LudumData

Life of Colonies by Overv

[raw]
made by Overv for LD26 (COMPO)
Given the theme "Minimalism", I decided to create a minimalistic strategy game where the rules of Conway's Game of Life determine the lifetime of units. The twist here is that YOU get to control your own colony of life forms and beat the other three.

If you feel like you have no idea what you're doing (which is understandable), have a look at these patterns:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life

Try to get a feel for how patterns act and you will be able to create patterns that "walk" to the enemies to finish them off and take over enemy units!

Windows http://dev.vertinode.nl/life_of_colonies.zip
Source (LOVE) http://dev.vertinode.nl/life_of_colonies.love
Original URL https://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-26/?action=preview&uid=12692

Ratings

Coolness 45% 1411
Overall 3.82 82
Audio 2.81 487
Fun 3.29 288
Graphics 3.32 363
Humor 2.00 714
Innovation 3.68 156
Mood 2.86 566
Theme 3.96 188

Feedback

Kinzata
29. Apr 2013 · 05:15 UTC
Awesome!
Holofire
29. Apr 2013 · 14:40 UTC
Very great game. Its fits the theme very well and looks amazing.
martijn
29. Apr 2013 · 14:42 UTC
Finnally my knowledge of conways game of life has a practical application.
Shigor
29. Apr 2013 · 14:42 UTC
Life_of_colonies.exe is not a valid windows32 exe.... could you provide just the love file?
Shigor
29. Apr 2013 · 14:43 UTC
Oh, I see, 64 bit executable (bad idea this... there are still a ton of us with win xp)
Puffi
29. Apr 2013 · 14:43 UTC
Great atmosphere, the generation counter in the background was nice touch. Some ambient sound would've great, but anyway a great execution.
karsyf
29. Apr 2013 · 14:44 UTC
I really enjoyed this! It was a little hard to predict what would happen based on my actions so I didn't feel I was 100% in control, but once you get aggressive and start attacking other colonies its a lot of fun
oskardevelopment
29. Apr 2013 · 14:44 UTC
Fun game (awesome with strategy a strategy game!) and loved the music with it! Didn't get any information of how to restart when I won?
nicso
29. Apr 2013 · 14:46 UTC
a really good idea. I would love to see a multiplayer game based on this.
myachin
29. Apr 2013 · 14:51 UTC
great idea

is here AI contorling other colors?
bushmango
29. Apr 2013 · 14:54 UTC
I was doing really well until I turned red into a glider!
Kotucz
29. Apr 2013 · 15:02 UTC
Nice. Played many times. So simple, yet so hardly predictable :-)
Ysty
29. Apr 2013 · 15:47 UTC
A really neat idea. Great game.
🎤 Overv
29. Apr 2013 · 15:47 UTC
Unfortunately I had no time left to give the other colonies real AI, they're currently based on just the rules without any intervention.

I'll update it with a restart button right now.
Joshua Douglass-Molloy
29. Apr 2013 · 16:06 UTC
Brilliant use of Game of Life to create an actual game. Would be mind-boggling with multiplayer.
VDOgamez
29. Apr 2013 · 16:43 UTC
It was neat to have a competitive game of life thing, although I felt like I knew too much about how it worked for it to be much of a challenge. You can just stick one of the stable configurations in the corner and let the other ones die off
ilo
29. Apr 2013 · 20:35 UTC
Such a clever idea. I wonder how deep the game could get playing against human opponents. That I'd like to see!
Pacifist Games
30. Apr 2013 · 01:45 UTC
Really interesting, but hard to grasp with so many units on the screen. It might have been more interesting if each of the colonies started with a small stable collection of units, rather than a large random mix.

Were the sounds an indication of whether you lost or gained units in that generation? I really couldn't tell.
whitetigle
02. May 2013 · 08:47 UTC
Sorry like all the games made with LOVE I tried to rate, I could not test it on windows. It just crashes at startup. :(
wonderwhy-er
02. May 2013 · 08:55 UTC
Haha, man we both used Conway's Game of Life as basis for your games. Though your is more of a game then mine.

Its fun, but something is lacking...
Firstly beauty of Convay's Game of Life is not seen.
Secondly game lacks depth somehow... Some score and ending resources should be added I guess.

Anyways, fun to see someone trying in same direction as I did! Good work!
Ithildin
02. May 2013 · 10:22 UTC
Nice idea. It is a bit difficult to track the interactions of your colony (even more taking into account neighbours), but that makes it more interesting to me. Great job!
jwolf
04. May 2013 · 02:59 UTC
Interesting concept, good execution. I could see this being very tricky in multiplayer, although that may be because I have trouble predicting the results sometimes.
SuperlevelSebastian
06. May 2013 · 22:19 UTC
Sadly it doesn't seem to be a Win32-bit version. :(
@SamPotasz
06. May 2013 · 23:14 UTC
I found the sound perfectly done.
SuperlevelSebastian
10. May 2013 · 14:25 UTC
Source works. Thank you!