Video Game / Planet Life

Oh no! Derek is about to punch you!

Planet Life is a single-player Idle Game developed by Northplay, and published on the browsers back in September 2018, and fully completed and also published to mobile devices on March 2020.

In this game, you are a planet in space, seeking to make friends, collect resources, and find more life to add to your planet. In the process, one of your allies, known as Derek, will be able to be trained to go into dungeons, beat up Jerks, and find more resources hidden with you, and even more potential friends. As you find more friends, you'll find new worlds, more potential friends, and many new and unexpected surprises to be unraveled in your pursuit of satiating your need for friends as a big planet.

The game is available to play on Newgrounds, CoolMath Games, or on its own site. It is also available on iOS and Android platforms, but the second and third chapters require payment to access, while the web versions have the full game for free.

Additionally, on December 1st, 2022, an enhanced Steam port titled Super Planet Life was released, which requires paying for but has some additional minor features added on, including its own Achievement System.

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Planet Life provides examples of:

• Already the Case: Empress Cocobar from Chapter 2 can talk about how her coco people came from a special potato-shaped coco asteroid that is sacred to them, and remarks that she hopes that no one does anything to it. But back in Chapter 1, the Planet had inserted a giant straw into a potato-shaped asteroid to mine Coco.
• Ambiguously Human: The Jerks, who are the closest thing to actual humans in the game, but they're all zany in one way or another, appear to consist only of males, and they can come out of cans of all things.
• Amicable Exes: Burger and WIFY are shown to be exes, but this trope is averted with WIFY kidnapping Burger, forcing the Planet to enter her villa to free him, only to find that she has forcefully turned Burger into a planet now named Burgulon.
• An Entrepreneur Is You: You can gain ghosts (a currency in this game) through a stock-market like feature known as the Intergalactic Ghost Exchange where you can buy ghosts with Stardust, and the conversion price always fluctuates from high to low rates in back. You are encouraged to buy low and sell high to gain ghosts (or Stardust) optimally.
• Animate Inanimate Object: Some of your friends include a living bottle named Bob the Bottle, a living chainsaw named Sven, and well as living food like Broccula, a broccoli being, and Count Candy, a sapient piece of candy.
• Asteroid Mining: You find a large brown asteroid which is actually a gigantic piece of Coco Pops, which you mine with a straw to gain Coco. Said asteroid may or may not be the asteroid that Empress Cocobar and her coco-people came from. Later on, you can do the same to a giant Coco Penguin you find in the second chapter.
  "Sorry penguin!"
• Betting Mini-Game: The Casino Camp in Beanie's Imagination contains 2 mini-games, "One-Eyed Derekulian Roulette" and "Wooden Poker", both of which consist of bets for Gold or Wood, with the former minigame having you drink from one of three cups, with a 1/3 chance of that cup having an eye in it, causing you to lose the bet. The other game is essentially betting on if your given card has a higher tree value than the other players.
• Character Tics: The game tends to note these for its non-planet characters when you choose to just talk with them, showing off tendencies they tend to have as they communicate with you.
  • Derek: Yelling loudly, heavily breathing, and wiping off the froth from his mouth.
  • Sweatson: Constantly sweating.
  • Juicosaurus: Constantly gargling and spewing juice when talking.
  • Coco Ghost: Passing through the wall just to make some point.
  • Sven: Impulsively cutting down trees.
  • Empress Cocobar: Staring at you skeptically.
  • Broccula: Dropping her important business papers.
  • Bret: Showing off his butt crack on accident.
• Brainy Baby: Chapter 3 features a baby engineer that hatched from an egg, already able to work on blueprints and work on the planet Burgulon's core.
• Checkpoint Starvation: Even in the 99-floor dungeons, there are no checkpoints at which you can resume a run at should you stop it. You will always have to start from Floor 1 each time you leave.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The equipment for Derek has 4 color-coded tiers, Scruffy (lowest tier with gray text), Decent (2nd lowest tier with blue text), Excellent (2nd highest tier with yellow text), and Crazy (highest tier with pink text).
• Coolest Club Ever: The first thing you manage to summon with the Celestial Summoner in Chapter 3 is a Space Bar, complete with a resemblance to a keyboard's Space Bar and with a floating V and B key above it. It has managed to continue an ancient party with no signs of stopping (though Burgulon wonders if some people ever get tired of it), though Coco can be invested into the Space Bar to get Gold back over time. Burgulon also eventually gets to establish a Jerk Club that houses tons of partying Jerks.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Should Derek fall in battle within a dungeon, he can be revived with some Stardust, though you'll have to start the dungeon all over again. In Chapter 3, should your core be drained of its Stardust by Derekulians, the enemy will leave and you can easily refill the core to begin another fight.
• Deck Building Game: Combat in Chapter 3 is replaced with setting up a team of Jerks each with their own abilities and stats for attacking the enemy Derekulian, baking muffins to prevent the enemy from eating your Stardust, or support abilities like increasing the number of jerks you can send out or increasing the number of available jerk actions. Defeating the enemy Derekulian earns you Space Rings which can be used to get more new Jerks.
• Delicious Distraction: In Chapter 3, your Jerks can bake muffins, which enemy Derekulians will prioritize eating over your Stardust. If they've eaten more muffins they would've eaten in Stardust, they'll be too full to take any Stardust from you.
• Determinator: The Jerks you send to act against a Derekulian all go down after one action as a result of the Derekulian bringing them through a Curb-Stomp Battle, but the Jerks of your Jerk Squad will all manage to get up once they've all been beaten up by the enemy, representing your Jerk deck being refreshed after they've all been discarded. Since Stardust is the equivalent to health in this case, you want to actively invoke this trope on the Derekulians.
• Detonation Moon: One of your opponents in Chapter 3, Bent, is a sentient and malicious moon with Glowing Eyes of Doom summoned by 3 moon lords in attempt to take your Stardust. Your Jerks can defeat the moon, leaving a large hole on Bent resulting from a big chunk getting beaten off of him.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: As you level up Derek's Bull Fart skill through training, you get an increased amount of uses for the skill, but the skill gains an increasing chance to fail and not do anything, explained as Derek failing to let out a fart. However, after the fail chance reaches 50%, subsequent investments into Bull Fart will increase the amount of available usages in a run without increasing the fail chance, though the upgrade cost does steepen greatly by that point.
• Doomy Dooms of Doom: One of the Derekulians you can deal with is known as DEREK OF DOOM, all caps included.
• Dungeon Bypass: Shortcut Doors enable Derek to go to the next level of a dungeon without fighting Jerks. The same applies to the Shortcut doors within Chapter 3's Ancient Planet, as well as the "Shh!" doors. Derek can also wear equipment that increases the chance of finding Shortcut Doors, increasing the frequency at which you can skip through parts of a Dungeon.
• Dungeon Master: A literal In-Universe example with a Dungeon Master you can create in the Workshop, represented by a floating head of a dungeon master complete with a beard and a wizard hat that creates 99-floor versions of the dungeons you've completed.
• Endless Game: Not really, the Endless Dungeons all only last for 99 floors. There isn't an actual endless dungeon, though the last dungeon, Derekulus X, can be replayed after completion.
• Escape Battle Technique: The Door Of Regret skill for Derek, which can be taught to Derek to let him exit a room that he didn't want to brawl in for as many times you trained the skill.
• "Everyone Comes Back" Fantasy Party Ending: After dealing with Jack, nearly all of the entire cast joins you to party, even minor characters like the Intergalactic Mailman.
• Eye Pop: Derek's eyes do this as depicted by the Door of Regret skill, appropriate for entering a room that he may not want to have entered. The Jerks in the third chapter all do this constantly, but some like the Jerk Coach and Jerk Manager do this to its usual cartoonish extreme.
• Eyes Always Shut: Beanie, who always has this while smiling. The one time she actually opens her eyes, they get burnt blue by the light of Jack's sunlight, thus there isn't any reason to open her eyes at that point in the first place. However, in Beanies' own imagination realm, Beanie's avatar continues to uphold this trope.
• Face of a Thug: Played for Laughs with one of your gained friends, John, a large scary looking blue horse that the Planet is consistently frightened by according to the narration, to the point of not trying to look at John when attempting to talk with him.
• Fartillery: Derek's Bull Fart skill enables him to unleash a huge, deadly fart that wipes out the entire room of its Jerks should it succeed.
• Fighting Your Friend: In the third chapter, the penultimate opponent you face before dealing with Jack himself is a Brainwashed and Crazy Derek, complete with Mind-Control Eyes. Once you defeat Derek with your Jerks, he ends up hanging out with his would-be nemesis race, the Jerks, since they're also on your side. Despite usually being enemies otherwise, they end up co-existing with some tension.
• Fun-Hating Villain: Playing music from your Space Radio ends up attracting angry Derekulians who don't like the music, which is used to bring down to your planet's surface to battle your Jerks.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: A friendly Jerk, Bret, mentions the one time a group of Jerks successfully defeated a Derekulian on their own, before the Derekulian was revived with Stardust, as you can do with Derek should he fall in battle. The revived Derekulian came back and beat up the Jerks as usual. Additionally, when sending Jerks to fight enemy Derekulians in combat, sending Jerks to do their action like playing a card is written as the played Jerk doing their one thing before the Derekulian instantly beats the Jerk up after said action, getting that Jerk "discarded" in the process. Once all of your Jerks have been beaten up, they all get back up as a representation of refreshing the deck.
• Genre Blending: The game can be described as an odd mix of a Role-Playing Game and an Idle Game, and eventually, elements of a Deckbuilding Game are put into the mix.
• Genius Loci: You play as a sentient planet, looking for lifeforms to add to yourself to make yourself more lively. You even have landmasses that make up a face, which is even expressive in the form of said landmasses moving. Don't think too hard on what that looks like on the Planet's surface. Your robot companion, Burger, becomes the mechanical planet Burgulon, although you don't get robots populating you, but a lot of Jerks and a baby engineer.
• Ghost Planet: The Ancient Planet was implied to be this, given that it's the one planet in the game doesn't interact with you, having "been dead for a long time". Due to this, some of the Derekulians have made their home here, extremely bored and going crazy should they encounter anything else roaming inside, due to a dead planet being unable to house any Jerks for them to beat up.
• Hollywood Healing: Played for Laughs with Derek's Full Heal skill, bringing his health straight to full, all just by "pulling himself together", using Heroic Willpower based on the skill's description. You as the Planet even lampshade the fact that healing doesn't really work that way.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Jack, who has much higher HP than any of the normal opponents in the chapter, with an astound 99,999 HP, and is capable of gulping up much more Stardust than your maximum stardust capacity can hold in 1 turn, and is for the most part, almost-impossible to defeat relative to previous enemies. However, you'll be given methods to create Coco-infused Stardust, which make it so when he "defeats" you and consumes your Stardust, the special Stardust causes Jack to explode. There are Jerk Squad setups that enable you to defeat Jack without said special method, and the game will reward you with a ton of resources if you do, on top of changing the dialogue to reflect on Jack's defeat as well.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Dungeons in sets of three, in order of increasing deepness will always be referred to as "shallow", "deep", and "abyssal" in terms of difficulty and length.
• Intimidating Revenue Service: Jack is a sun that intends to extort Stardust from nearby planets, you included, with a ridiculously absurd and impossible amount of Stardust as your initial debt.
• It's a Small World, After All: Because you as a Planet were created without life on your planet (doesn't explain the Jerk dungeons in you or how Juicosaurus' kind had already been created and went extinct on your surface by the time you find him), you're seeking friends to join you, and most generally hang out in one Friend House within you, and aside from some buildings, that's all on your planet.
• Jerkass: The aptly named Jerks are the main enemies within the dungeons you send Derek through. The third chapter initially subverts this before going all over the place by showing off actually friendly Jerks that help you fight off the new threats of the chapter, the Derekulians that will attempt to raid your Stardust. That said, while they're all on your side, constantly partying, and some are nice unlike what their collective's naming would suggest, the Jerks you put in your squad can respond to being kicked out of the squad immaturely, throwing other Jerks at the enemy Derekulian or even baking other Jerks into muffins (they somehow get better), or if they're a Mean Jerk, deal extra damage if the opponent has lost at least half of their health through rude remarks. They may all be literally called Jerks, but they're more crazy than mean overall.
• Karma Houdini: WIFY doesn't receive any comeuppance for kidnapping Burger and turning him into a planet (not that Burger minds too much), and she finds a broken robot in the ending who she approaches in a deceptively nice manner, implying that she'll only continue to be nothing but trouble.
• Monster Adventurer: Derek, who is an aggressive bull-man who you can send to enter the dungeons within you in order to get resources and beat up the Jerks living within you, said Jerks being more human in comparison.
• Message in a Bottle: Found in the abyssal Coco Dungeon, actually sent by a living bottle named Bob the Bottle within the Monster Dungeons, who also had a brother named Balthazar the Bottle, with implications that Balthazar sacrificed himself to become said message-holding bottle you find within the Coco Dungeons.
• Ms. Imagination: Beanie, who even manages to create a vast imagination realm that Burgulon can enter by touching her. Some characters in the real world also decide to enter and reside within her imagination as well. She also has created her own imaginary beings within her imagination (some of which are based on characters from previous chapters), and can even create Legendary Jerks through her imagination.
• Named After Their Planet: Derekulians, who come from Derekulus X. Another odd example is the people of the Broccoli Empire who seem to avert the trope, being coco people ruled by a living chocolate bar for an empress, but live on a giant piece of broccoli. It turns out that they did have a giant coco planet, but it was attacked by a horde of health inspectors for being "too unhealthy", the coco people given a planet-sized piece of broccoli as recompense.
• New Game Plus: After beating the game, Remouladin offers you the opportunity to restart the game, but being allowed to keep a piece of equipment for Derek and a Jerk from the old game, on top letting you use Worm Cubes to buy exclusive permanent upgrades to enhance your subsequent runs.
• Non-Linear Character: Remouladin is a time-controlling worm god that transports you through space, but then Chapter 3 causes you to find a worm named Mouladin, who is explained to have some connection with time, and when you give him enough lollipops, he evolves multiple times to eventually become Remouladin, which means that in Chapter 3, which takes place after Chapter 1 where Remouladin debuts, you've witnessed Remouladin's emergence into existence, meaning that you've encountered future Remouladin before past Mouladin.
• Numerical Hard: The Dungeons increase in difficulty by increasing the amount of levels you have to go through, and the overall amount of Jerks per level that Derek has to fight through. The same goes with the Derekulians in Chapter 3, which only get more HP and can eat up more stardust or muffins at a time.
• Oddball Doppelgänger: After going to the Broccoli Empire and advancing to Chapter 2, the "Talk to Burger" choice makes you talk to a knockoff of Burger with a weird green head named Burg3r instead, which the Planet doesn't want to do anything with.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: The Garden Boys in Chapter 3 are a trio of gnomes (Lil' Gnomey, Cat Paws Calvin, and Tip Toe Tyler) that are also a Caper Crew currently in hiding after their last Stardust heist went very wrong. They can be hired with Stardust to delve into the Ancient Planet to get resources from it.
• Planetville: The playable Planet and Burgulon are this, only having a small community of friends on them as inhabitants and a few locations on them to visit, and they visit other planets that only have a few notable locations to check out.
• Pop Quiz: WIFY makes you go through one before you can progress to Chapter 3. Not only are the questions rather odd, but the answers have to be bought from Space Ben, and not all of them are correct answers. Finding the correct answers here is a case of Trial-and-Error Gameplay, but if you're lucky (or use a walkthrough) you won't have to spend too many ghosts to buy the answers.
• Promoted to Playable: After Chapter 2, Burger, who was turned into a planet by WIFY, becomes the protagonist of the rest of the game as Burgulon.
• Proud Warrior Race: The Derekulians, of which the main Derek you bring into dungeons is one of, being angry bull-men who primarily know how to punch Jerks' faces in. One of their traditions is is sending out their young to go out and conquer dungeons on their own, and the one Derekulian that doesn't get into any fighting is the Ancient Derek deep within the Ancient Planet in the third chapter, and that's since he's too old to get into action.
• Rainbow Speak: Used notably and literally for the Legendary Jerks, using multicolored rainbow text for "LEGENDARY", and the aforementioned Jerks also have rainbow clothing (constantly changing color) to denote their rarity and power.
• Randomly Generated Loot: All of the equipment you get from Chests have randomized stats and abilities. Some items have one set benefit, but how strong that pre-determined benefit gives is also randomized.
• Real Joke Name: The Stupid Looking Planet has a real name of "Planetud", which the unseen developer in-universe considered it a stupid name, and changed things so he's referred as "Stupid Looking Planet", which is one of the reasons that he's quite the cranky planet.
• Redemption Promotion: A double subversion where the Jerks you recruit as Burgulon, unlike with the Planet, are loyal to you, but still overall enemies with the Derekulians, who are capable of doing more things than the enemy Jerks in the previous Jerks, like baking muffins or supporting other Jerks, but they can't have overwhelming numbers like the Jerks in the previous chapters, who could even number into the thousands to fight your Derek while your Jerks can only size up to 50 members at most. On the other hand, play your Jerks right and they can work together to defeat Derekulians (including your Derek, who is a One-Man Army himself forced to fight your Jerks) much stronger than them, and they always manage to get back up when they're all beaten up, unlike the enemy Jerks.
• Robot Buddy: Burger, a small robot that helps you learn the game, collects resources for you, and gets kidnapped by his ex, WIFY, in Chapter 2.
• Sentient Stars: Stanley, a dopey, drooling, but friendly star who gives you Stardust in the third chapter. After enough uses of the Celestial Summoner, however, Stanley is replaced by the much more menacing Jack, who even has his own Sinister Shades.
• Sequence Breaking: There's a hidden method for this for skipping to the other chapters right away. For skipping to Chapter 2, make Burger switch between collecting wood and gold until a new option with a broccoli icon appears. For skipping to Chapter 3 should you be in Chapter 2, visit Sweatson until he provides you an option to do so.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of Derek's potential headgear equipment is Crazy Dave's pot headwear.
  • Another one of Derek's headgear equipment is Yellow Jerk Hair, which resembles Super Saiyan hair.
  • One of the Jerks you may encounter in Chapter 3 is Jerkinson Crusoe, an obvious nod to Robinson Crusoe.
• Space Pirates: Slopnax, one of your opponents in Chapter 3, is of the second variety noted on the trope's page. Once you defeat him, he enters Beanie's imagination and becomes a passive ally.
• Stable Time Loop: It turns out that the explosion that created the original Planet that you started the game with was a result of the last chapter's Big Bad, Jack, exploding after his defeat after being sent through a wormhole by Remouladin. The wormhole had sent Jack back in time in order to maintain this loop, which is implied to be why Remouladin didn't use such wormhole powers on Jack earlier.
• Stat Grinding: The Gym in Derek's Dungeon School enables Derek to spend resources to permanently increase his maximum health, and his strength, which lets him take less damage from fighting Jerks overall. In Chapter 3, you can increase the overall amount of damage dealt or Muffins baked by your Jerks.
• Stealth-Based Mission: In the third chapter, you are able to send gnome thieves known as The Garden Boys into an ancient planet to loot its resources by going through doors, but as they go further into the dungeons of the Ancient Planet, there is an increasing chance of them running into a Derekulian and ending the run. While it isn't directly noted at all, "Shh!" doors will increase gnomes' sneakiness and lower the chance of being spotted in the process.
• Stock Ness Monster: The Loch Juice Monster within the Broccoli Empire, which can be fed Coco to eventually make it regurgitate out a bowl with a goldfish inside that you can click on to get Gold, and eventually its insides hold many Jerks within, making the monster itself a dungeon.
• Superboss: The last and strongest Derekulian summoned by the Derek Summoning Device is much, much stronger stat-wise than the Final Boss, Jack, who isn't supposed to be defeated by normal means either. With 1,000,000 HP and any attack being able to deplete all of your stardust many times over, If you manage to set up a proper Jerk Squad capable of defeating even that Derekulian, you'll be rewarded with not only a ton of resources but a Worm Cube as well.
• Tastes Like Friendship: Your goal is to find new friends to join your planet, especially at the beginning of the game, where you have to gather resources or clear out dungeons to unlock said friends, who can join your built "Friend House" and produce resources automatically for you.
• Talking Animal: Sweatson, Burger's pet dog, who can not only speak in English, but in Danish too.
• There's No Place Like Home: Derek sees to prove himself a worthy fighter and return to his home planet, Derekulus X, which you can eventually do after clearing all Endless Dungeons, and it turns out that it's packed with thousands of Jerks to fight through as the game's Brutal Bonus Level.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: A major example that takes place in the last chapter of the game. Where the first two chapters featured gameplay of you sending Derek to go dungeon crawling, looting the place and beating up many Jerks in the process, the third chapter ends up becoming a major reversal of this gameplay, playing as a different planet and setting up a squad of Jerks akin to a Deck Building Game, to beat up other members of Derek's species, the Derekulians, who are now an antagonistic force that intend to raid your planet's core of Stardust. There's also another side-game where you send gnomes to delve through an ancient planet to look for resources, while relying on luck to evade the notice of Derekulians within the planet. Eventually, you can switch back to the old gameplay of the previous planet, but the rest of the game's progression insists on you gaining resources through the new planet's methods, and fighting off Stardust-raiding opponents with your Jerks.
• Weird Moon: One of Chapter 3's opponents is a malevolent moon named Bent, sent by 3 "Moon Lords" to take your Stardust. Your Jerk Squad is able to fight off and defeat Bent, somehow.
• Whale Egg: At the start of Chapter 3, Beanie gives to Burgulon an egg that eventually hatches into a human baby engineer.
• Womb Level: The Monster Dungeons are essentially dungeons within a Loch Juice Monster, with hundreds and hundreds of jerks inside for Derek to deal with.
• World Shapes: The Broccoli Empire is essentially a kingdom ruled by the Coco Queen (a living chocolate bar) on a broccoli-shaped planet, assuming the planet itself isn't broccoli.
• Worm in an Apple: Remouladin, a worm god residing in a planet-sized apple, who also happens to be a master of wormhole transportation and Time Master abilities. Chapter 3 also has an Evil Doppelgänger of Remouladin named Mayonada, who resides in a giant lemon instead of an apple.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: A rare non-villainous example. The Workshop, your first building, can eventually be destroyed once you have exhausted all available creations it can be used to make. Doing so gives you a free ghost, implying that the Workshop was in some sense, alive before.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Running away from a fight by exiting the door he came from (in a graceful manner) is something that Derek is unable to do on his own, given that Derek is a Proud Warrior Race Guy. You have to teach him to flee through training Derek's Door of Regret skill, and the same goes with making him go look for health pools to drink from with the Thirsty skill.
• Zerg Rush: The Jerks' main way of being more threatening to Derek as he goes further into a dungeon, being more and more numerous each time. In the third chapter, where you use Jerks to fight enemy Derekulians, some types of Jerks rely on having high numbers of Jerks as well, with Jerk Throwers throwing unused Jerks for more damage, and their opposite, the Vengeful Jerks dealing more damage with more used and beat-up Jerks present.

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