Nice! Haven't actually downloaded the game yet, but I watched the trailer. I really like the animation effect of pegs or checkerboard squares moving up and down in the third dimension (and changing color) to signal ON vs. OFF.
I'd love to see more extended videos of Life patterns along these lines, with 3D zooming and panning -- maybe with waypoint scripts and labels along the lines of
LifeViewer scripting, while I'm wishing for things. Golly is a great tool for running Life patterns quickly, but for presentation purposes and especially for making videos, it's a huge improvement to be able to have smooth camera motions and views from different angles in three dimensions.
The Life Lexicon is a good starting point for a pattern collection, but it's very limited; it's a "dictionary" format meant more for looking up the meanings of terms than for showcasing the best known Life patterns. Some kind of carefully chosen subset of the
LifeWiki all.zip pattern collection might be an idea worth investigating.
There are also much older, "classic" collections of small to medium-sized patterns, like
Alan Hensel's "lifebc" and "lifep". But most of those were collected a couple of decades ago. Golly's current pattern collection skews toward larger patterns that probably aren't so workable for a project like this.
We haven't really had a "best of" collection just for recent small-to-medium-sized discoveries for quite a few years now, with a few exceptions in particular areas, like
hotdogPi's updated oscillator collection -- which
would be a nice collection to explore with this 3D/Blender approach!
