Overview

Conway's Game of Life is a Turing Complete formula driven simulation depicting an ecosystem composed of a single organism. You can find a more lengthy description in my capture of the "Rules and Info" page of the emulator below or at the wikipedia page on Conway's Game of Life here. In this project I created an emulator of Conway's Game of Life using C++.

Contributors

N/A

My Role

Solo Project

Tools

Microsoft Suite

C++

Solo Development

Deciding on a Feature Set

Feature Set

Basic Features:

1. Simulation run

2. input capabilities

3. main menu

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My primary goal with the feature set was to give users complete freedom to observe the progression of different machines within Conway's game of life.

As such I included the following features:

1. speed up simulation

2. progress by step

3. survival time color coding

4. mid simulation input capabilities

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After finishing these features and getting the opportunity to mess around in the simulation a bit I ended up adding additional quality of life for anyone new to CGoL

These included:

1. the "rules and info" section

2. three presets displaying the 3 main types of machines found in CGoL

Looking Back...

Passion Makes the Project! - After messing around with several emulators online I got pretty interested in the ideas and progression behind Conway's Game of Life. As a result, I was able to fine tune my feature set in a way that supported certain features I found that I was missing or appreciated in other projects. Not to mention the work became a breeze.
Plan Ahead - The one downside to changing my scope during development (not very agile of me) was that much of my code became improperly formatted for what I was trying to do. Although I did have to re-write that portion of code, I did fortunately write the majority in a way that defined the grid size and updated cells dynamically. This saved me TONS of time and in the future will absolutely be something I hope to always include in my projects in case of increased scope.