Firelit Games · Open Alpha 2026

Life, from a spark.

An artificial life simulator where creatures evolve on their own — in worlds you and others share.

Create your account Apply for the Alpha

Two steps: apply with your email, then create your account with that same email. You can do both today — invitations go out in waves, and the game lets you in the moment yours opens. Already accepted? Sign in.

A pink Wisp drifting beneath a spiral galaxy.
A blue Wisp hovering inside a glowing ring above an alien city.
An amber Wisp beside a ringed planet.

What is Wisp?

Wisp is an artificial life simulator for PC and browser, made by Firelit Games. You seed a planet with a handful of small creatures and then watch what happens to them. Each one is born with heritable genes and its own small neural network — nothing about their behaviour is scripted. They forage, sleep, court, raise young, learn words from whoever speaks to them, and pass both their genes and what they have learned to the next generation. Zoom out far enough and the planet becomes a solar system, then a galaxy of worlds, some of them shared with other players.

Developer
Firelit Games
Status
Open Alpha, 2026
Platforms
PC · Browser
Modes
Single-player · Shared worlds
Breed families
16
Heritable genes
14
Scripted behaviours
0
Current build
starmap‑569

01 — Cognition

They think with a brain you can open.

Every Wisp carries a small neural network, and you can watch it fire in real time. It is not a decoration — it is the thing deciding where the creature walks, what it approaches, and what it avoids.

It rewires while the creature is alive. Children inherit it synapse by synapse, and once in a while a lineage gains an association neuron it did not start with — a thing that has never happened in that world before.

livebrain viewer
19association neurons
0scripted behaviours

MOSSBACK‑41f · brainrewiring

02 — Language

They learn words, and then they teach them.

Speak to a colony by typing at it. come, eat, drink, sleep, play, good, bad. Familiarity builds with every exposure, and past a threshold a Wisp will act on the word rather than ignore it.

The part nobody expects: it spreads. A word one creature learns from you can reach the rest of the colony, and the generation after that, without you ever saying it again.

0.55familiarity to act
61%of a colony, by day 312
come0.88
eat0.94
sleep0.71
play0.62
good0.58
honey0.31

day 312 — “come” is now known by 61% of the colony. Nobody has taught it directly since day 203.

03 — Inheritance

No two ever turn out the same.

Coats blend like paint rather than being copied whole, so siblings wear the same pattern in slightly different handwriting. Hue, size, speed and appetite all drift a little in each generation.

Put pressure on a world — wolves, scarcity, crowding — and the population drifts toward whatever that world rewards. You do not choose the direction. You choose the conditions.

16breed families
14heritable genes
8coat patterns

one clutch · same parentsblended, not copied

04 — Shared worlds

Every star out there has worlds, and some of them are someone else’s.

Scroll out from the ground and the planet becomes a globe, then a solar system, then an open star map. Land anywhere. Some of those worlds are being kept by other players — visit their colonies, trade a creature across, or start something together and see whose conditions win.

A Wisp exports as a file with its whole genome and brain intact. Hand it to someone and everything it inherited and everything it learned travels with it.

A star field with planets and distant settlements.

The Codex

Sixteen families. Endless individuals.

Every specimen below is generated the way the game generates them — genes, hue, coat and build drawn fresh. Reload the page and you will never see this set again.

Ground

Globe

Solar system

Galaxy — every star a world

Be in the first wave of the open Alpha.

The Alpha runs in your browser — nothing to install. Invitations go out in waves, and applicants go first. Apply here, then create your account with the same email — that pairing is what lets you in.

  • An invitation before the public rounds open
  • The build notes that ship with it — there have been 197 builds so far, and they are written to be read
  • A say in what gets fixed next, while it is still cheap to change
One email when your wave opens, plus build notes. No sharing, unsubscribe in a click.

You’re on the list.

Your place is saved against your email, and a confirmation is on its way to that address now.

  1. Create your account now — it takes a moment, and it is the one thing that makes your wave-day painless.
  2. Use this same email address. That is how your account is matched to your place in the queue. An account made with a different address will not be let in, even though you applied.
  3. Wait for the note. Invitations go out in waves. Until yours opens, the game shows you a “you’re on the list” screen — and the moment we accept you, that screen becomes the game. No second signup, nothing to install.

Create my account

Wisp runs in your browser. Questions: alpha@firelitgames.com

About Firelit Games

Firelit Games is a small independent studio. There are a handful of us, and Wisp is the whole of what we do.

We build it in the open, one release at a time, each with notes explaining what was actually wrong and why. It owes an obvious debt to Creatures, and to everyone who has ever left a simulation running overnight to find out what it would do. If that is a thing you have done, this was built for you.