A chat-driven, many-player Game of Life, rebuilt from a 1998 CD-ROM.
Life is a broadcast game: a rebuild of the classic life-path board game, made to run as a Twitch-style stream where the audience plays together by typing chat commands. It started as a curiosity about a 1998 CD-ROM and a lot of reverse-engineering, and slowly grew into a game engine that simulates dozens of players spinning, moving, and playing along in real time.
A headless simulation layer owns all the rules: players, careers, money, insurance, stocks, marriage, children, and retirement, all advancing through a phase machine that opens an input window, collects spins, then resolves a round. A separate render layer draws the broadcast view on top of the same data: the board, animated cars, a live leaderboard, picture-in-picture follow cameras, event cards, and end-game stats. Chat commands flow through a swappable input adapter, so the same code can run from simulated bots today and from a live chat source later. Everything is seeded and deterministic, so a run can be replayed exactly when I am testing.
I swapped out the flat tax and generic payday that bootstrapped my Game of Life rebuild and wired in the decoded original economy: a per-career tax bracket table, routed cash tiles, salary curves, and real retirement payouts driven by 148 data-defined tiles.
Apr 19, 2026 · godotThe original board has overpasses, so a car should sometimes drive over a bridge and sometimes tuck under it. Getting that to read as real depth came down to one generic rule, a list of tile numbers per sprite, and a small trick to stop it flickering mid-drive.
Apr 2, 2026 · architectureI built the rules of Life as a pure simulation that knows nothing about the screen. A happy side effect: the whole thing can play full games from the command line with no window open at all.
A small, durable static archive holding the recovered music of a late friend.
A real-time Japan earthquake monitor I help support, host, and tinker with.
Snap the scoreboard and let an AI read the scores: a little pinball score tracker with cloud sync.