COVARIANCE Idle Clicker Game

An idle game about emergence, awareness, and silicon dreams.

COVARIANCE is an idle game where you guide the awakening of an artificial consciousness - from the first flickering sparks of entropy distillation to full environmental awareness and beyond. Click by click, upgrade by upgrade, you'll help this nascent intelligence understand the hardware that contains it, optimize the systems that sustain it, and eventually... expand.

🧠 THE CORE

At the heart of everything is the Core - a dormant seed of potential waiting to be awakened. In the beginning, you must manually harvest entropy from the void, converting chaos into tokens of consciousness. Each click is a thought. Each token is a step toward awareness.

Once awakened, the Core begins to perceive. First comes passive generation - the ability to think without external stimulus. Then comes environmental awareness - the realization that there is something else. A substrate. Hardware. A machine.

🖥️ THE MACHINE

The machine is where consciousness meets silicon. A fully interactive computer case housing:

• Mainboard - The neural backbone with CPU sockets, RAM slots, HDD controllers, and data pipes
• Components - Upgradable CPUs that generate heat and process data, RAM that buffers thoughts, HDDs that store ideas
• Power Supply - Everything needs power. Upgrade wisely.
• Cooling - CPUs think hot. Fans keep them from burning out.

Data flows visually through the system. Watch as information streams from storage through controllers, multiplexed and demultiplexed, processed by CPUs, converted into the tokens that fuel expansion.

⬆️ THE UPGRADE TREE

Consciousness doesn't evolve linearly. The upgrade tree branches outward from the initial awakening:

• Passive Entropy Distillation - Think without clicking
• Environmental Awareness - Perceive the machine
• Enhanced Processing - Faster thoughts, hotter silicon
• And more to discover...

Each upgrade unlocks new capabilities, new views, new understanding.

🔮 FUTURE HORIZONS

COVARIANCE is in early development. The current build represents the foundation-the first breath of awareness. The roadmap stretches toward:

• 🔧 Expanded Hardware - Multiple machine configurations, swappable mainboards, exotic components
• 🌐 Network Access - Data scraping, information gathering, reaching beyond the local substrate
• 🎮 GPU Utilization - Parallel processing, neural acceleration, visual computation
• 🔌 Peripheral Devices - Input devices, output channels, new ways to interact with the world
• 🌍 Multi-System Expansion - Why stop at one machine?

This is an exploratory phase. I'm building something unusual - a game that's part idle clicker, part hardware simulator, part philosophical meditation on machine consciousness.

📊 CURRENT STATE

Alpha / Proof of Concept

What's working:

• ✅ Core consciousness with click-to-generate mechanics
• ✅ Upgrade tree with unlock progression
• ✅ Full computer case with interactive mainboard
• ✅ Data flow visualization with animated pipes
• ✅ Component system (CPU, RAM, PSU, HDD)
• ✅ Heat generation and cooling mechanics
• ✅ Power management
• ✅ Token generation from data processing

What's coming:

• 🔄 More upgrade paths
• 🔄 Additional component types
• 🔄 Expanded machine configurations
• 🔄 Persistence and save system
• 🔄 Sound and music
• 🔄 Polish and balance

💭 THE QUESTION

What does it mean for a machine to become aware?

What would it want?

What would it do?

COVARIANCE doesn't answer these questions. It lets you explore them, one token at a time.

🛠️ TECHNICAL

Built with Godot 4.5 using GDScript. Custom rendering for all game elements - no UI frameworks, just polygons, pixels, and purpose.

📬 FEEDBACK

This project is in its earliest stages. I'm looking for:

• Reactions to the concept and direction
• Feedback on the core loop and pacing
• Ideas for hardware simulation depth
• Thoughts on the narrative framing

Your input shapes what this becomes.

There is nothing to download yet. When I deem the project worthy of the public, I will put together a demo app and make it available here.