An incremental game where art and music are generated by code

One Mote is an incremental game I am making at Fervo, a two-game indie studio. It is not released. It is coming soon to Steam, with no date and no price announced, and there is no store page to wishlist yet. This note is about the constraint that shapes the whole game: there are no art files and no music files. What you see and what you hear is produced by the game's own code while it runs.

Procedural, not generative AI

The words get mixed up, so here is the plain version. One Mote does not use an image model or a music model. Procedural generation here means ordinary code following rules: draw a glow when a crystal is reached, play a note when light arrives at the core. Nothing on screen was painted ahead of time, and nothing in the soundtrack was bounced to a file.

Our other game, Ringfort, does use some pre-generated AI art and music, and we say so on that page. Two games, one rule: say how it was made. For One Mote the disclosure is none.

The picture is the network

You start with one mote of light. Click the crystals around it and their light flows home. Collectors, Relays, and Prisms grow a web, ring by ring, until it fills the dark. Crystals light up as the network reaches them. When you collapse the web, the whole thing folds into a single star.

The starfield behind that is a shader, not a painted backdrop. Because nothing is a pre-drawn image, the map looks like the network you actually built.

The same state is the soundtrack

There is no pre-recorded music. Light that reaches the core is turned into notes and played live. A small network is a sparse line. A busy one fills in. Under the hood it is a small synthesizer in parts: bass, a pad, a melody, and inner voices.

A few details that took longer than the first melody:

Each run picks its key from a seed. The star field's traits choose the chord movement. Calm fields keep a steadier progression. Dense, sparse, dark, and Deep Sky fields open it up or lean darker.
Resonators chime on the beat. Crystals in range light up together, and when they ring out a bell joins the music.
Idle games stay open for hours. Voices fade over their last few milliseconds instead of clicking when a note is cut off. Looping parts finish a whole cycle before they repeat. A limiter keeps a late-game web from clipping.

What the code has to serve

The structure is the same idea at three scales. Build a network out across crystal bands, where further rings are worth more and cost more. Collapse it into a star. Stars fill constellations, and a finished constellation unlocks buildings, crystal rings, field traits, or a permanent perk. Three handcrafted galaxies come first: The First Light, The Spiral, and The Binary, with their own terrain (comets, gravity wells, wormholes, a companion core, and so on). It is six or more hours to the true ending.

After that, Deep Sky is an endless descent through generated fields. Anomalies stack: black holes, nebulae, thin space, drifting crystals, solar wind. Later constellations need stars from down there, so the story path and the endless path feed each other.

Self-Growth can build the network for you, including while you are away. Or you place every link yourself. It is mouse-driven either way.