Conway Game of Life Demo

The Conway Game of Life demo allows users to interact with a zero-player game by creating an initial configuration. This cellular automaton, devised by British mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970, is a fascinating example of how complex patterns can emerge from simple rules.

In the Game of Life, cells are arranged on an infinite two-dimensional rectangular grid. Each cell has eight neighbors, which are cells that touch it. The status of each cell changes with each turn (or generation) depending on the statuses of its eight neighbors. This simple rule leads to the emergence of complex patterns and behaviors.

The demo starts by creating a custom structure for the game board, using a combination of algorithms and game development concepts. The simulation is designed to run at high speeds, with a minimum grid size of 25x25. For larger grids, the simulation may start to lag slightly, but it remains usable even up to 100x100.

The user interface is built using SwiftUI, which provides an adaptive and relatively-pretty display. The demo includes options for drawing a visual grid and for enabling dark mode. These features can be improved further by factoring them out into separate views that can be drawn on top of the main view.

Overall, this Conway Game of Life demo is a fun project that allowed me to practice working with custom structures and algorithms in a game development context. While there are certainly ways to improve it, I'm happy with how it turned out and look forward to applying these lessons to future projects.

Conway game of life demo