Glimtide
One living island in the browser, shared by everyone who watches it.
Glims, small jelly creatures, live on an island in the ocean of Tidemere. They eat, sleep, talk, fall in love and pass their skills to their children, and the world never stops, even when nobody is watching. You watch, feed and play with them, and new mechanics join the live world without a restart.
- Designed the game and wrote its design documents: needs, life cycle, genetics, climate belts and the shared tide.
- Built the simulation in TypeScript on Bun: an ECS world ticking ten times a second, where every mechanic, even hunger, is a module.
- Made modules hot-swappable: a new mechanic is installed into the live world between two ticks, with data migrations, a trial run on a copy of the world and a circuit breaker.
- Wrote the glim brain as utility AI, and the browser client in Vue 3 and PixiJS, in English and Russian.
- Set up the backend on one Hetzner server: a WebSocket gateway that keeps viewers connected while the world restarts, PostgreSQL, snapshots to R2, and a narrator that retells the chronicle with Claude.
One world for everyone
There is exactly one island, and every viewer sees the same glims at the same moment. It lives on when the tab is closed.
Nobody steers the glims
Each glim weighs its needs every few seconds and picks what matters most: food, sleep, a chat, a partner or a nest.
Skills run in the family
Swimming, climbing, building and which foods are safe pass from parents to children, so families drift apart into species.
A shared tide
Food, play and pranks fill a meter all viewers share. When it is full, the sea picks the tide the island needs most.
A world that tells its own story
A director picks the best moment to show, and a chronicle writes down births, sharks, journeys and new species.
Your own species
Sign in to name a glim and follow it, or design a species of your own and land it on the island as a small tribe.
- Platform
- Web browser, desktop and mobile
- Price
- Free
- Languages
- English, Russian
- A glim lives
- About one hour of real time
- Studio
- XPLOIT