Project Progenitus

A 2D single-player life simulation game inspired by Maxis's Spore, written in Python with Pygame. This project is currently in development, with the "Cell Stage" being the first playable milestone.

How to Play

The goal of the Cell Stage is to survive and evolve.

• Move your cell around the primordial soup.
• Eat food that matches your chosen diet (plants for Herbivores, other small cells for Carnivores) to collect DNA points.
• Avoid larger, hostile cells that will hunt you.
• Evolve by finding a mate cell. This will open the Cell Editor, where you can spend DNA to add new parts to your cell.
• Discover new parts by breaking open meteorites.
• Win by collecting enough DNA to fill the progress bar at the top of the screen.

Controls

• W, A, S, D or Arrow Keys: Rotate and move your cell.
• ESC: Open the Pause Menu. From here you can Save, Resume, or return to the Main Menu.

Features

• Procedural Generation: All visuals (cells, backgrounds) and audio are generated procedurally.
• Life Simulation: Play as a single cell, eat, grow, and evolve.
• Diet System: Choose to be a Herbivore or Carnivore.
• Evolution Editor: Evolve your cell by adding parts that modify your stats.
• Part Unlocking: Discover new parts by breaking open meteorites.
• Save/Load System: Save your progress at any time and load it from the main menu.

Getting Started

Follow these steps to run the game on your local machine.

1. Prerequisites

Make sure you have Python 3 installed on your system. You can download it from python.org.

2. Clone the Repository

First, you need to get the project files. If you have Git installed, you can clone the repository. (Note: A placeholder is used here. You would replace this with the actual URL of the repository.)

# Replace the URL below with the actual repository URL
git clone https://github.com/example/project-progenitus.git
cd project-progenitus

If you do not have Git, you can download the source code as a ZIP file from the repository page and extract it.

3. Set Up a Virtual Environment (Recommended)

A virtual environment helps keep the project's dependencies separate from other Python projects on your system.

On macOS/Linux:

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

On Windows:

python -m venv venv
.\venv\Scripts\activate

You should see (venv) at the beginning of your command prompt line, indicating the virtual environment is active.

4. Install Dependencies

With your virtual environment active, install the required Python libraries using pip:

pip install -r requirements.txt

This command reads the requirements.txt file and installs all the necessary packages (like Pygame).

5. Run the Game

You are now ready to play! Run the following command from the project's root directory:

python main.py

The game window should now appear. Enjoy!