A downloadable game

Into The Cell is a Scoring Endless Survival game where players are playing as virus and have to fight the immune system of an organism. This project was made during the 2019 Montpellier GaCha Game Jam, which is the Ubisoft's game jam.

The "hardest game jam of your life" they said, and in fact it was quite challenging ! We had to work as group of 15 students, group should be formed from people that don't know each other. Then each group had to draw constraints going from Easy, Medium, to Hard. Validating a constraints would make the group earn respectively 3, 5 and 8 points for the final jury. 

For this game jam we had to draw five (5) constraints, they were the following :

  1. One (1) color, four (4) tons.
  2. One (1) item, three (3) possible use.
  3. An IA with four (4) different states.
  4. A grid base map.
  5. Around a recent event.

The theme of the Game Jam was "The Matryoshka", also known as Babushka dolls. So we thought about what's the essence of the Matryoshka, what this word could possibly mean. The idea that we pulled out from the theme is to have one body in another, forming a single entity when in fact they are not.


The game system is based on the Snake game, over the course of the game the player will be able to collect bonuses just like in Snake, which he will be able to choose the use. We made the choice to take inspiration from Snake because it allowed us to validate the constraints 2 and 4. I will develop this point more in the Mechanic part.

We oriented the game towards an endless scoring game in which the player play as the Ebola virus and will have to survive inside a cell that is looking to get rid of him, this allowed us to validate the fifth constraint (at the time Ebola was under the spotlight). We chose that the player would embody the infectious agent for two reasons, the first is that if you look at a snap under microscope, the Ebola virus looks like Snake so he was a good fit and for the constraint, and for the game itself. The second is that the game is an endless scoring, there is no "winning", player will die and will only be able to get the highest score. So we made sure that the hidden meaning was positive, the disease would not triumph over health.

The game's space, namely the infected cell is AI with 4 states. It indeed has 4 phases, in the manner of a boss, and will switch between phases. First regularly and then as you go along, the order and rhythm will be impacted. The increasing difficulty as well, signifying that the cell is redoubling its efforts to defeat the virus. Then the third constraint was validated.

The player loses the game when the head of the virus encounters one of the cell's defenses and it has no protection.

The basic mechanics are very simple, the player can choose a direction and the character moves to, just like in Snake. The bonuses present on the board can be collected by the player, it will first make the player grows, getting bigger and bigger. Then he will be offered the choice between using the object, he has three choices:

  • Scoring, the player will win a fixed amount of points with a multiplier according to his size. The larger he's, the bigger the multiplier is.
  • Shield, the head of the virus will be provided with protection against the next damage suffered.
  • SlowMotion, diffusion of an agent in the cell slowing down all the immune defenses.

The player can find his body cut by the defenses of the cell, he will then leave behind him a part of the body which will become an obstacle for some time, before disappearing, being digested by the cell.

As the game progresses, the cell will grow little by little, the game space becoming more and more, but the number of dangers for the player also more numerous!

The cell has 3 modes of defense against the player, each phase using one of these mechanisms, the 4th phase meanwhile uses all means of defense.

  • Phase 1 mechanic is called "White Centurions". The cell emits agents which cross the board, cutting / killing what is in their path.
  • Phase 2 is a slightly more passive phase, the mechanic is called "Undermined Lympho". The cell emits agents from the ground, they will activate themselves after a short delay and remain active as long as nothing has been in contact with, even if the cell changes from state.
  • Phase 3 has a cutting agent for mechanic, it's called "Cutting Phago", the playing space will be reduced by chemical barriers for a certain delay since they appear.
  • In phase 4 the cell will use the weapons it possesses in the other phases, the proportions between each will evolve during the game.

Unfortunatly the game isn't available to download. During the last hours of the jam, programming team has had issues with the GitHub trunk and some part of the work we've been doing has been lost. The build we ended up with had too much missing elements to insure a good experience.

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