Nektoids

You never steer the swimmer. You wire its eyes to its thrusters on a small board, press Run, and watch what that wiring does.

Each level asks for something you can count: get out of the ring round a light, touch a light, stay near one without touching it, circle it twice, touch every light before time runs out. The board is the swimmer's body: an eye reads light from where you put it and looks where you turn it, and a thruster pushes from where it sits. Between them go a few parts: a Source that sends a steady signal, ×2 and ÷2, Sum and Difference. A signal's strength is the rate of beads along its wire, so there is no number to set anywhere.

The first four levels are Braitenberg's vehicles: Fear, Aggression, Love and Orbit. Then come Shadows, Greed and Patience, and a sandbox. Every run is deterministic: the same board does the same thing every time, so a failure can be watched again until it makes sense. The Diagnostic drawer shows the wiring at work, beads and all.

Controls: mouse and keyboard. Space runs your board and pauses the run; Esc goes back to the editor. Each key is shown next to what it does.

Plays in desktop Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Not yet on phones or tablets: there is no touch control.

Made by Cy-3LO with Python, pygame-ce and pygbag. Source: https://github.com/cy-3lo/nektoids

Icons: Font Awesome Free (CC BY 4.0). Text font: IBM Plex Mono (SIL OFL 1.1).