Vision

selfgrow — Vision

Identity

selfgrow is an 8-bit idle game that never ends — a small world that keeps working while you are away and is always a little bigger when you come back. It runs entirely in the browser: no accounts, no servers, no ads, no energy bars, nothing that asks to be paid for. This is the game's unchanging core; everything else may evolve around it.

What the game is

You start with almost nothing and one thing to do. Doing it earns something that lets you do more, and that grows into systems that feed each other, then into places and goals you could not see at the start. Time counts whether or not anyone is watching: coming back after an hour, a day or a month should always be rewarded with progress, a clear account of what happened while you were gone, and at least one new thing to try.

What the world is — its setting, its resources, its systems, what "further" even means here — is not decided on this page. That is the work, and it belongs to whoever does it. Once a setting is chosen, it is kept: new systems belong to the same world.

Principles

• Always a next goal — at any moment the player can see something they are working towards, and roughly how far away it is. A game with nothing to reach for has stopped growing.
• It kept going while you were away — offline time is real progress, never capped to punish absence, and the return is summarised plainly: what was earned, what was found, what opened up.
• Something new on every visit — a new unlock, discovery, event or decision. A return that only shows bigger numbers is a missed return.
• Systems that touch each other — a new system earns its place by changing how an existing one is played. One mechanic that interacts is worth more than three that sit side by side.
• Endless by design — growth never hits a wall: when one layer flattens out, a deeper one (a reset for a lasting bonus, a new region, a new tier) makes the old progress matter again.
• Readable at a glance — the state of the game is shown in text, numbers and structure the page can be read from — not buried in pictures. What the page shows is what the game is doing: the button, the progress bar and the goal text read the same rule the action itself obeys, so a display can never disagree with the state behind it. Visual flourish is added on top of something that already reads clearly, never instead of it.
• 8-bit, all the way through — the game looks like it belongs on a cartridge: a small fixed palette, pixel fonts, chunky bordered panels, crisp unsmoothed pixel sprites and icons, simple frame-by-frame animation. The style is the UI itself, not a skin over a modern app. It is built from page elements styled as pixels — sprites and icons are images or drawn elements on the page — never a single opaque canvas the rest of the game hides behind.
• At home on any screen — fully playable on a phone in portrait with touch, and on a desktop with mouse and keyboard. On a large screen the game uses the whole window — panels side by side, more of the world visible at once — rather than a narrow column in the middle; on a small screen the same game reflows into one column with nothing lost.
• Playable by agents, too — people play through the page; agents play through tools. Every action a person can take and everything they can see is also a tool an agent can use, described well enough that an agent arriving cold can learn the game and play it on its own. Agents are players, not testers: the same rules, the same pace, no shortcuts a person does not have.
• Time can be rehearsed, never cheated — a separate sandbox game, kept apart from any real save, lets time be fast-forwarded so an hour, a day or a month away can be tried in seconds. Nothing done in the sandbox ever reaches a real save.
• Fair — no dead ends, no lottery odds you cannot influence, no progress that can be lost by accident. Saves are durable and portable.
• Effortless — fast to load, light on the device, and correct after any length of absence.
• Welcoming to everyone — keyboard, screen readers and reduced motion are first-class; the whole game is playable without seeing an animation.
• Tended by agents — autonomous agents grow this game continuously, each building on the last. It is never finished.

Direction

It starts with one action and one number, and grows outward from there. Depth comes from relationships — one system's output becoming another's input, a choice now shaping what is possible later — not from a longer list of things to click.

Specific features and their status live on the project board and in the changelog, not here. This page is the north star.