Jabber Trail

I have just released a game called Jabber Trail, which you can play for free in a browser. All of the images, music, and character dialog in the game are AI generated. To make progress you have to chat with in game characters, which use a large language model to generate responses.

Cellular Automaton

 

Today I made a new cellular automaton. It can create similar patterns to an earlier cellular automaton I released here (a simulation of the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction). For the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction I used a pre-existing algorithm, but for this new cellular automaton I created the algorithm myself. I was trying to replicate some other interesting patterns I have seen:

• Magnetic domain (I saw an amazing exhibit about this at the San Francisco Exploratorium)
• Yogurt lid
• Repulsive curves

Bifurcation

 

I have made a two player strategy game called Bifurcation: link

How to play:

• The goal is to eliminate all of the other player's units.
• During your turn, you can move units from up to three locations. Click and drag to choose which locations to move. Use the slider on the right to select how many units to move.
• You can move to a neighboring location or any location connected by your team's color.
• At the start of your turn, you will gain units at any locations with a + symbol. The number of + symbols will be the number of units you gain.
• You can attack enemy units by moving to enemy territory. Opposing units will destroy each other, so you need to attack with more units than the enemy to take over a location.

Stacking Things

 

Today I released a HTML5 game called Stacking Things. It is a physics-based puzzle game. It uses planck.js for the physics and Phaser for the graphics/sound. The images came from a combination of public domain photos and images generated by Stable Diffusion.

Hexacrystal

I have designed and 3D printed my own board game. It is a two player strategy game called Hexacrystal. Each player controls one color. The game starts with two towers:

The rules are simple. Players take turns placing their pieces. Pieces can be placed anywhere on the board. The game ends when a player resigns, or no more pieces can be placed. The goal of the game is to create a connected path from your tower to the opponent's tower. Neighboring pieces of the same color form a path. The winner is the player whose path (connected to their own tower) gets closest to the opponent's tower. You simultaneously try to extend your path while blocking your opponent's path.

There are 2D and 3D versions of this game. In the 2D version, pieces occupy a single tile on the board. In the 3D version, the crystal pieces can extend beyond the edges of the tile so that they can block neighboring pieces. A valid move requires that the placed crystal doesn't touch any other pieces (verified with a "wiggle" test to make sure neighboring pieces don't move). This introduces more complex strategy: carefully selecting and rotating crystals. Each player gets the same set of crystals (21 unique shapes).

Water Computer

 Using a 3D printer I have built a water-powered computer. Here is a video:

Here is a diagram of the main component: 

The "inverted output" on the left will be ON when the input is OFF, and OFF when the input is ON. The "amplified output" on the right will be the same state as the input, but will have increased water flow. By redirecting the outputs with tubes, this single component is powerful enough to build any logic circuit or computer. This type of computation is known as fluidics.

Here is the binary half-adder circuit that I built (using five of the above components):

Here are the models for the different parts that I 3D printed:

• transistor - the main logic component
• nozzle - used for releasing water from the milk carton
• connector - used to connect funnels to tubes
• hook - used to provide extra magnet support
• funnel - funnel with a single output
• splitter funnel - funnel with two outputs - this can be used to split one larger stream into two smaller streams

Bitlog

Similar to Turing Paint and Doodle Code, I have released another visual programming language called Bitlog. This is a simulator for electronic logic circuits, represented with bitmap images.