Ludum Dare #46compo

Conway's Garden of Life

by davidsheadgames

Overall★★★★★★★★★★3.14

Fun★★★★★★★★★★2.86

Innovation★★★★★★★★★★3.16

Theme★★★★★★★★★★3.79

Graphics★★★★★★★★★★3.32

Humor★★★★★★★★★★2.13

Mood★★★★★★★★★★2.67

It's what it says on the tin, Conway's Game Of Life done in "garden" form.

Done in a rush for Ludum Dare 46: Keep It Alive

No sounds, sorry. :(

Controls:

- Left mouse - plant and remove crops.

- R - Reset the stage.

Goals:

- There is no way to win (though there's definitely a way to lose). Collect as many berries as you can while trying to avoid "wasting" crops.

- Treat it as a toy more than a game. There's not a huge consequence to losing, really.

- It is extremely easy to get a berry farm going that just produces live crops forever. Don't worry about it.

- Crops are only 'wasted' if you pick them up when they are 'dead'. Crops can be revived if there are enough live plants near them.

- Berries will only form if Conway's plant can sustain in place for 3 days or longer.

Tips:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life#Examples_of_patterns
this wikipedia might come in handy ;)

Known bugs:

- Dead plants will reset to first stage when coming back alive.

Additional resources used:

- Super Mario 2 font https://www.dafont.com/super-mario-bros-2.font

Notes: This was pretty rushed due to having roughly only 20 hours of the 48 hour jam to make a thing... it shows.

Genres: educational

Tools: Unity

Comments18

Norris Eldridge20 Apr 2020, 01:37

At first I did not get this game but I'm not strangely addicted. This does feel like it could be a sort of idle game with the goal really just being to make the numbers go up. Very nice work on this game. I'm really curious what's going on underneath the hood but I definitely want to poke around in game some more first.

thedashdude20 Apr 2020, 02:26

Pretty fun. I think the field could be a bit bigger, as I wanted to get some of the cooler Conway's structures in. I liked the added rules on top of Conway's, so if you feel like revisiting the project I'd suggest making the fruit rules have a little more depth.

sztrovacsek20 Apr 2020, 18:45

Oh, that's a pretty clever one, I really like it! I'd say definitely work on it more once the jam ended. Good job!

axeltherabbit20 Apr 2020, 19:38

A nice classic little game

blobo22 Apr 2020, 16:24

I like the idea! Cool game.

Tesseract23 Apr 2020, 00:54

Hi, I also made a game based on Conway's game of life, but took it in a different direction. I really like the way your game makes me think about GoL in ways I hadn't before - for example, are there any setups where you can live while harvesting everything which lives 3 turns? If you get to a rotating pattern of 3 cells of a 2x2, that works, but can you reach that from a single initial setup while harvesting everything as soon as possible?

jelch23 Apr 2020, 18:38

Nice twist on a classic!

Kent Reese23 Apr 2020, 18:51

Nice way of making a tribute to Conway. I really liked this entry.

niklasriewald23 Apr 2020, 19:00

The combination of Conways game of life with a farming simulator is very interesting, I think this idea has potential if fledged our more fully. Graphics are also very pretty.

davidsheadgamesauthor26 Apr 2020, 22:29

@thedashdude I was worried that limiting the play field would significantly reduce a lot of that, yeah. Initially I was just having a hard time getting it going because I didn't get a proper 'select' graphic working until late game, so I was struggling to use the tinier tiles. I'll try making the play field more adjustable, to open up the play more.

@tesseract Thanks! Yeah, I was playing around a bit with this. Once I fix a particular bug, I think it'll open up a lot more min/max strategies. Depends on where I get time.

@kent-reese Thanks. I didn't actually realize Conway passed away just this month until after the jam; I'm planning to work a tribute page to him into the game itself, as it only seems right.

Nils Liquid Fire27 Apr 2020, 11:42

Wow, what a great idea and what a nice way to honor Conway.
And in addition to that this game is really a lot of fun.

colozz27 Apr 2020, 11:53

Your game is really nice and the game mechanic added to Conway's game of life is fun.

RIP John Conway, he was a mathematician I admired a lot.

marcusnystrand27 Apr 2020, 12:00

I kept it going for a while but then lost it all when investing every seed I had :)

Fun and relaxing game, nice aesthetics too. Well done!

jaywoody27 Apr 2020, 17:04

Cool toy to experiment with and a nice twist on the original version!
A very nice entry even if you said it was made in a rush.

WilloXs27 Apr 2020, 19:34

This is a really cool idea - it's not that gamey but its nice to play around with

polegar30 Apr 2020, 16:23

Amazing idea and great tribute to John Conway. It would have been nice if you had time to add more features to make it more entertaining for the player like music and sounds/graphics effects when you reach a certain number of berries. Anyway great job and I like idle game !

knason11 May 2020, 18:27

omg, someone said relaxing but I was not relaxed at all. :-) but it was quite fun! I made it for 108 days. Good job on the entry!

JoaoG11 May 2020, 22:07

It's a cool short game! Some sound could have made a difference but it works, I played until I collected 200 berries. The art is great and I liked the idea. Good job! Thank you for not giving up to participate, even if you haven't had much time.

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