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(http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/9936/lifedotbigrc5.png)(mockup)

I wanted a project that was awesome, yet implementable given my skill level. So when I was brainstorming for ideas, I decided to make squares a theme, since squares are always easy to deal with. Thinking about squares brought me to two things: platformer levels and Conway's Game of Life. It occurred to me that the cells from Life would probably make good moving platforms. And so my new project was born!


I'm making this topic because I finally have a rudimentary prototype. Arrow keys to move, down to jump to the cursor position. There's no goal, just jump around and pipe up if you notice something cool and emergent.

Organet.exe (http://superdotman.googlepages.com/Organet.exe)
Organet.app (http://willhostforfood.com/users/S/Super-Dot/Organet.app.zip)

It took a lot longer than I expected because I needed to use a big ugly hack that didn't work well and demotivated me for a month. But now I can start working on it motivatedly again! :gentleman:

mac download pleeeeze

been thinking of using cellular automata to generate levels for a while.


tooo coool!

Heh this is a great idea and made me smile for some reason. Somehow controlling the flow of time or even the cells themselves in order to move from point A to point B could be a quick and (fairly) simple way to make it into more than a prototype. Perhaps let the protagonist add or remove single cells as he jumps around.

It always bugged me that the game of life wasn't actually a game  ;D

You need to make someway of not getting stuck in squares.
I have 3 suggestions for what should happen to him when a square spawns on him:
1) He dies
2) He gets pushed out of the way
3) He blocks the spawning of the square

Obviously the character should act as a square, that is, he contributes to the crowding and fertilisation of the cluster he's at (that is, for the other squares he IS a square). Unless having taken a red pill when he only contributes to crowding, or a green pill when he only generates, not crowds. The black pill is dangerous, because then he doesn't interact and squares can grow on him, which is lethal.

One thing that occurs to me is having squares grow out of other squares.  That is, instead of making generations transition immediately, plan the next generation, then migrate cells from one place to another .  If a cell dies, it either gets absorbed into the nearby cells if any persist, or shrinks into nothingness.  If a cell is spawned, have the nearby blocks push their edges in that direction, i.e.


It's still possible to die, i.e. if you have 4 cells on all side, you have nowhere to go.

I can't guarantee that it'll work properly, as Game Maker Mac is still in beta, but I'll put one together as soon as I boot into OS X.

I considered this kind of thing, but ultimately you're probably not going to be able to control the cells, as they're way too unpredictable for me to maintain a difficulty curve. Controlling the speed of the cells is something I've been considering; pressing the "next generation" button repeatedly, shaping the terrain as you're going, has a lot of potential. Though I'm not sure that I like the thematic implications--the whole appeal of Life is that it's unpredictable, and such a button would make it more predictable.


This is pretty much the main obstacle to this game becoming fun, and I've given it a LOT of thought. The main problem is that Life is unpredictable, and it's hard to tell if you're standing in a bad place, especially if you're jumping around.

I'm thinking that cells should fade in or slide in from the background or something, so that you can tell that you're standing in a cell's birthplace. I'll need to prototype that to see if that's enough of a warning to justify killing the player.

My most recent idea, and the one I like the most, is that the part of the cell that would touch you doesn't actually spawn at first. So the cell would be shaped like a U or an L or an O. As you move out of the cell, the remaining part fills in. Since most of the time, you're not in the very center of a cell as it spawns, this might fix most of the problem.

If the cells spawn and die exclusively when you press the "next generation" button, I can just prevent the next generation from occurring if there's a conflict.

I considered this, but I want to try to keep the Game of Life part relatively pure. It's awesome as it is, and I'm worried that modifying the representation like this or elsewise would make it less awesome. Life is largely neat because it looks alive even though it's sitting on a grid, so I want to keep the grid.

On my mac atm, but I'll test it when I get home to my pc. I like the sound of it.

Mac prototype ho!
Organet.app (http://willhostforfood.com/users/S/Super-Dot/Organet.app.zip)
Game Maker Mac beta means that there are key sticking issues, it's antialiased, and it's 20 MB. At least it works? :shrug2:

So the current plan is to have a Braid-style level system, where each level explores the gameplay possibilities of a new concept (though I doubt that there'll be puzzles). Concepts will be things like oscillators, still lifes, spaceships, methuselahs, and anything else I (or you!) can think of. There'll also be levels that show off cool things (emergent or created) like Gosper's Glider Gun.

running it on my laptop with windows 7 here. It behaves a bit wierd.
It's a really tiny window, but if I press space, the window pops up to a size of 1/4 of the screen resolution.

Maybe something windows 7 specific.

it felt pretty weird (except for getting stuck; I imagine it's probably best to have the player be pushed up when blocks appear over him?), but it was definitely something I can imagine myself playing.

Hey, it's great to see this up and running!

Yeah, I'm with you in thinking that Life isn't 'readable' enough for interacting in the grid to be a very rewarding experience in a platformer. There's also the fact that most modifications to a pattern just break it, rather than creating interesting variants like they would in Go or Chess. I think you're right to go the direction you are with this.

I'm looking forward to using trapped gliders as elevators. Cheers! :)

Just use a step event to check if your stuck in a block, and if so move up till your not in the block. this is muck easier than most stuck in a block checks since your only moving up, so you don't need to check the nearest direction out.

That's because I built it on top of Platformajigger (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=4306.0), which uses weird drawing code. This is just the prototype; I'll be rewriting it (not necessarily (http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~mfp27/platformengine/) from scratch) when I've done enough design to know what the programming will look like.


That's a good idea! I am considering that so hard.

Oh, and thanks for the nice words, dudes! I am even motivateder now. ;D

This. Are the patterns procedural, or is it just a bunch of patterns that are constantly switching?

The patterns are generated from the "game of life" algorithm I think..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life)

here is an interactive web-version to play with.
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/ (http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/)

I know what the game of life is (it's pretty cool), but he may have simply replicated it by having a bunch of randomly switching backgrounds.

The beginning is populated with randomly positioned pixels, half black and half white. Then the whole thing operates based on the Game of Life's rules.

That makes it a lot cooler than I thought! :gentleman:

This freaking rules. :) I'm glad you made this, because it really needed to be made.

What if the cells only advance when you're in the air from a jump (and only once)?  That way you could have some platforms that you could only make after the next generation while in midair.  Also, some platforms you'd miss if you tried because that cell disappears in midair.  For instance, you could never jump on a single square because it'll be gone, and you can jump on a vertical 3-square because it'll turn to a horizontal 3-square.

I suppose this direction is more at the core of what platforming games are - maybe you're not wanting that direction.  Could be fun to try out tho. :eyebrows:

Haha, that could be really neat! Again, though, it's not as thematically compatible.
But I plan on releasing the source, and I'll try to make that easy to implement! :coffee:

I like the fading in idea you mentioned, and I suppose you would have them fade out as well with at least 2 degrees of solidity (such as solid enough or not solid enough to be a platform) besides solid. Slowing down the Life code might also be helpful to the player.

With inspiration from godatplay, I imagined what the game might be like if the passage of time was connected to the movements of the character. In a way, the character would be a personification of time, since time would only progress during walking or jumping. If he stands still, time stands still. I guess that could give the game a roguelike quality, but I imagine time as being fluid while moving rather than having a turn-based feel.

I'm working on prototyping the fading thing right now. I'm trying to make it so that when a block fades in completely, it becomes solid, and when it fades out completely, it ceases to have any effect. This might introduce some ambiguity--is this partly-faded block solid?--and the prototype will tell us how much of an issue that is. I might have fading-in cells tinged green and fading-out cells tinged red or something.

The plan for now is to have different speeds for different levels. A level where you have to try to make sense of chaos, like the prototype demands, works better with a slow rate, but any time you'd want to ride a glider, you'd want it to move faster than the ones in the prototype go.

I like the fluid time thing, and it would probably go really well with the fading part! I have no idea what the code would look like for the fading, but that's okay. The gimmick is used to really good effect in Idealism (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/gamedesignsketchbook/3560-Game-Design-Sketchbook-Idealism) and Braid's fourth world (which you can try out in the free demo (http://www.playgreenhouse.com/game/NNONE-000001-01/)). I probably won't go for that particular gimmick, again, but I'll try to make the code lenient.

Thanks for the update.  I look forward to seeing what you come up with. :coffee:

Progress on the code is slow, so I've been doing design work.

Here are two houses! Like any good houses, they stay perfectly still. Made in Golly (http://golly.sourceforge.net/).

(http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/3752/houses.png)

I'm still working on them. The ground consists of a series of blocks on tables (http://www.ericweisstein.com/encyclopedias/life/BlockonTable.html).

Very cool. :)  Hope to see it in action soon.

Yo, what's the status?
Would love to test out a prototype with fading blocks. :)

The status is I'm learning C and a bunch of other things this coming semester, and I'm going to recode the whole Game of Life computation part in C when I'm smart enough. (I'm keeping the rest in GML so that iteration and prototyping and stuff is easier. I might recode a bunch of that too so that it's easier to work with; right now it's a vine-jungle.)

It's still going to get made, but it's on a pretty big hiatus right now. :shrug2:

Awww, that's too bad.  Just don't forget about it; I know of plenty of projects that have died because people want to rewrite them.

Just a random thought; I just played the demo, and it might be easier to avoid getting stuck if the blocks grew, rather than instantly flashing on/off or fading or whatever. Y'know, figure out the next grid state ahead of time, than have dead blocks shrink back into the nearest wall, and new blocks grow out of existing walls. Just an idea.