far along
Playable build, 55 out of 100, ranked 11 of 17 on the progress ranking.
ALIVE is a deployed browser observation simulation at version 1.3 with ten technology ages and five world sizes, and towns in it still decline after about four years.
- Playable6/10
Version 1.3 is deployed at a public Pages address and a seeded run starts from a setup screen offering 10, 50, 100 or 200 founding souls.
- Core gameplay5/10
After the hunger fix one tracked world went from 126 people in year 1 to 30 in year 8, and the status note says towns hold their strength for about four years and then decline.
- Content6/10
The game has ten ages of technology, twenty trades, five world sizes from 86x60 to 260x180 and five world shapes.
- Art and audio5/10
Characters use a fixed pixel grid of 2.0 pixels per world unit chosen from six candidates, and audio is limited to ambience and music tones after the violence audio was removed.
- Stability5/10
A headless harness runs the game logic without a renderer, runs on one seed are now identical, and the cost of a 0.1 second step at 300 people fell from 65.7 ms to 11.5 ms.
- Release readiness5/10
Version 1.3 is deployed at a public Cloudflare Pages address as of 2026-09-05, the date of the latest source material.
Assessed Oct 4, 2026. Based on some documentation and posts. This is the studio’s own assessment and it changes as the game does.
Updates
Being hungry prevented eating
The previous post ended by asking whether a world that kept collapsing was hard or broken. It was broken, in several places, including a seed that never meant anything and a hunger rule that stopped people from ever going to get food. Then a skin tone ladder, a quadratic slowdown at 10x, and a hunt that never killed anything.
The pixel grid was the mechanism
Character art was rejected twice before it landed, and the second rejection was caused by a bad brief. The fix turned out to be a fixed pixel grid, which also doubled the frame rate. Then a crowd that gated its own corridors, and a tech tree nobody would ever reach the end of.