Roots of Life

Plant seeds, cut the roots, and change the very rules of Life itself
to create beatiful evolving root structures.

Roots of Life is a game, a simulation and an interactive piece of art. It takes inspiration from Conwey's Game of Life but expands the original ruleset to better model root-like growing. However, the default rules are only the beginning as the game allows player to fully customize its rules from a set of over 100 billion combinations.

CREDITS

Miro Aurela	Game Design and Programming
Minea Juntura	Art
Jesse Nukarinen	Lead Programming and Game Design
Brandon Startz	Game Design and UI design
Henri Viitanen	Music

ABOUT

Roots of Life was created as part of Global Game Jam 2023 and particularly Finnish Game Jam 2023. The jam took place between February 3th and February 5th and the theme of jam was: Roots. We also took part of 3 Diversifiers:

•  Sharing is caring: Share your source code on GitHub repository
• The Number 23: Use themes of change, progress, innovation, new beginnings, revolution, and transformation
• Is This The End?: Make game with multiple endings

For our project we focused on the game design Lens Game as a Toy. We aimed to create a game that is fun to play and interact with even without any particular goal in mind. 

RULES

The state of the game is controlled by a Stochastic cellular automaton. At all times each cell is either alive (=has roots/seed on it) or dead. As new generation start, each cell determines their state for the next generation depending on the number of the 8 neighbouring cells and random chance.

Rules for Alive cells:	If number of the alive neighbors matches this setting there is a random chance (based on the value of the slider: 0% - 100%) for it staying alive. Otherwise it dies.
Rule for Empty Spaces:	If number of alive neighbors matches this setting, there is a random chance (based on the value of the slider: 0% - 100%) for it becoming alive. Otherwise it stays dead.
Root Lives:	If this slider is active, if defines number of "lives" for alive cells. When the cell should die, it instead loses one life point until they have no lives left.
Root max lifespan:	If this slider is active, this slider sets an maximum number of generations a cell can consecutively stay alive. After that the cell will die despite any other rule.
Rule of being born without orthogonal neighbors:	This rule prevents any cell being born without any orthogonal neighbors. This guarantees that the roots never grow diagonally for which there is no graphical representation in our system. This rule cannot be changed by the player.

RESOURCES

GitHub repository: https://github.com/jesnuka/RootsOfLife