I Made a Zero Player Game

Is a game with no players possible? Well... I made one (sorta)

The GMTK Game Jam gives you 48 hours to develop a game from scratch. The theme was "out of control". The idea I settled on was a puzzle game involving cellular automata, inspired by Conway's Game of Life. Players will set some initial conditions of various cells on a grid, and then the simulation will play out.

I pulled out the good ol' Unity game engine to build this game. After some serious struggle, I eventually developed a possible game idea and figured out how to program it (didn't actually end up using cellular automata, but it kind of mimics it).

There are different types of cells with specific functions. A mover cell moves in one direction and pushes any cells in its way. A rotate cell will spin cells that touch it. A generator cell with duplicate another cell.
game development. The idea is that combining these will lead to emergent gameplay (with the goal being to destroy enemy cells).

During this game development marathon, I added animations, made some levels, attempted pixel art, made some more levels, programmed dragging and controls, and added even more levels. I finished the game about 4 hours before the deadline, which gave me plenty of time to make builds and submit. After that I actually fixed a bug and added level saving, and updated everything an hour before the deadline.

So I think I started to scratch the surface of emergent gameplay, something I've always wanted to do. The game is called Cell Machine, it's available on web/PC for now, but I might port it to mobile, but only if I can come up with a good title for that video lol.

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--- MUSIC ---
→ "Hero Dance Party", "Mystical Pixels", & "Bubbles and Submarines" by TeknoAXE
→ "Crazy" by Antti Luode

[TrenBlack]

Single player games - for when you have no friends. Zero player games - for when you don't even like yourself.

[sans]

My little brother: can I play?

Me: nah it’s 0 player

[plemmysaur]

"are you winning son?"
"i dont know"

[justacutepanda]

Sam: *ACCIDENTALLY* creates an entire community *WITHOUT EVEN REALISING IT*
also Sam: casually disappears from the face of the earth never to be seen again

[barrittchambers]

after 5 hours, I had a blue square moving across the screen

If that aint a big coding mood then idk what is

[fendoroid]

Devs during game jam: We made an entire game in 48 hours.

Devs after game jam: fixing that bug will take over three weeks.

[testservergameplay]

"I Made a Zero Player Game"

sounds like Raid Shadow Legends in a nutshell.

[abowlofnoodles]

You have summoned a very weird community

[hachiouma]

"Are you winning, son?"
"Huh? I'm not playing. 'The Game Plays Itself', dad."
"Oh."

[MaximQuantum]

Sam Hogan: "I Made a Zero Player Game"
Me: "...also known as a simulation."

[iruama]

Sam: I made a self playing game


"congratulations you played yourself"

[PrincessBouncyBall]

I love that one of your ideas was just "computer virus"

[orion]

Maybe you can add "Community Levels?" like, you can play and try to finish the levels made by other people so the game would be almost endless.

[portalstorms]

“For some reason I decided to do pixel art for this game”
-Every indie game developer

[-silvr-]

Sam: “I made a zero player game”
Viewers: Cool! So innovative
Mobile AFK arena games: allow us to introduce ourselves

[kosuken]

I’m coming back to this video to announce that, this game became so popular there are whole YouTube channels just about mods of this, congrats man you did it (I hope you’ll be able to came back to game developing soon)

[Migixkem]

Just finished making my game


: What do you do in the game?

*_"No"_*

[philyoung]

I’m really surprised no one’s said “Congratulations, you played yourself” yet.

[Johnnyi]

Honestly, this game looks very interesting! If I would’ve added something, then maybe a sandbox mode, kinda like the one you used to plan out levels. Give players the opportunity to create levels of their own. Still a great game!

[chebypattern]

The example at the beginning is literally what one of the "elements" or rather tools consists of in the mobile game "Sandbox" that slightly resembles "Powder Toy".

I was always wondering why the "game of life" looked so unique.