The studio

Petri Dish Games is a one-person game studio. It consists of Max Pliskin, its designer, founder, and sole 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 the studio's reference for those worlds. 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 fighting game of wizard duels over a fully simulated falling-sand 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 is a genetic evolution synthesizer in the browser: organisms on a hex grid breed, mutate, and play, and the patches they play through are genetic too. Listener picks are the selection pressure the dish breeds against, and every organism it has bred is published in a gallery. Glia Lite is a lightweight browser version, Rust compiled to WebAssembly.

Greenout is an endless swing-physics arcade game: the player grabs vines, swings, and releases for momentum, outrunning a haze that dissolves the world behind them. It is free in the browser.

The pipeline

The studio's work sits at the intersection of biology, emergent simulation, and AI-driven software creation. Max sets the direction of each game, defines the agent roles that build it, and approves what ships. The same pipeline keeps the Concordance: every mechanical claim on it is read against the code that produces it, and re-checked when that code changes.