Digital Petri Dish

A sandbox where you can play with cellular automata with fun colors and some simple controls for their rules.

As new generations spawn, they have a chance of their color mutating.

This is a very CPU dependent game, and you may experience low frame rates or loud fans depending on your setup.

The initial version was made in 48 hours, with updates already coming.

!!!!THIS IS YOUR EPILEPSY WARNING!!!!

Since this game lets you control the survival and birth rules, you can easily make patterns that are... really hard on the eyes. You can always hit "r" to instantly clear the screen and reset the rules. In the future I will likely add some detection for these cases and auto reset.

CONTROLS

LEFT MOUSE BUTTON - spawn some matter

LEFT/RIGHT - Change which slider is selected, see below for description of sliders (for now)

UP/DOWN - Adjust selected slider, hold SHIFT to move further (eg SHIFT-UP)

1 - preset 1, this is classic game of life rules, see here for more

2 - preset 2, this is the Bugs LTL ruleset, see here for more

DESCRIPTION OF SLIDERS

Cellular Automata are really difficult to predict in their behaviors, and part of my motivation in making this toy was to see just how unpredictably they change when even slightly modifying their rules. As such, even knowing what the sliders do won't really help to inform your choices and understanding them requires some decent knowledge of cellular automata.

All that being said, here's what they do:

SLIDER 1 - Adjusts lower limit for cell survival

SLIDER 2 - Adjusts upper limit for cell survival

SLIDER 3 - Adjusts lower limit for cell reproduction

SLIDER 4 - Adjusts upper limit for cell reproduction

SLIDER 5 - Adjusts neighborhood size, for now capped at 5

SLIDER 6 - Adjusts color mutation rate from 0 to 100 percent

Here's some more gif's and stuff!

Digital Petri Dish initial release stuff