Game: Arcade of Life

[acharneski]

Hello Everybody!

I'm a longtime lover of life, and I've always wanted to build a game-ified version of it... I've finally found a good format! The idea is basically missile defender inspired use of gliders and defending territory. Both the enemy and friendly tiles evolve according to the game of life, leading to gliders, spaceships, and guns being strategic assets. Chaotic destruction mechanics come for free with entertaining effect!

It also includes a level designer and an editable pattern zoo with a complete lifewiki import, even the OCA patterns.

It's Open Source and Ad-Free. I hope you enjoy!

https://aol.cognotik.com/
https://github.com/SimiaCryptus/Arcade_of_Life

[NNlk05]

Did you use LLM tools in the making of the website?
Very nice game overall tho !

[acharneski]

Did you use LLM tools in the making of the website?
Very nice game overall tho !

I'm glad you enjoyed it, even though you suspected the evil hand of automated tooling...

Would you believe that I handcrafted every line of code, handwriting on home-made parchment by firelight, and then manually preparing punchcards made of tree bark using only stone tools?

[NNlk05]

Would you believe that I handcrafted every line of code, handwriting on home-made parchment by firelight, and then manually preparing punchcards made of tree bark using only stone tools?

Yep. Not using LLM tools in 2026 means you are falling behind.
One suggestion is that you simplify the UI a bit. There are a bit too many buttons for my taste.

[acharneski]

One suggestion is that you simplify the UI a bit. There are a bit too many buttons for my taste.

I totally agree. This kinda' grew beyond its original scope as we played and iterated, particularly with the level designer. I'll probably focus on that next. Thanks for the constructive feedback! LMK if you have any other thoughts or ideas!

[LWSSONHWSSONLWSS]

Make the ink bar lower

[acharneski]

Make the ink bar lower

Thanks for the feedback! Can you please elaborate? Do you mean the positioning is awkward, or you find you have too much ink to make the game challenging?

If the latter is the case, you can always tune the settings or experiment with level design, and even share your preferred settings via json export.

With the game mechanics having just been implemented, I'm still working on tuning game balance and difficulty progression.

[tommyaweosme]

i downloaded the repository and attempted to use it on my device. i got stuck on the epilepsy warning screen as the button wasn't working, so i manually edited the epilepsy screen out, and the buttons still didn't work.

[acharneski]

i downloaded the repository and attempted to use it on my device. i got stuck on the epilepsy warning screen as the button wasn't working, so i manually edited the epilepsy screen out, and the buttons still didn't work.

Did you try to simply open the index.html file?

Try using the website.

If you want to run it locally, make sure you use an http server, such as npm run serve, as the readme indicates.

[I6_I6]

Really nice game!
How do the cells evolve when different states interact? I've noticed it works differently than regular Life if I fire a spaceship and it collides with another spaceship. How did you handle the edges of the playing field?

[acharneski]

Really nice game!
How do the cells evolve when different states interact? I've noticed it works differently than regular Life if I fire a spaceship and it collides with another spaceship. How did you handle the edges of the playing field?

I'm really glad you life it!

The enemy and friendly cells annihilate each other if they are adjacent, kinda like anti-matter and normal manner. this is why you won't see any mixed life patterns. there is an extra die-out rule for cells that don't change for N turns, and this is tuned for each territory type so that certain zones have programmable static/dynamic affinity. This also means that various patterns in the zoo have a hard metric for age-tolerance, and I'm planning to add that soon.

Grid wrapping is pretty standard torical wrap, but the space invaders game introduces an offset wrap I thought was pretty neat.

Glad you enjoy! Feedback welcome! Please share with your friends!

[acharneski]

https://aol.cognotik.com/
https://github.com/SimiaCryptus/Arcade_of_Life

If anyone would prefer a 6min demo video to check this out, I just published one on youtube:

https://youtu.be/nVhosQ0nGgo