alifegames.com has the objective of creating virtual worlds where genuine evolution will help us create interesting and hopefully intelligent artificial life entities. In order to bring this about we need people who give these entities a chance to live on their computers. We believe that this can best be achieved by building virtual worlds that are fun to run. Thus, we are creating our worlds as computer games.

We also believe that the best way to get a vibrant evolution going is to give everybody a chance to contribute their ideas to the evolutionary mix. Thus, we publish our source code under the GNU Public License. You are free to change the code in any way you see fit, as long as you adhere to the terms of the license. If you are a commercial game publisher and interested in our code, you can also buy a commercial license. We would like to meet other programmers who are interested in artificial life and would like to cooperate with us on future projects. If that could be you, let us know.

We have 3 projects that you can check out. bSerene is a 3D shooter game with alife monsters. It is written with Direct3D and runs on Windows only. It is a simple game, but much more sophisticated than the demo games that come with Microsoft's DirectX SDK - a good starting point to learn Windows game programming, and actually a cool game to play. bSerene has been downloaded over ten thousand times before it came to SourceForge, and right this moment there is probably someone somewhere on Earth playing it.

The DungeonMaker is our first program on Linux. It is partly written in order to learn how to make games on this cool platform, but it is also intended to be the best randon dungeon generator in the whole wide world. Version 2 of the DungeonMaker has been released in May 2002, and we are now planning to make a simple and fun game to demonstrate the capabilities of the DungeonMaker. In this game we will implement an intelligent map, a concept we describe in detail in the DungeonMaker2 manual. It will be called MazeRunner, and you will be able to race through mazes while being harrassed by very simple MOBs, who have no individual AI, but make good use of the of the intelligent map capabilities.

All this is in preparation for our big project. This will be the real thing. We will actually try to initiate a process that will eventually lead to either consciousness in computers, or an understanding why that is impossible. Currently we are patiently gathering ideas and working on the architecture of the project. You can join the discussion on our mailing list. Whenever ideas have firmed up enough, we post a position paper. Read these if you want to see where we're heading.