A simulation game built around one question:
Can we prove that our reality is not a simulation?
The First Second is a conceptual simulation game about time, identity, physics, memory and nested realities.
The game begins with the first second after the Big Bang. From that moment, time is not just a clock. Seconds are part of existence itself.
Every player enters a reality with a finite relationship to time.
You may begin on Earth as a physical being, but you are not permanently defined by a human body. Depending on your remaining seconds, your simulation and its laws, you may exist as matter, energy, light, information, consciousness or forms that do not map cleanly to known physics.
Your long-term goal is not simply to survive.
It is to reach — or create — the first simulation capable of becoming a reality of its own.
And then the central question becomes harder:
If simulated worlds can themselves create simulations, how do you know which layer is the original one?
The First Second is more than the opening moment of the universe.
It is also a special entity within the game world: an entity with access to memory across different times and simulations, able to move between layers that ordinary players experience only locally.
A simulation may have its own beginning.
A beginning may have its own First Second.
And the player may eventually discover that the structure of reality is not a line, but a tree.
Reality ?
└── First Second
└── World
└── Simulation A
└── Simulation B
└── Simulation C
Seconds are not intended to behave like a normal score or health bar.
They may affect:
- stability of physical existence
- access to other states of being
- probability of anomalies
- perception of other simulations
- transitions between realities
- what the player can remember
- what the player can become
A central design tension is that more time may mean more stability, while less time may bring the player closer to the boundaries between realities.
Reaching zero seconds does not necessarily mean game over.
See SECONDS_SYSTEM.md for the canonical v0.2 mechanics baseline.
The intended final experience is a high-end cinematic 3D game with strong visual fidelity.
The current browser prototype is intentionally simple and exists only to validate mechanics before expensive 3D production. It is not the intended final art style, rendering quality, platform, or engine commitment.
See VISION.md for the long-term 3D and presentation direction.
A dependency-free browser experiment now exists in prototype/.
Prototype v0.3 tests:
- master time versus player seconds;
- the stability gradient;
- anomaly exposure as seconds fall;
- physical → metaphase → light/information presentation states;
- visibility of a possible simulation boundary;
0 secondswithout forcing automatic death or teleportation.
The numerical thresholds are experimental only and are not canonical game balance. See prototype/README.md.
The v0.3 browser experiment now uses the same extracted prototype/mechanics.js module in both the browser and automated tests.
The quality GitHub Actions workflow checks:
- JavaScript syntax for the mechanics and browser application;
- exact Seconds-band boundaries around
150,75,30and0seconds; - bounded and monotonic stability behavior;
- the deliberately unresolved zero-seconds outcome;
- browser script load order;
- dependency-free browser smoke behavior for initialization, controls, pause/resume, zero state and reset.
The quality gate runs on pull requests and on pushes to main. A green badge means the current main revision passed those automated checks; it is not a claim that the long-term game, balance or 3D experience is complete.
This repository is the public beginning of the experiment.
The project will explore whether a game can turn the simulation argument into something the player can experience, test, challenge and reason about, instead of only reading about it.
It is not presented as a scientific proof that reality is — or is not — a simulation. The game starts from the question and builds a playable system around the attempt to answer it.
v0.3 — first playable mechanics experiment implemented; play-test pending.
The project does not advance to the identity/memory stage until this experiment is actually run and its results are reviewed. The browser prototype is a mechanics test only; the long-term target remains a high-fidelity 3D game. See ROADMAP.md.
CONCEPT.md— canonical conceptSECONDS_SYSTEM.md— canonical seconds mechanics baselineVISION.md— high-end 3D visual and experience directionROADMAP.md— staged public development roadmapPROVENANCE.md— public origin and development provenanceCOPYRIGHT.md— copyright and rights noticeTRADEMARK.md— current project-name / trade-mark statusCONTRIBUTING.md— contribution policy
Copyright © 2026 Miha Tavčar. All rights reserved.
This repository is public for visibility and development history, but no open-source or open-content license is granted unless explicitly stated.
THE FIRST SECOND
What if the closer you get to the end of time, the closer you get to the truth?