Conway's Game of Life with sound
published 2026-07-29 | tags: #gamedev #prototype #bevy #rust #game-of-life
Play it on itch.io right now! popgame.itch.io/life-with-sound
This was a side-quest.
I was hitting a wall on another gamedev project and thought "I should try coding up Conway's Game of Life". It's a pretty simple game, but there's some fun challenges like infinite grids and such, let's give it a go!
As I was playing an early build I thought "This is so epic, I wonder if I can sync up some orchestral music to this!"
I don't know the first thing about music, but my friend Sam does! During our weekly co-op gaming session we brainstormed some ideas and landed on something that had promise:
- Assign a pitch (Note + Octave) to each coordinate in the game.
- When a cell is Alive at that coordinate, play the sound.
- When no cell is Alive at that coordinate, do not play the sound.
Now the grid is infinite in Game of Life, so this had to be a repeating grid, similar to tiling a picture over and over and over on an infinite plane.
I was able to whip that addition up pretty quick and it was good enough to show promise, so I added a few more fun features
- Visualizing each pitch with a different color (note) + brightness (octave)
- Allow customization for:
- Which notes are active.
- Which octaves are active.
- The speed of the simulation.
- A "camera follow" feature that pans and zooms so everything stays in view automatically
- Support touch controls so it actually works on mobile.
This is my first game written in bevy 0.19 and I really like the new bsn! { ... } syntax.
It is a pretty concise way to express the contents of a scene, and I really like the system.spawn() scheduler method which makes it easy at a glance to see what is spawning my initial world state.
The implicit ..default() is a really nice quality of life improvement, not needing to specify that I want it to fill in the rest because obviously I do.
My only gripe is that macro-heavy workflows tend to cause headaches because of magic compilation hidden behind pretty syntax; I burned a few hours trying to "fix" a compiler error that was caused by me derive'ing something I didn't need to -- rude!
There are plenty more features and polish I could add but I'm calling it here.
It provides an interesting, thought-provoking, experience (for me) and that was my goal.
I could tweak the sound, sand UX rough edges, add micro-transactions make it prettier to look at, but it works and I feel thoroughly un-blocked on my initial project.
This took longer than I wanted, but I'm happy with how this side quest turned out.