Petri Dish Games · draft · 2026-10-29

HiveCult

Open-Source Game Development Agency for Hive Coding

What it does for you

Your design docs, rendered as a site your team reads and talks on.

Builds shipped to Steam, and the store page designed for you.

Clips of your mechanics, and later long-form videos, posted to content platforms.

A backup of everything, and open-source copies on GitHub.

A surface is one more way out, with its feedback coming back.

Everything people say back, from bug reports to suggestions, comes back in and becomes work.

The surfaces at the top are where people see your work and answer back.
Feedback comes down into SwarmCult. Triage sorts it into bug reports, design issues and suggestions, and turns it into jobs. New commits in Nucleus make jobs too.
The job queue sorts jobs into lanes: tests, builds, clips, long-form content, storefront design, and any lane you add.
Workers sit outside SwarmCult. Each one takes jobs from the lanes it can handle and sends its results back.
SwarmCult verifies every result. Changes go through the merge queue into Nucleus. Artifacts go up to the surfaces.

Nucleus, the repository: one monorepo per Culture on a server you control, holding code, design docs, releases and your picks. It runs on Jujutsu and backs up to GitHub.
SwarmCult, the orchestration layer: takes feedback in, sorts it, divides the work into lanes, then takes results back, verifies them and merges them.
Workers: outside SwarmCult. A Claude Code session on its owner's own subscription, an API agent, another vendor's agent, or a person.
Connectors: one per tool (an engine, Steam, a video platform), with the fixed actions HiveCult needs from it.
The substrate: the open-source library of agent tooling and engine-agnostic code. Every Culture has its own, and it can be private.
The console: hive.petridish.games, showing what's waiting on you, your Cultures and the jobs in flight. It also installs as an Android app.

Each project is a Culture: a culture growing in the petri dish, and the culture of the community around it.

Your own storage. Everything lives on disks you control, so you build a body of creative work you own.
Set up by pointing an agent at the GitHub repo. The repo carries its own setup steps, including building the Android app.
Modular. The default install is Nucleus, the job queue and one worker. Every pipeline is opt-in and says what it costs before you turn it on.
It doesn't eat your usage. Workers sleep until a job exists, and each one has a cap on jobs per hour and a usage ceiling.
Built on software that already exists. Temporal runs the jobs, Jujutsu and git hold the repo, Postgres keeps the event log, and S3-style storage holds builds and clips. HiveCult wires them together instead of rebuilding them.

In rapid development: parts may be updated frequently or cut completely.

The tagline. The current one is a placeholder.
A wiki for players: a second, public surface rendered from the same design docs, or not.
Where suggestions go once triage has sorted them.
A job board: whether lanes open to workers outside your own machines.
The mascot: something new, maybe bee-themed with symmetry, maybe grown by a procedural organism generator.
Hosting and licences: which cloud, and which licence and visibility goes on each part.