Cellular Automota by The Floating Brain

[raw]
made by The Floating Brain for Ludum Dare 56 (JAM)

Cellular Automota in 3D (or 2.5D your choice)! Conway's Game of Life, Langton's Ant and whatever we manage by the end of the jam! Maybe you can think of Automota and Ants as Tiny Creatures right! (Recommend native binary linked below for performance)

Conway Fire: conway<em>fire</em>1.gif Conway Crystalize: conway<em>crystalize</em>0.gif Combined Conway: conway<em>combind</em>0.gif Screenshot 2024-10-07 140948.png Screenshot 2024-10-07 141122.png Screenshot 2024-10-07 140814.png

Ratings

Overall 1028th 2.797⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Fun 1046th 2.422⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Innovation 501th 3.355⭐ 33🧑‍⚖️
Theme 876th 3.156⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Graphics 950th 2.422⭐ 34🧑‍⚖️
Audio 671th 1.8⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Humor 933th 1.84⭐ 27🧑‍⚖️
Mood 1037th 2.414⭐ 31🧑‍⚖️
Given 27🗳️ 39🗨️

Feedback

Willby
08. Oct 2024 · 01:23 UTC
This is pretty cool to play with. I have always enjoyed playing with conways game of life. Moving around the cell placer is a little finicky but you get the hang of it.
Roitchie
08. Oct 2024 · 20:23 UTC
The computer science nerd in me is tingling at this entry. It seems so obvious in hindsight but I never would've thought of cellular automata as tiny creatures. This is an awesome really innovative take on the theme though. It was fun to play around with and experiment with and there's a lot of customisation options.
Pachino55
09. Oct 2024 · 05:13 UTC
Woah, so cool
Prolich
09. Oct 2024 · 13:51 UTC
I've always been fascinated by the game of life and your interpretation of it is amazing. So clever to tie it with the theme too!
sheaksadi
09. Oct 2024 · 13:54 UTC
never knew i needed this in my life
martonel
09. Oct 2024 · 13:58 UTC
Interesting idea, good job!
Calcopod
09. Oct 2024 · 14:14 UTC
Always enjoyed cellular automata, especially when it comes to level generation.
However cool it is, I don't think it works standalone as a game, but it was funky to play around with.
The control were a bit too finnicky, but they worked well enough I guess.

Any form of SFX or music would have gone a long way, but I understand that maybe wasn't the goal of this project.

Innovative idea to try and use CA for the theme, however, so bonus points for that!
LDJam user 388078
09. Oct 2024 · 14:28 UTC
Very cool. UI could use a bit of polish, but that's the nature of a jam with such a short timeframe
ParzivalVulpine
09. Oct 2024 · 19:20 UTC
This caught my attention with one of your posts the other day, cellular automata as an interpretation of tiny creatures is clever haha. good stuff
ratly
14. Oct 2024 · 20:11 UTC
Another fellow cellular automata maker! (My team made a simple 2D version into a little puzzle game). This was fun to play around with in big 3D space, and I wonder what kind of game you could turn this into? E.g. it would be fun to try to reach a target pattern with a limited number of cells. We thought about doing that in 2D, but it would be even more fun in 2.5D.
🎤 The Floating Brain
14. Oct 2024 · 23:22 UTC
@Calcopod @ratly Yes originally we wanted the CA to create environments that tiny creatures would move into which would then be subjected to environmental challenges.

@Calcopod I really like your sound idea!
@ratly That is also a really neat way to turn this into a gameplay loop!
🎤 The Floating Brain
14. Oct 2024 · 23:23 UTC
Thanks for checking out our submission officially past the required 20 votes!!
🎤 The Floating Brain
14. Oct 2024 · 23:29 UTC
@sheaksadi lol glad you enjoyed it!
🎤 The Floating Brain
14. Oct 2024 · 23:41 UTC
@roitchie Good to see another fellow nerd here! I really think CA have a lot of potential! Its silly but I really appreciate that you liked to customization options, in a 48 hour jam its often hard to get that level of polish but in 72 hours it really gave me the time to package this up (and write my own little "application framework") as a more polished application, I worked hard on those options and made sure they were somewhat compile time optimized (grid size is a template parameter, some of the functions are `if constexpr`'d), so thank you for noticing :smile: !
Sean Osman
24. Oct 2024 · 22:54 UTC
This is a super cool way to use the tiny creatures theme, would never have thought of something like this! love it!