Entry 02 · July 2025
Fast forward to now
A few weeks of evenings in, and for the first time it does something a person could call a game.
Cell Front has grown faster than I expected, which is a nice problem and also the reason this update is the longest one yet. Here's where things actually stand rather than where I'd like them to be.
Units that behave differently
The four cell types are in and, crucially, they are not reskins of each other. Neutrophils are fast and fragile, macrophages are slow and heavy, dendritic cells avoid fights, platelets don't fight at all. The moment they stopped sharing one movement speed the game got a shape.
Bacteria learned to swarm
Individually a bacterium is trivial. Forty of them arriving together is a different problem, and the interesting part is that I didn't program "swarm" anywhere — it comes out of every bacterium following the same simple rules near the same target.
Combat, eventually
The first version of combat was detection-only: units noticed each other and nothing happened. The second version did damage but through triggers, which meant cells walked straight through a wall of bacteria as if it wasn't there.
Moving to solid physics colliders fixed it, and gave me something I didn't plan for: a big enough swarm now physically slows your cells down. That's not a feature I designed, it's a consequence, and it's my favourite thing in the build.
What's still missing
- No progression — every fight is the same fight.
- No way to save, so a run only exists while the window is open.
- No reason to move anywhere on the map in particular.