The Game of Life in 3D

An extension of John Conway's "Game of Life" to three dimensions. Explore how a random starting seed evolves into fascinating cave-like structures through several iterations of a specified rule set.

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Inspiration

John Conway's Game of Life, and Evan Wallace's experimentation of extending the concept to a third dimension (https://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs195v/projects/life/edwallac/index.html).

What it does

Generates a random starting state inside a 24x24x24 grid with 50% of cells being filled. Generate the next iteration of the simulation by pressing the left mouse button. Move around the simulation using WASD, and space/left shift to move the camera up and down respectively.

How we built it

Built using C# inside the Unity game engine.

Challenges we ran into

A lack of knowledge of C#.... I had practically 0 C# and Unity experience before this project, so perhaps I ended up biting off a bit more than I could chew, meaning that the final result is far from being polished. Performance ended up being a particular bottleneck, making it impractical to simulate starting states larger than 24x24x24 due to the amount of memory that was needed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That being said, I'm extremely pleased that having begun with virtually no knowledge of the technologies I was building, I've produced a working submission that, despite a lack of polish, successfully does what I set out to do.

What we learned

There's definitely something to be learnt about time management and foreseeing how long challenges will take to overcome. Although this is a late submission I do maintain that it would've been finished before the deadline were it not for my pesky Sunday work shift. However, this project has opened by eyes to how relatively easy it is to learn a new technologies in a short space of time by tackling an engaging but also realistic project.

What's next for The Game of Life in 3D

I definitely want to continue working with Unity, but in the short term I think I'm going to explore other projects, perhaps narrower in scope, to better hone the skills I've learnt here. However, I'd be very interested in coming back to this idea in the future once I've learnt more to add polish, more features, and release this properly.

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