## What it is
Point of Origin is a side-scrolling platformer where the puzzle is the ground. Built for the Cal Poly Game Development Club's World's First Game Jam (September 2026, theme ORIGIN). It's playable in the browser — no download needed.
## The idea
You're shown how something ended, and asked to find where it began. You wake in the dark among the ruins of a structure that grew there, and your lantern only reveals the ghost of it in a small circle around you — so you have to run and jump through the ruins to piece together the full shape from memory. Then you find the single cell it grew from, stand there, plant a seed, get clear, and press Grow.
The living cells rise as solid ground: gold where they match the outline, red where they don't. Get it exact and the door opens — and the growth you just created is the bridge that carries you to it. The puzzle and the platforming are the same object, which is the part I'm happiest with.
## Why it's a hard puzzle
It's a reverse cellular automaton. Running a growth law forward is trivial; asking which starting cell produces a given final pattern is the interesting direction, because the forward rule loses information. You're not solving a maze, you're inverting a simulation by reading its output.
And it can go wrong in ways that matter: living growth overgrows whoever is standing inside it, so you have to move away from your own seed before you grow it, or run.
## How it's built
- Odin — the cellular-automaton simulation, compiled to a native DLL so the grid steps fast enough to be a real-time mechanic rather than a turn.
- Nexium — my own language drives the build, the binding generation and the level pipeline.
- Unity 6 — the game itself, calling into the Odin simulation through generated bindings.
- Houdini and Blender for the assets.
Four languages, a native interop boundary and a custom level format, put together under jam deadline. The Nexium tooling is the part that makes it more than a jam entry to me — it's a second production user of a language I wrote.
## Play it
It runs in the browser or downloads from itch.io. Takes about a minute to see the core idea.