GAME LIFE — a tiny browser arcade
▶ Walk the floor at lifegameproject.com
What began as a Conway's Game of Life implementation grew into a terminal-themed arcade: a main floor of finished cabinets, a WIP lab of rough experiments, online co-op over Firebase, and an iOS shell. Everything is vanilla HTML/CSS/JS + canvas — no frameworks and no web build step.
The arcade floor
| Cabinet | What it is |
|---|
| game_of_life.exe | The original. Draw patterns, explore four cellular universes, turn them into music — sandbox, 11 leaderboard challenges, and a Music Box sequencer. (details below) |
| glyph_run.exe | An arena survivor where you ARE a Chinese character — evolve 3,000 years back to your oracle-bone form, with a fresh daily oracle objective. Every monster, weapon and drop is a real ancient glyph. (details below) |
| qi.exe · 棋 | The board-game room. Go · 围棋 adds a beginner tactical AI on 9×9, a live attack-or-defend guide, local two-player boards on 9×9, 13×13, or 19×19, teaching aids, and private friend rooms. Gomoku · 五子棋 offers a minimax AI, tactical coach, AI-vs-AI, and private friend rooms. |
| tether.exe | Two players, one rope. Verlet rope physics, wind, ice, crumbling ledges — local or online co-op. |
| labyrinth.exe | An endless torch-lit descent — fog-of-war line-of-sight, A* pathfinding, a bigger maze every escape. |
| grow_a_tomato.exe | Grow the biggest, sweetest tomato — powered by a real plant-metabolism model. |
| tomatoswipe.exe | Minesweeper, but the mines are tomatoes. |
| sudoku.exe | Backtracking generator with a guaranteed unique solution; pencil marks, hints, one-click solver. |
| truco.exe | Brazilian bid-and-tricks with visible card-power and play-order guides, staged dealing, blind one-card rounds, solo play, local 2-human co-op, and unlisted invite rooms for 2–4 trusted friends. Teams pool bids, tricks, score, and elimination; empty online seats become AI. |
Every game is bilingual (English / 中文, toggle in the header) and touch-friendly.
字源 Glyph Run — an arena survivor that teaches oracle-bone script
A top-down Brotato-style survivor where you are a Chinese character, and every system doubles as a 字源 (etymology) lesson sourced from zdic.net 字源字形:
- You only steer (WASD / virtual joystick) — ink auto-attacks, weapons fire themselves, and each of the eight families' gifts is woven into movement: 人→大→夫→舞 slips fated blows, 牛→牢→牧→犇 shoulders enemies aside, 鬼→魂→魅→魔 drifts and phases, 象→像→豫→為 quakes with every stride, 隹→鳥→鳴→鳳 gusts the pack back, 羊→羔→美→羴 scatters it in panic, 木→本→林→森 roots it fast, and 火→炎→焱→燚 burns a cinder trail.
- Glyph drops are XP — and each does its meaning: 魚 heals, 貝 pays, 龜 shells you, 雨 slows the field, 鳥 dives the nearest three… level up and your character evolves mid-fight.
- Equipment is 部首: every arm is a true radical worn at its compound position — 弓 at your left like 引, 戈 guarding your back like 伐, 罒 crowning you like 羅, 灬 smouldering beneath like 羔 — plus utility radicals: 宀 a roof that blocks, 氵 a splash that mires, 忄 a heart that mends. Starting arms come cast in bronze; duplicates recast toward 甲骨文.
- 合文 composition: become the right form while carrying the right radical and you spell a real character — 牛+宀=牢, 隹+网=羅, 羊+灬=羔, 林+灬=焚, 人+戈=伐, 木+斤=析, 牛+刀=解, 鬼+忄=愧, 火+宀=灾… the composed radical acts one casting older, and every compound you spell is kept in the codex gallery.
- The script era rewinds each wave (隸書 → 篆書 → 金文 → 甲骨文) through the oracle 門 gate; the wave clock counts in real oracle-bone numerals; death is marked by 亡, the broken blade.
- A bestiary of real characters: 鬼 spirits, charging 豕, pouncing 虎, the vessel bosses 皿 and 蠱, and a nine-segment 龍 — each named on first sight, each with a slow-motion arrival banner.
- The UI is a physical object: menus are aged rice paper struck with a hand-carved 字源 seal, the death screen is a cracked oracle shell, upgrade choices are written on an unrolling bamboo scroll (竹简) and circled in cinnabar brush — all set in a brush-script face, not a keyboard font.
- Ink is the feedback: every strike is a tapered brush stroke, fallen spirits splatter lasting ink on the ground, your own wounds run cinnabar, and a synthesized brush-on-paper soundscape (mutable 音/默) gives each hit weight.
- 五行 synergies: every drop carries an element (weapons and 鼎 are 金); stack pairs that feed each other — 水木相生 regenerates, 金火鍛造 re-tempers a shield, 土水成泥 lengthens every slow, 木火燎原 keeps your ink burning. Hoard one element and its opposite (相剋) starts hunting you.
- The scholar's desk (文房四宝): between waves a bamboo scroll unrolls with three refinements across 筆 brush · 墨 ink · 硯 inkstone · 紙 paper — some pay now, the ones marked 遠 pay at the bones. 墨池 makes kills leave mire-ink pools.
- 合文 ripening: glyphs left clustered on the ground fuse into a 鼎 worth five glyphs, a heart and the light of 光 — guard territory instead of hoovering XP.
The WIP lab (/wip.html)
Playable-but-rough experiments: plank_pilot.exe (a space dodger for 30/45/60/90-second plank rounds: small face shifts steer, or eyebrows switch lanes; touch/keyboard practice needs no camera), escape_grid.exe (4 runners vs 1 hunter, Dijkstra AI), keep_up.exe (co-op Pong), lander.exe (two-player lunar lander — one throttles, one steers), train_rl_hunter.exe (watch an RL policy learn in-browser), and greenhouse.exe (the raw plant digital-twin behind grow_a_tomato).
Plank Pilot supports sideways phones and one-phone buddy co-op: two adjacent flight zones, one shared timer, independent controls, and bonus points for clearing obstacles together. A single front camera tracks both faces; each face is enlarged behind its own translucent game view, with adjustable visibility. Both faces must remain in view. Processing stays local without recording, but camera mode downloads MediaPipe and its model. Real iPhone Safari and Android Chrome two-person camera validation is pending; it does not verify plank form. See setup and device testing.
Online co-op
Qi's Go and Gomoku tables, plus Tether, Keep-Up and Lander, support remote play: create a room, share the code, play across devices. Go uses revision-checked room transactions and requires both players to agree on the final score. Realtime sync is Firebase RTDB — no accounts, no install.
The original cabinet: Conway's Game of Life
Three modes, switched from the header: ✦ Sandbox (draw, stamp, evolve), 🏆 Challenges (11 goal-based puzzles with a global Supabase leaderboard and shareable winning seeds), and 🎠 Music Box (the grid becomes a sweep sequencer — row = pitch on a pentatonic scale, Web Audio, 100% client-side).
| |
|---|
| draw & play | 🔮 Aura — cells coloured by age |
| ⚡ Lookahead — preview future generations | 🎠 Music Box — patterns become music |
Highlights: freehand drawing with zoom/pan, 8 classic patterns with drag-and-drop stamping (rotate/mirror), full undo/redo plus "back a play", image→cells conversion, save/share patterns to a community gallery, PNG export, and a shareable Rule Lab spanning Conway (B3/S23), HighLife, Day & Night and Seeds.
🔊 ▶ Watch the Music Box with sound
Tech notes
- Stack: vanilla JS + canvas. Most games are self-contained HTML files in
game/; Go keeps its deterministic rules engine and UI script separate so the engine can be tested. No framework or web build step.
- Deploy: GitHub Pages from
main → lifegameproject.com (HTML cached ~10 min; games carry a small build tag next to their back-link).
- iOS:
app/ is a Capacitor shell that bundles a frozen copy of the site (npm run ios re-syncs app/www before archiving).
- Services: Supabase (Life leaderboard/gallery), Firebase RTDB (remote play rooms).
Run locally
# no build step — just open it
open index.html
# or serve:
python3 -m http.server 8080
Built by
Houfu Chen · Sam Qiu · Husam
Contact: [email protected]
License
MIT
