Vivarium: You Are One Ant

A browser-based colony survival game. You hatch from an egg, fight rival colonies, die, become an egg again. Playable at ffilm.org/vivarium and on itch.io.

Mobile-friendly. It will kill you. Become an egg. Try again.

You're an ant. You emerge into a circular viewport, a sandy world seen through a lens. Your colony is red. The others aren't. You forage, you fight, you die. When you die you become an egg and the cycle starts over. There's a pheromone grid underneath, colony AI governing the rivals, a floating joystick for mobile, and a soundtrack that opens like something cracking out of a shell.

It took less than a day to build.

I used Claude Code to do the heavy lifting and steered it like a tiller. The pheromone grid, the colony AI, the floating joystick: all of that emerged from a conversation with a machine. The circular viewport, the Vonnegut death screen, the soundtrack that opens like something cracking out of a shell: those were mine.

It reminded me of 2005. Newgrounds. A version of the internet that existed before it knew what it was supposed to be.

I was deep in Flash back then. ActionScript, hand-drawn graphics, things that took weeks and ran at 24fps on someone's Dell in a bedroom in whatever town. You'd upload it and by morning strangers had played it and left comments that were either brutal or ecstatic and nothing in between. The feedback loop was fast and weird and completely unmediated.

Nobody was building a brand. Nobody had a content strategy. You just made a thing and flung it at the internet and the internet caught it or it didn't.

Flash is dead now. Adobe killed it, Apple refused it, and then the browsers finished it off. I still mourn it a little: the aesthetic of it, the particular warmth of vector art animating at slightly-too-few frames per second, the way every .swf felt handmade even when it wasn't. You can't really replicate that. Vivarium tries, with its sandy palette and its ellipse-based ants, but it knows it's not Flash. It just remembers Flash.

What itch.io has that most of the modern internet doesn't is permission to be small and strange. You don't need a trailer. You don't need a publisher. You don't need ten thousand followers before anyone will look at you. You just need a thing that works and a page to put it on.

I've spent years building things that needed to be explained: apps with onboarding flows, platforms with value propositions, products with target demographics. Vivarium needs none of that. It says "you are one ant" and either you tap to hatch or you don't.

That directness feels important right now. Maybe because so much of what the internet serves up has been pre-digested, pre-approved, pre-optimised for engagement. A weird ant game made in a day by a Welsh developer at 4am is none of those things.

It's just a thing that exists now that didn't exist yesterday.

I think that's still enough. I think it might be everything.