As a part of my course for one of our first submissions we were tasked with building a small serious game in unity over the course of a couple of weeks. As a part of that we were given the option to create a project based on the research of one of the attending scientists at the Ocean Sciences Meetings 2026 in Glasgow.

For this we chose to base our work on the research by Danny Ionescu and Mina Bizic. Their research centers on the study of macro bacteria, Bacteria that can reach up to 7cm in size as single celled organisms. We were fortunate enough to be able to get in contact with Danny and Mina and organize a meeting with Danny and later a quick in person meeting at the event with Mina. They were both incredibly informative and really enthusiastic about our ideas, and we were really thankful for them taking time out their schedules to speak and work with us on this project.

One of the properties of the organisms discussed at the meeting is that unlike other single celled organisms these creatures do not clone themselves in a binary format. Instead they split into different versions of themselves, by dividing up their proteins and chromosomes in an unequal fashion. Resulting in cells with completely different proteins and chromosomes. We decided to take this idea and expand it into our game.

The idea for our game was first-person collectathon platformer where the player would take the role of a person shrunk down to the size of the bacteria(The bacteria is still relatively small to us) and make use of a unique scientific device to hook onto them and reel them in. With the main goal of the game to catch every bacterium within each area. With the main gameplay loop taking inspiration from games such as the Ape Escape franchise where the collectables act as individual creatures that need to be captured in order to move from one area to the next. Along with Slime rancher taking inspiration from the vacuum catching mechanic for the main game.

With the project also making use of a more non-traditional 3D art style. Using 2D sprites in a 3D space that are set to always rotate towards the player. The inspiration for this was from the upcoming game Mouse P.I. for Hire and the Original Doom from 1993. We decided to pursue this in order to achieve a unique aesthetic for our project to help us stand out and help draw players towards the game.

The team members on this project included me, Liwei (Gabriel) Ye and Alwalid Alamasour.