Code, breed and dance 3D creatures

GenoCode is a small language for making creatures, and an app to grow them in. Write a creature as code or build it from blocks, breed it into a family of new ones, and watch them dance to your music.

Start creating Getting started

Free, in your browser, nothing to install. Open source (MIT).

The GenoCode app: Phoenix's code on the left, the creature in 3D in the middle and its genes as sliders on the right

A creature is a short program

An invisible turtle moves and turns in 3D and lays shapes where it goes: balls, cubes, cones, tubes, rings. Mark a value as a gene and it gets a slider, and it can mutate, be passed on to children and blend from one creature to another.

Make this snowman in the getting-started guide →

creature Snowman
// Balls one on another, each smaller than the last.

gene balls  = 3    in 2..6 step 1  // how many balls
gene shrink = 0.75 in 0.5..0.95    // how much smaller each ball is
gene snow   = hsv(200, 0.1, 1) in hsv(0, 0, 0.6)..hsv(360, 0.5, 1)

pitch -90
shape ball
colour snow
repeat balls {
  lay
  forward 0.8
  grow shrink
}

Flowerball built from blocks, with its code beside the blocks

Code or blocks

Prefer not to type? Drag blocks onto a canvas and the code is written for you. Change either one and the other follows, comments and all. Gene sliders and colour pickers sit right on the blocks.

A grid of twelve Octoplant children, each with its own genes

Breed and mutate

Every program describes a whole family. Mutate a creature into a grid of variations, pick two parents and breed them, lock the genes you like and keep going. A bred creature saves as one self-contained file.

Morph

A creature can have named variants. Morph glides smoothly from one to the next and round again, every gene blending on the way.

Cobra dancing in Dance mode, with the music meters at the top

Dance to your music

Play a music file, a web address, your microphone or another browser tab. GenoCode hears the bass, the middle and the highs, finds the beat, and the creature dances in one of 17 styles. Dance styles are GenoCode too, so you can write your own.

The pattern designer: a large pattern preview, its settings and a row of variations

Patterns and backgrounds

Design textures with schemes and finishes like pearl, metallic and iridescent, breed them like creatures, and put them on a creature or behind it. Or write your own patterns, pixel by pixel, in GenoCode.