Making A Game Where You Create Life

A developer documents building a customizable real-time cellular automaton game for a game jam, covering the history of cellular automata from Von Neumann to Conway's Game of Life, then explaining how they extended it with custom neighborhoods, multi-neighborhood systems, and GPU-accelerated simulation. Technical highlights include packing neighborhood data into 64-bit integers for efficient GPU transfer via Vulkan push constants, building a tilemap-based UI for drawing custom kernels, implementing bitwise operations to count active neighbors, and generating procedural color palettes using the OKLab color space. The project, called 'God Machine', was built in Godot and includes original music composed using suspended chords.