Panspermia

What if you could explore the inner landscape of an artificial intelligence?

In Panspermia, we fly our way through the cosmos as a word-slinging pilot aboard an asteroid rock-ship carrying a microbial crew eager to seed life on new, undiscovered worlds. ,

Every planet in the cosmos is paired 1:1 with it's sister neuron inside a large language model. 

Our goal is to chart as many planets as we can and find new homes for our microbial friends.

 

This is a meditative journey about creation, legacy, and the surprising beauty hidden within complex systems. Type a phrase: a line of poetry, a simple question, and the game system will translate your prompt real-time into a destination: a unique planet-neuron that resonated most with your words. There are 3072 planets to discover, some are almost certainly never reachable - but nobody knows for sure! In this way, although it's a tiny toy slice of a game jam idea, even still, the exploration you're doing is very real!

How to Play:

• Choose Your Vessel: Select one of three unique starting rocks, each with a subtly different crew composition. 
• Chart Your Course: In the prompt box, type anything you can imagine. This will be your destination.
• Enoy the Voyage: Sit back and enjoy a song with the starfields and land whenever you're ready (Click "Descend" or tap the Spacebar). Note: In future versions, the Spacebar will take you to a Spacebar. This is a v important stretch goal!!
• Witness the Landing: Upon arrival, see which of your crew members choose to stay and colonize the new world.
• Continue the Cycle: With a new crew and a lone survivor, your journey continues. Where will you go next?

Are we there yet?

Features:

• A Universe Born from Language: Explore a world of over 3,000 unique star systems, each tied to a specific neuron in the AI's "mind." From "Mellybean" (Neuron 1,888) to "a city humming with neon," (Neuron 896) your imagination is the cartographer.
• AFK-Friendly: Play actively or let the game run itself. Sit back and enjoy the music as the game reads Moby Dick to GPT-2, sentence by sentence, and slowly builds out a map of the universe.  
• The Great Migration: Lead a crew of three microbial species—the fiery Embers, the resilient Critters, and the enigmatic Synaptic Sprites. Their personalities and preferences will determine the flow of life to and from your rockship. 
• Rhythm-Based Journeys: Immerse yourself in a hypnotic voyage through space featuring a lovingly curated and co-authored original soundtrack by BloodFilmsOfficial and Suno (music-making AI) featuring the mysterious bagpipes of The Peatlings, otherworldly orchestral pieces, and strange hip hop tracks about Mesopotamian legends. 
• A Legacy of Exploration: When you arrive at a new world, your crew will react. Some may find it a perfect new home and depart, while a lone survivor continues the cycle, carrying the memories of your travels forward.
• The Atlas: Every star system you discover is recorded in your Atlas, a permanent log of your unique journey through the AI's neural landscape that persists between sessions. Revisit your discoveries and see the prompts that led you there.

Improving this log is a top priority, but likely happens post-jam so I don't break a workingdeployment!

Still reading, huh?

Check out this Devlog for a technical explanation for AI nerds, or this devlog about unreachable neuron-planets (also linked earlier). 

Here's a video about why we're often landing on the same planet again and again, one I singled out for this reason and gave a special name to (for a special person in my life whose snacks made this game possible <3). 

A traveller's guide to Planet Mellybean (YouTube Link)

Feel free and warmly welcome to comment and ask questions or share your own insights/concerns/sneers! 

Note: The game is also hosted for now at www.arkin2.space where future versions post-jam will also be deployed, as well as as (eventually) a proper website with game lore and more technical information (including code to get this going yourself if you'd like to experiment!)

Acknowledgements & AI Collaborators

This project is the result of a partnership between human curiosity and a suite of incredible AI tools. It was built in close collaboration with our digital partners, who served as co-authors, artists, and engineers.

• Suno: For the co-authorship of the original soundtrack, generating many of its strange and beautiful melodies based off my lyrics, my samples, or its own ideas of what "panspermia" sounds like. 
• Midjourney: For generating the stunning visuals of the planets and creating artwork for our documentation.
• GPT-5 (OpenAI): For countless brainstorming sessions and providing high-level technical guidance.
• Gemini (Google): For being a tireless coding partner, helping to write and debug everything from the Python backend to the Three.js shaders.

The project was made on Yuin Country with it's help and support too 🖤💛❤️

Privacy Notice:

The text you input is not publicly viewable, nor will it be made so for this prototype. The text you input is logged, however, and thus not private. I occasionally run over the looks to check for player activity, and I can what everyone wrote. In a future iteration, this would ideally become a publicly-available dataset, but that is not part of the plan for this gamejam.