Raid monster nests, steal their body parts, become something new.

You are a Glim: a small, hungry jelly with a glowing heart, alone in a bioluminescent sinkhole jungle. Find and step inside a nest's ring, and it wakes, sending wave after wave of guards until you destroy its heart.

Every guard is built from body parts, and the parts it fights with are the parts it drops. Tear off a beetle's legs, a toad's spitting head, a moth's lantern or a flytrap's jaws, then graft them onto your own body. Each one shows on the Glim and moves with it: legs give you speed and an ability, arms are weapons that strike on their own, heads and backs add health, reach and passives.

Every part also makes you hungrier. Eat, raid, or starve. Grow enough and you molt into a bigger body with a new body socket and a bigger stomach. Destroy enough nests and the Hollow opens, where the Brood Queen waits.

Every run ends with a specimen card of the creature you became. Save it and share it in the comments or with your friends!

How to play

• Move: WASD / arrow keys. The Glim faces the cursor.
• Leg ability: Space, or 1–4 for any leg ability.
• Graft screen (pauses): Tab or G. Drag parts onto the glim or from it.
• Zoom: mouse wheel or = / −. Photo mode: F9. Pause: Esc or P.
• Arms attack on their own: your job is where to stand, when to use your legs, and when to run.

Browser notes

• Made for desktop browsers (Chrome, Edge, Firefox) with keyboard and mouse or a gamepad (Gamepad is Beta). Phones are not supported.
• First load is about 54 MB.
• Click the game once to start the sound. Use the fullscreen button for the best view.
• If it runs slowly, set Settings › Quality to Low.
• Settings and your best run are saved in this browser.

How DreamLayer was used

Every creature in Underbloom is a puppet made of separate body parts that a procedural rig moves: legs plant their feet with IK, arms swing from the shoulder, the body sways and leans. The enemies, their elites, and the Brood Queen are built from the same parts you steal. That design needs one thing from an image generator above all: a consistent set of parts for each species, drawn from above, that join into one animal. DreamLayer's character consistency is what made that work.

Reference first. We started from one style frame Mohammed created as the art direction: a lineup of the Glim and the four species. For each species, DreamLayer edited that lineup into a single clean reference: one creature alone, seen from straight above, every limb separated from the body. Only after the reference was approved did anything else get made, and everything else was an edit of it:

• the elite, the small wildlife critter, and the projectile, as edits of the species reference;
• the nests as a chain of edits: the small Clutch from the reference, the Colony from the Clutch, the Hive and the razed Husk from the Colony, so all tiers share one footprint;
• the adaptation bodies as edits of the approved body (Wary, then Hardened from Wary), so the outline and the sockets stay where the rig expects them.

No generated parts. Body, head, legs, arms and back were cut out of the approved reference, not generated one by one. For the Thornmaw we asked DreamLayer to draw the plant as a parts layout, so every piece could be lifted out with one background removal and plain crops, keeping DreamLayer's pixels.

The rig brings them to life. Unity's procedural rig turns those still images into walking, striking, flinching creatures without a single animation frame. When you graft a Thornmaw's jaws onto your Glim, it is the same image the Thornmaw was wearing.

What DreamLayer made in this build

• The Glim, the player's hatchling.
• The whole Thornmaw species (all 19 files): body, head, limbs, elite, wildlife critter, thorn projectile, five nest stages and both adaptation bodies.
• The Skitterling: reference, body parts and elite.
• The Lanternmoth's Wary body.
• The Brood Queen's claw strikes, painted ground warnings and the membrane that seals her Hollow.
• The painted particle and impact effects, and the ability and set icons.

Magnific handled the processing around it (background removal and part clean-up) and the environment art to balance credit usage. The title and How to Play screens are frames captured from the game itself. Every image, which engine made it, how it was processed, and who approved it is logged in the project's art book.

Credits

Underbloom by Mohammed Motawea: design, architecture, art direction, testing & QA. Code written with Claude Code under his direction. Art with DreamLayer AI and Magnific.

• Playtesters: Gabriel Menezes.
• Engine: Unity 6 (6000.6) with URP 2D, Input System, and Cinemachine, WebGL build.
• Art generation: DreamLayer (creatures, nests, effects, icons). Magnific for background removal, part clean-up, and the environment art.
• Music: Woodland Music Album by GWriterStudio (patreon.com/gwriterstudio). Boss music and stings generated with Magnific (Google Lyria 3 Pro, ElevenLabs Music v2).
• Sound effects: Book of the Dead sound library (Unity Technologies); Environment Sounds, Monster SFX Pack 2020 vol. 2, Combat Magic Spells and MonsterPack2 from the Unity Asset Store; the Brood Queen's voice, the heartbeat, and the toad croak generated with Magnific (ElevenLabs SFX). All edited for the game.
• Fonts: Handlee by Joe Prince and Alegreya by Huerta Tipográfica, both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1.
• Unity Asset Store: Feel by More Mountains (game feel), Master Audio 2024 by Dark Tonic (audio).
• Tools: DreamLayer CLI, Magnific, and Claude Code.

Made for the DreamLayer Jam, October 2026.