Crescent Loom
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Knit bones, stitch muscles, and weave neurons into biologically-realistic underwater lifeforms.
It's like Spore, but with actual science.
Liked the cell stage of Spore, but wanted more depth? Gotten merrily lost in the graphical programming puzzles of SpaceChem? Love the "can I manage to build this...?" creativity of Kerbal Space Program?
Crescent Loom is the very first biologically-realistic nervous system simulation game. It lets you — in a hands-on, mad-scientist way — tinker with everything from neurotransmitter to the ecological niche of an animal.
So dive in and maybe — just maybe — by poking around with these simple creatures you'll figure something out about how your own body ticks.
[ More Info | Play Online Free ]
Crescent Loom is currently in open development; expect potentially major bugs, crashes, changes, and additions as I work on it over the next few years.
The best way to keep an eye on this is by subscribing to my monthly wickletter.
Purchase
In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $19 USD. You will get access to the following files:
Development log
- Wicklog 28: Scaling down & personal revelationsOct 30, 2019
- Mac hotfixJul 13, 2019
- Wicklog 27: NO DICEJun 12, 2019
- Wicklog 26: educational grant submission!Apr 22, 2019
- Changelog (html5) — January 13, 2019Jan 14, 2019
- Wicklog 25: load it faster, draw it fewer, show it betterJan 11, 2019
- Wicklog 24: neuroscientists, new build, and the fossil recordNov 17, 2018
- Wicklog 23: Here's the planAug 30, 2018
Comments
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why does it say "downloadable demo" but when i click on it it brings me back here?! also the online one keeps crashing, idunno why, but as far as i know, this game is great!! just not the website.
For some reason, I can't play the game online ... i'm not sure what's wrong, but both of my computers can't load the page.
My web hosting service is flaky & sometimes can go down for up to an hour. Is it still not working for you?
Yeah...
I've tried way too many things to get it to work...
– edit –
Me being stupid, I didn’t read that Crescent wasn’t available on Windows and by coincidence I just happened to be using my Windows machine which I almost never do. The message I wrote is thus irrelevant.
Original message below
Any chance you’d make the game discoverable by the itch app? From the app, I only get “open page”. I can download Crescent Loom from the website, but I like using the app to keep things nice n tidy.
Huh, interesting. I wonder why that is? I'll look into it. Thanks for the heads up.
I think if you use Butler it should directly pick the executable. If you manually upload, there may be some convention to how you should do things, not sure (I’ve only used Butler).
The game seems super interesting, but I haven’t installed it for that reason yet. It’s really petty of me, but bypassing the app makes my launcher also not pick it up, which makes it not listed in my “games to try” list, etc.
I’m not saying that to put pressure on you to fix it, I’m saying that to give context as to why I am not giving you any feedback on the game proper. I’ll keep checking for a few times and if you haven’t had time to fix it, I’ll install Crescent manually, it’s totally ok, no sweat.
I am using Butler as well. Hrm.
Hmmm sorry it was me being stupid. The game isn’t available for Windows! I noticed the “Install” button appeared on my Linux box.
That’s even better and a great surprise, I’m just so not used to games being available on Linux and not Windows that it didn’t occur to me to check before now.
Sorry for the worry!
Ah! That's it! Nay, it was I who foolish. I somehow missed checking this box for windows, but had it checked correctly for the linux version. It should be fixed now.
how different is the demo from the main game?
never mind i think i fixed it
so i found all that out on my own but i see in a lot of your screenshots and stuff there is like a mode with a bunch of other creatures and stuff in it but i dont see this in my game could you tell me whats up with that? is it not added yet? am i in the wrong version?
Hi! The only differences between the online & downloaded versions are technical constraints — the web version can't save files locally and runs a bit slower. And actually now that I think of it, I'm usually a little better at updating the web version so it might have bug fixes that the downloaded one doesn't.
Re: other creatures: there's a few others in Sewee Bay you can interact with. But there's not currently a mode with, like, a bunch of other creatures. As the game updates, save files sometimes get obsoleted so it's lost some modes in the screenshots.
aw this looks awesome!! i hate so much that i cant buy it
Did you see that there's a free in-browser version? It's as identical as I can make it given the tech constraints — just runs a little slower and you can't save locally.
yo i... adore this, and my friends adore this, and any effort to do anything like spore but good is an incredibly noble one. i'm not sure if this is the correct method/place for bug reporting but the tutorial stops responding after the part where you're told to push the play button, and it looks like there's a lot more tutorial to go judging by the greyed-out levels next to it. is this intentional? again, thank you thank you thank you for wonderful game.
Hi Mabelmabel,
Glad to hear you're enjoying it! Alas, the tutorial does end after you press play; the greyed-out levels are works-in-progress that aren't in-game yet. I could definitely do a better job making that clear.
I'm currently trying to get more funding to keep working on the game and add more levels. Following the game here or joining the mailing list will letcha know when I update it.
I'd love to hear any other feedback you have about the game, so don't hesitate to give me a shout. :)