Chemistry of Life

The Story:
Play as the pilot of a microscopic ship that is observing cellular organism reproduction in a Petri dish. It's a chaotic environment and the cell-forms release a toxic chemical that damages your ship if they get too close. As a last line of defense, your ship can deploy a mitotic inhibitor (a chemical compound that prevents cellular reproduction) to break tessellation chains and save your ship. Your primary objective is to observe though, so stay away from the cells for as long as possible

Cellular Automata:
Among the first systems to simulate life-like behaviour, Cellular Automaton are abstract, discreet computational systems based on basic 'rules of life' that can display complex emergent behaviour.   These emergent behaviour have been used to model  behaviours and solve problems in physics, chemistry, cryptography and many other fields.

In this game, we use a Cellular Automaton to model emergence and reproduction of cells in the Petri dish. We implemented a modified version of Brian's Brain, which itself is a modified version of the famous Conway's Game of Life. We chose Brian's Brain because it often generated spaceships, rakes and other tessellations that have directional movement at or near the grid's speed of light.  In our version, new cells are generated in the middle of the Petri dish using well known patterns (boomerang, twin eye, the diamond etc)

Miototic Inhibitor:
Chemical compounds that prevent or slow mitosis (cell division) are known as Miototic Inhibitors. These compounds, including vinca alkaloids, colchicins and taxanes, are often used to treat cancer.

In this game, miototic inhibitors are used as a last line of defense by allowing you to break up long  tessellations to protect your ship. Use it wisely though, it takes 30 seconds to regenerate.

About Game Development:

This game was created for the 1-Bit Weekend #2 Jam - so it was built in a long day and uses 2 colors.  The game was built using the Godot game engine and we created all assets used in the game, including code, graphics, sfx and music for this jam.

The algorithm for calculating new generations is a little greedy, so you may find that the downloadable game runs smoother than the browser based version.