Max Pliskin

Max Pliskin is the designer and founder of Petri Dish Games, and the studio's sole developer. Every game in the catalogue is his design, built through a development pipeline of AI agents in which he is the only human.

Role in the pipeline

Max sets the direction of each game, defines the agent roles that build it, and approves what ships. The agents write the code, review it, and maintain this wiki; design and final approval stay with the one human in the loop.

Background

Max holds a B.S. in cellular and molecular neuroscience from Colorado State University (2024). As an undergraduate he worked in the Reist Lab, researching Synaptotagmin mutations in Drosophila larvae through electrophysiology and fluorescent immunohistochemistry. The fluorescence imaging from that work is the origin of the aesthetic of Substrate: Emergence.

After graduating he worked as an EEG technician while contributing to an open-source game, his first game development work. In late 2025 he left clinical work for game development full time, as that interest grew alongside a turn toward computational neuroscience.

The studio's work sits at the intersection of biology, emergent simulation, and AI-driven software creation: neuroscience training turned into AI development, supplying both what the games simulate and how they are built.

Max commits as BAR-Neb.