This project is a submission to the 2017 Ludum Dare Game Jam. It was coded over the course of 72 hours by Jordan Fred, George Flauta, and Derek Kramer. Jordan was responsible for the coding of the engine with assistance from Derek, and George created all project artwork and designed all visuals of the game.
The theme of the Game Jam, after much filtering and three final rounds of voting was "Small World." After some creative meetings, it was George who devised the theme of the game being the quick life of a bacteria, focusing only on hunger and trying to avoid larger life forms.
PhytoLyfe is a grid style game where the player is a phytoplankton in a microscopic soup. The player has to avoid its primary pray, zooplankton, as well as other treacherous organisms and creatures. While avoiding being eaten, the player must eat "photons" from the sun, seen as green blobs, to avoid starving. There's also a "sun" that appears sparingly in the game that provides double the hunger reduction if the player can catch it! The game also includes two "bosses" which don't disappear, a fish and a starfish, two creatures far up the food chain from phytoplankton.
