About kolonie

kolonie is an independent browser game, designed, built and run by one developer in Berlin. It is free to play and needs no account.

Who makes it

I’m Aaron Scheuerlein. kolonie.app is my one-person business: I own it and I write the code. It is registered as a business in Berlin-Pankow and has been trading since 25 September 2026.

It started with a question from my father. He had set up a virtual server for my brothers and me, and one day he asked what I had done with my share of it. The honest answer was that I had more or less forgotten about it. kolonie is what I have done with it since.

kolonie.app runs two things: this game and the kolonie wallet, a non-custodial wallet for BTCX.

The idea

“Kolonie” is German for colony, the word for a patch of bacteria growing in a petri dish. The game borrows that picture: every player is a colony in a dark dish, feeding on nutrients and on each other until one of them has taken over the dish.

Games where you grow by eating smaller players have been around for a long time. kolonie adds two things to the formula: momentum you pay for with your own body, and gravity. Heavy cores hold everything in orbit, suns burn and black holes swallow, so a good round is less about quick reflexes than about reading orbits and choosing when to spend mass and when to coast.

Under the hood

Each dish is a physics simulation on the server. It advances in fixed steps of 1/60 of a second with a velocity-Verlet integrator, the kind used for planetary orbits, because it keeps orbits from slowly spiralling apart. The server loop runs 30 times a second and fits two physics steps into each pass. Dishes are spread over three worker threads, and the server has room for about 900 players at once. When the threads are busy, new players are asked to try again a little later.

During a round your browser sends only your pushes, and the server accepts at most 20 of them per second. It sends back the part of the dish your screen can show, 24 times a second, with positions rounded to less than a pixel at your zoom level, which comes to about 10 KB per second. Your browser draws smooth motion between those updates and works out your path line itself, with the same integrator the server uses, every frame.

Each layout is drawn from a random number seed. The generator rejects any layout where the mass outside the cores could not reach the win goal 1.3 times over, or where a colony would start inside a hazard zone, so every dish can be won from every seat.

Nothing you hear is a recording. The music is composed live in D Dorian: a low drone, chords that change every 20 to 40 seconds and soft bells every 4 to 12 seconds. The closer the danger, the further its filter opens, from 380 up to 2,400 Hz. The sound effects are tuned to the same scale, built on a low D at 73.42 Hz.

Fair play

Funding

Keeping the servers running costs money every month. For now the goal is to bring in more players, so that the game can pay for itself. It is funded by advertising through Google AdSense and by optional cosmetic skins. Ads appear only with your consent, and the game plays exactly the same without them. Small optional rewards in BTCX, the coin of the Bitcoin-PoCX network, are kept apart from the ads: they live in the kolonie wallet, and games played for them show no ads. The FAQ explains how they work.

Community and contact

Ideas, bug reports and feedback are welcome. Join the community on Discord, follow kolonie on Instagram, or find me on X as @allyolifesaving. For anything formal, use the contact details in the Impressum. The changelog lists every update since the first version.

Play kolonie