🌿 Tree of Life
Kin — a one-minute daily game about how every living thing is related — and
the Atlas, an interactive visualization of 3.8 billion years of evolution
that it opens onto.
Live at: treeoflife.wiki (the game) ·
/atlas.html (the tree)
Features
Kin (the front page)
- Ten questions a day: who is the closer cousin? — the answer is derived from
a curated tree of life with every branching point dated from an open source
- Streaks that forgive (a missed day is covered by a freeze), an endless Arcade,
friends' links and challenges, stats that stay on the device
- Installable, plays offline, no account, no cookies
The Atlas
- Zoomable, pannable evolutionary tree spanning all domains of life
- 300+ named groups and species from LUCA to Homo sapiens, with photographs
credited to their authors
- Deep Hominin section with species comparison
- Interactive timeline with mass extinction markers
- Dark and light themes
Languages
| Language | Status |
|---|
| English | Complete |
| Hebrew | Complete (RTL) |
| Russian | Complete |
Development
This project uses vanilla HTML/CSS/JS and deploys on Vercel. No build step required.
Local development
git clone https://github.com/behemot46/tree-of-life.git
cd tree-of-life
node serve.js
# The game: http://localhost:5555 The Atlas: http://localhost:5555/atlas.html
Deployment
Vercel deploys every push and pull request; main is production. CI runs the
unit tests, the game's browser checks and the Atlas's smoke suite, and runs both
browser suites again against production after each deploy.
Data Sources
- Evolutionary dates: current scientific consensus (2020+ literature)
- Images: Wikimedia Commons (CC0 / CC BY-SA)
- Hebrew terminology: Hebrew University biological nomenclature standards
Changelog
See CHANGELOG.md
Documentation
- CLAUDE.md — how the project works: architecture, data shape,
styling, i18n, smoke tests, deployment
- ROADMAP.md — why it works that way: decision record, what
shipped, what is still open
