Simulation
Artists, egos, & strange creations.
Watch artists pitch projects, collaborate and have melt-downs as they work to complete pieces in the shared gallery. See creations pop out.
Change who they are, it's an ant farm full of weirdos.
that colony is running right nowHow it plays
Watch first. Nudge second.
They decide
What to make, who to make it with, when to quit. Every choice comes from the artist, so the feud, the unlikely duo and the collapsing mega-mural are stories nobody wrote.
Personality is the engine
Taste, ego, stubbornness, patience, appetite for drama. Put two artists in the same spot and they make different calls, and you can see why.
The art looks real
The artists are scribbles. The work they make is not: oil looks like oil, a sculpture looks photographed. That mismatch is half the joke.
Readable at a glance
Storm clouds, sparkles, sweat drops, speech bubbles. You can tell who is sulking and who just had an idea without opening a single log.
The one thing you control
Turn up her provocativeness. See what happens.
Open any artist and drag their personality around. Mood, energy and grudges are off-limits; those are consequences. The change plays out over the next minute or two, like a person, not a remote control.
Juno Pell
Sculptor. Works in rusted wire and grudges. On Concrete Lullaby with Mira and Oskar.
What Juno does next
The ticker logs every edit (“You turned up Juno’s provocativeness”), so when Mira storms off two minutes later, you know whose fault it was.
Every piece is a stack of drafts
Built up, painted over, argued about.
Each meaningful change to a project makes a new image that builds on the last one. Flip through them and you watch a piece pass between hands: who joined, who covered something up, where it changed direction.
Project titles blend everyone’s taste
A Brutalist Lullaby for Pigeons, in Neon Clay
founder: brutalist · sound · birds — joined by: neon, clay
Under the hood
Rules for the small stuff. Claude for the drama.
Asking a language model every frame would be slow and expensive. So plain rules run the moment-to-moment, and the turning points go to Claude. If a call is slow or the budget runs out, the rules answer and the colony keeps moving.
Walking, resting, working
Numbers straight from each artist’s stats.
- Wander, rest at the café, admire finished work
- Pick which active project to work on
- Score how well a pitch fits
- Build dissatisfaction as a project drifts
The moments that matter
The colony’s imagination and voice.
- Invent projects and write the pitches
- Call the close ones: join, quit, revive
- Describe each draft and caption it
- Narrate the ticker and review finished work
The actual art
Generated on Replicate, one model per job.
- Fast sketches up front, premium finals at the end
- Edits that continue from the previous image
- Newcomers’ past work as a style reference
- Each artist can have a signature model
Provocative artists push as hard as the models allow. When an image is refused, that becomes an in-world event: “The committee censored Untitled Riot No. 3.” The idea is retried one step tamer until a draft renders, and the artist remembers how far it had to be toned down. Some grumble. Some double down. Some quit in protest.
Every run starts with a fresh colony
Pick a temperament.
Choose how many artists and how different they are from each other, from a like-minded scene to a wildly mixed one. Every colony gets at least a couple of pitchers and one social connector, so it never stalls.
Chill Commune
Friendly, patient, team-loving. Big collaborations that actually finish.
Avant-Garde Chaos
Provocative, restless, stubborn. Lots of pivots, cover-ups and dramatic exits.
Lone Wolves
Solo-leaning, long focus. Quiet masterpieces and the occasional reluctant duo.
Random
Roll the dice. Edit the seed and replay a colony you loved exactly.
The build plan
Roadmap
- phase 1
Living sandbox
Doodle artists wander a 2D canvas. Setup screen, inspect, edit, add and remove.
- phase 2
Solo projects
Artists start, juggle and finish their own pieces, with placeholder drafts and a ticker.
- phase 3
Pitching & teams
Speech-bubble pitches, yes / maybe / no, shared projects and relationship memory.
- phase 4
Drift & departures
Projects change direction, members get unhappy, someone storms off, ruins get revived.
- phase 5
Real draft images
Generated drafts on Replicate, then a model router that hands each piece between models.
- phase 6
Wackiness polish
Critic reviews, a gallery with flipbooks, art fairs, rivalries and movements.
- phase 7
Tools & sharing
Debug overlays, seed sharing, replays, and exporting time-lapses.