It’s about time.
Starlife is a game about deep time. Stars are born, live, and die in the palm of your hand, millions of years compressed into a minute. So there's something ironic about how long the game itself took to exist. The idea is fourteen years old, and it spent most of those years in a drawer. Welcome to the Starlife devlog. This post is about how the game finally got out.
My first real job after grad school was at The American Museum of Natural History in 2008. I was creating educational science video at a furious clip, but my spare time was devoted to ideas about game design. So I filled notebooks with ideas about games. One of those ideas was Starlife, a multitouch puzzle based on stellar astrophysics.
The game specification document, which took months of work in visual design, writing, and mechanics, was completed in 2012 (images from the original spec are in the gallery above). After an unsuccessful attempt to build the game (not to mention a nearly lost friendship), the spec collected dust for fourteen years. I spent an entire career in advertising. Recently I dug the Starlife spec out of the closet thinking I would update my skillset and learn to use these fancy new AI tools. Starlife was a small manageable project. In the last four months I wrote the entire Starlife engine, 570+ commits, ~55k lines of Dart, every system device verified. The physics, the gas renderer, star lifecycles, a full-history rewind, all starting from nearly zero. The scope got a little bigger.
An idea that needed a studio and a budget in 2012 needed one stubborn person and a few good AI tools in 2026. The spec didn’t change, my ability to build it did.
The development of Starlife is unusual simply because I ask (Claude) what the science says, and then we try to make that as fun as possible on a touch screen. This process has delivered some great stories, coming in later posts. More than the game itself, though, I hope my story nudges others to do the same. To resurrect a long-abandoned idea, to build something that was once impossible, to stubbornly persist in creation.
Starlife is coming to iPhone and iPad. If you want to follow along and get into the TestFlight beta, sign up at starlife.info.
It's about time.