LifeInteractive

A Twist on Conway's Game of Life:

A simple "tank" game serves as a means of interacting with the evolution of Conway's cellular automaton.
Watch a demo video here, or play the game by loading the .jar here.

Gameplay:

A grid of cells evolves "naturally" from an initial state in accordance with the rules of Conway's Game. The user navigates a tank-shaped avatar with directional keys, and fires projectiles in the facing direction. With each tick, the tank moves and projectiles travel in their initial direction of travel, up to a maximum distance.

There are projectiles of four sorts:

• Bullets are fired with the 'x' key. If a bullet collides with a cell, the cell dies of unnatural causes.

• Seeds are fired with the 'z' key. If a seed collides with a cell, artificial life is generated immediately adjacent to the point of collision.

• Death rays are fired with the 's' key. A death ray is like a bullet, in that it causes a life-form to evolve as if the cell it is passing through were dead, without actually killing the cell.

• Life rays are fired with the 'a' key. They are to seeds as deaths ray are to a bullets; in both cases, the effects are statistical.
  

The game is what you make of it. It can be paused and then saved (or quit) at any time with the 'space' key, and it is over if either of these conditions obtain:

• the tank collides with a cell
• there are no live cells remaining
  

or if (by default) 1000 generations of cells have lived and died.

Scoring is based on a "harvest" model. For each cell killed by a bullet, the player receives a point, whereas for each seed implanted, the player loses a point (if they have any). So, one accrues more points by cultivating the life-form than by shooting indiscriminately.

Intention:

The game itself ought to be fun, of course, but the program was/is a "sandbox". As a result there are a number of boolean "toggles" in the code; e.g. toggling 'devMode' in the NavPanel class will add a 'surprise' button to the menus, which runs (one's choice of) additional code.

TODO:

• Add GUI support for loading famous initial boards from data/resources/seedLib.json

Structure: