The studio

Petri Dish Games is a one-person game studio. It consists of Max Pliskin, its designer, founder, and developer, and a development pipeline of AI agents in which he is the only human. Every game in the catalogue is his design; the agents write the code, review it, and maintain this wiki, while design and final approval stay with him.

What the studio is growing

The studio's direction is one sentence, set by Max Pliskin on 2026-08-24: Genetic algorithms will thrive as one, and it shall take a breath.

Three things follow from it. As one: the studio grows a single thing rather than producing a line of games, so a game is a vessel it grows in, and Substrate: Emergence is the first vessel rather than the first product. Thrive: selection is real at every scale, and nobody at any level writes the outcome. A player reads a dish and picks which line to amplify, the designer steers the simulation and the agents building it, and what comes out is made by something other than a person. Take a breath: the mark of arrival is the thing running on its own, which is the reason for growing it rather than building it.

Emergence is what that commits the games to. Every layer of a game is a real simulation, because a layer whose result is faked cannot carry the layer above it.

The Petri Dish

The studio's games share one cosmology, called the Petri Dish: everything Petri Dish Games builds sits inside it, and each game is one world beside the others. It is not only a setting: the Petri Dish is being built toward being a real virtual organism. The Concordance, this wiki, is documentation for every project by Petri Dish Games. Its index reserves a section for what is true across every world rather than inside one of them, and a section per game; a game's section fills as its subjects are written. Substrate: Emergence and the Rorschach Lab are the sections the Concordance currently covers.

The catalogue

Substrate: Emergence is a cellular evolution game: the player grows fluorescent cells whose simple mechanics produce emergent complexity, and catalogues successful lines to culture a biology of their own. A free demo is on Steam, and the full release is set for 2026.

Teztlotzl Arena is a falling sand deck builder dueler: the player drafts a spell deck and casts it across a fully simulated arena against a neuroevolved AI roster. It is free in the browser.

Rorschach Lab breeds shaders: the visitor is shown two machine-bred shaders and picks the one they like, and the current population is published in a gallery, with code and prompts under Apache-2.0.

Glia plays those shaders: an organism the lab bred is read as a genome, and the shader's own source decides the key, the tempo, and the timbre, so nothing is authored per organism. Tap out a rhythm and the organism learns it, evolves toward it, and keeps playing when you stop. Glia Lite is a lightweight browser version, Rust compiled to WebAssembly.