Welcome to Cat World: The Nine Lives, a game concept that combines survival mechanics with innovative agent-driven design. This project isn’t just a game—it’s a sandbox for exploring autonomous decision-making, emergent behavior, and long-term adaptation. The player takes on the role of a designer, creating a cat agent meant to navigate a systemic and persistent world filled with danger, opportunity, and unpredictability.

The foundation of the game is survival. The cat agent must balance core needs: food, water, rest, health, and safety. The world itself is relentless and indifferent, designed to challenge the agent without adapting to its failures or successes. Players influence the agent’s behavior by setting high-level strategies and preferences, but the agent ultimately takes autonomous actions based on its traits, instincts, memory, and learned experiences. This hands-off approach shifts the player’s role to an observer and designer, focusing on guiding the agent rather than controlling it directly.

A distinctive mechanic is the nine lives system. Each life represents a complete simulation run, and the agent’s death isn’t a reset—it’s part of its evolution. Through successive iterations, the agent inherits partial knowledge, instincts, and biases from previous lives. This creates a lineage of cats that become better adapted to survive and thrive over time. Failure, in this game, isn’t an end; it’s data for adaptation and growth.

The agent’s behavior emerges from a complex interplay of internal states like hunger, fear, thirst, and fatigue. These dynamic needs guide decision-making, ensuring the agent responds flexibly to its environment. Perception isn’t perfect—the agent relies on noisy, incomplete observations such as scent trails, limited vision, and sound cues, mimicking real-world uncertainty. Spatial memory and associative memory further enhance survival; the agent retains knowledge of safe zones, food sources, and threats, while linking patterns such as predator activity to specific locations or times of day.

Adaptation and learning are central to Cat World. Skills improve through experience, colored by traits like curiosity or memory strength. Reinforcement signals carry over between lives, shaping heuristics, biases, and decision frameworks. Traits evolve randomly across generations, introducing diversity within lineages and enabling the discovery of new strategies. Together, these systems create a dynamic, ever-evolving agent that is both unpredictable and intelligent.

This game concept has unique implications for agent research. Survival in Cat World is a natural multi-objective optimization problem that requires agents to balance competing priorities in challenging, non-stationary environments. Learning is embodied, grounded in physical constraints and real-time environmental interaction. The world evolves in response to resource depletion, predator activity, and other dynamics, encouraging continual adaptation and preventing static behaviors. Internal states, decision rationales, and memory models are all exposed for debugging and visualization, making the game particularly valuable for studying emergent behavior. Its modular structure also supports experimentation with novel architectures, instincts, and learning systems, extending far beyond traditional agent training methods.

In short, Cat World: The Nine Lives is both a survival simulator and a living laboratory. It turns failure into knowledge and death into progress, offering players and researchers alike the opportunity to explore the limits of autonomy, adaptation, and evolution. It’s an invitation to design, observe, and learn from agents navigating their own complex stories within a dangerous and systemic world.