Fellow game programmers!

Game of Life by Conway is an ancient computing concept. For over half a century clever minds have played around with the possibilities of the cellular automata 'Life'.
They have discovered tons of amazing patterns and developments. I hear the the Conway Life in theory can even emulate a computer. For example running Doom. Though I don't know if anyone has really pulled off that trick.

In fact I am not aware of the concept being used for gaming at all.

I suspect that though fascinating the Game of Life not very well suited for gameplay. But perhaps something can be done..

Below is a link to my unoptimized and unpolished but playable alpha version of Game of Life as a Game?

There are a few game modes available.

In sandbox mode you can do whatever you like as long as you like.

In the Immigration mode there are the two teams, red and blue. Winner is the team that has the largest numbers of squares when status quo is reached.

As the supreme ruler of the GoLaaG universe you can favor whatever team you like and interfere at will. Just pause the game and click where you want to extinguish or recreate.

The Target mode is a bit like curling. The invading blues win if they occupy the target square. Your job is to stop the invading blue. Preferably with minimum interference.

Butterfly effect is just a special case of immigration.
If running undisturbed the campaign ends after 359 iteration with blue victory.

Your job is to make just one little change and produce a red victory. I'm afraid I haven't tried that myself but I assume it can be done.

Then you have some further options to play around. You can choose between three different sizes of your universe. You can also save and load game postions as .bmp image files. Highly inefficent but it gets the job done. I'm afraid the .BMPs won't scale well in high DPI mode though.

Feedback is highly welcome. I'd be happy to see some discussion about the Game of Life but I can't promise I'll make efforts to implement new ideas.

The program has very modest system requirments and runs well in Virtual Machines.
Compliled with Lazarus on 64 bit Debian Linux for Intel/AMD.

Good Luck and enjoy the GoLaaG!

https://www.jonax.se/linux/golaag.php