Petri

That's a good point - sliders with the value next to the slider would be a waaaay better UI. Using sprites came about as a result of intending to replace them with much fancier little sprites for each color, but that never materialized, so alas, the circles remained. Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

Haha, thanks! I can't take full credit for the idea of continuous, particle-based cellular automata, but the particular interactions were my design through much trial and error (and some reliance on computer algebra software to make sure my math was correct!)

Yeah, each color is a different species, and each color has different interactions for every other color. For example, blue may want to only be next to blue, or yellow may want to keep red at a particular distance while red wants to be closer to yellow, leading to a back-and-forth snappy oscillation between the two low energy states.

I definitely considered color mixing and hybridization of species. I also want to figure out a way to encode the color interactions into something I can present to the player visually as "DNA" or chromosones to click on and modify via sliders or, if it's possible, typing out strings of ATGC etc.

Thanks for playing, and thanks for the feedback!

Thank you for playing - if I continue work on the game my main goal is to give the player more information and more control. Just gotta figure out what and how it should look. I appreciate the feedback!

Thank you for playing! I appreciate the feedback. I definitely had plans for some gamification, but ran out of time to implement any of them. I'll write a little about the code below in case anyone else is interested!

For reference, this is essentially a "simple" molecular dynamics code with fictional interactions. Every cell species has a set of 16 parameters that define its interaction force (based solely on distance, r) with each species, including its own. All cells repulse each other very strongly at close range (1/r dependence), but have randomly chosen attraction/repulsion at further distances to each other (this is a sin^3 curve, cut off after 1/2 or 1 wavelength - not at all based in reality!). Two additional forces are a velocity-squared drag force ("viscosity") and a 1/r central force ("pressure"). Using the sum of these forces, I compute acceleration, velocity, and position at each step.

There were a lot of physics bugs to handle. I had to constantly check for NaNs coming from the interaction force, bouncing off walls sometimes shoved particles too close to each other and the whole thing would explode, and some seeds produced just pure nonsense. Thankfully, I've written simple MD codes before, so I knew what I was getting into when I started, even though I'd never thought to try it in GameMaker until now.

There are a handful of other particle-based life sims out there that inspiried me - CodeParade on YT made one, the developer of Star Guard is working on one and sharing stuff on Twitter, and the "Artificial Biology of Lenia" paper on arxiv.org was a big inspiration too. Thanks for reading!

Thank you for playing! If I can put some more time into this post-jam I'd love to be able to give the player both more information and better tools, as part of adding at least some gamification of the simulation.

Glad you liked it! My original, far-too ambitious for a game jam idea was to allow players to capture, save, name, and share individual creatures, so it really makes me glad to see that even without those mechanics in place you still took to that task with glee. Thank you for the feedback!

Thanks for giving it a go! You make a very good point - it definitely needs a lot more guidance for the player. Each time R is pressed it randomly picks ~100 parameters that control the simulation, so until I add some more fine-tuned control even I don't know exactly how the little life forms work!

Thank you for the feedback! I had wanted to give the player detailed tools for building and modifying cells (copy+paste, saving and naming species for points/achievements, directly modifying their "DNA", etc.), but there wasn't enough time due to extenuating circumstances. That's the nature of game jams, I suppose! Thanks again; I really appreciate the rating and feedback, especially since this is my first game jam game ever.