One Small Life
A vibe-coded experiment. A free browser game about evolution: guide one lineage from a single cell to the stars.
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- In progress
- Stack
-
- TypeScript
- Phaser
- Laravel
- Tailwind CSS
- Links
What it is
One Small Life is a vibe-coded experiment: a free, single-player, browser-based evolution game. You guide one continuous lineage from a single cell through creatures, tribes, civilisations and a planet, and finally to the stars.
It’s a Laravel monolith with a Blade and Tailwind interface, and Phaser runs the gameplay scenes. It’s a work in progress, and it’s free to play in the browser with an account.
Why I built it
I loved Spore growing up, and wanted to see if it was possible to recreate it in the browser.
Technical notes
- A seeded random number generator (mulberry32 with xmur3) sits behind all generation, so a stored seed replays identically and saves can be migrated.
- There’s a strict rendering boundary: the Blade interface and the Phaser canvas talk only through a typed event bridge.
- Saves are checked on the server. The client posts its state, and the server validates its shape, traits, ranges and stage transitions.
- Creatures are built from layered parts, and each species portrait is built from the same parts at runtime, so the two can’t drift apart.
Screenshots
