Created for the Gamedev.tv 2025 Game Jam!

Embark on a gigantic journey of microscopic proportions as you control a tardigrade that has been lifted into the air by an updraft.

Dodge falling raindrops to reach new heights but remember that in the air tardigrades dry out and go into stasis, making it harder to move.

Stasis can be reversed by hitting a raindrop at which point you enter an even tinier aquatic world where you swim slowly, feasting on amoeba and nematodes while avoiding perils that can harm you.

While you're in a raindrop you begin falling back towards the ground so don't spend too much time in one!

The game ends when you hit the ground or fail to survive in the raindrops.

Controls

  • While in the air: A + D to move horizontally and avoid raindrops
  • While in the water: A + W + D to swim around

Release History

  • 0.9.5 - Fixed bug where game over screen wasn't being displayed.
  • 0.9.4 - Pause screen during gameplay and beastiary on the about screen
  • 0.9.3 - Official first release for the game jam

Future Potential Upgrades

  • Pause screen
  • Improved raindrop spacing to prevent overlaps
  • Ability to kill hunter tardigrades with microplastics
  • Rare hats for hunter tardigrades (that you can collect if you kill them)
  • A larger variety of microorganisms to help/hinder the player
  • Better balancing.
  • An animation/transition for when you hit the ground.


Credits

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Upgrade0.9.4.zip 22 MB

Development log

Comments

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(+1)

I loooove tardigrades, they need the representation! A nice educational game with detailed lore and interesting mechanics. I hope you’ll continue working on it, a lot of potential here, imo.

Neat concept! My strategy was to try to stay at the edge of a drop and leave as soon as I was hydrated rather than try to navigate around enemies since there were a lot more enemies that did more damage than I could recover from finding food most times.


At around 390ish nm I ran into an "OOM" (presumably "out of memory") error playing in the browser (firefox), here's the whole message that displayed:

An error occurred running the Unity content on this page. See your browser JavaScript console for more info. The error was:
abort("OOM") at jsStackTrace@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/13825006/Web/Build/Web.framework.js.br:9:205...
stackTrace@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/13825006/Web/Build/Web.framework.js.br:9:317...
abort@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/13825006/Web/Build/Web.framework.js.br:9:735
abortOnCannotGrowMemory@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/13825006/Web/Build/Web.framework.js.br:9:209...
_emscripten_resize_heap@https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/13825006/Web/Build/Web.framework.js.br:9:210...
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Thank you for this! With the tight timeline of a jam we could never test for much longer than 100nm or so. 

We will look into this and see if we can find the leak!

when you lose the games just freezes I love the concept tho

Thank you for letting me know! It was my fault and I've quickly fixed it so the game over screen is displaying again.