Comment by maybe-tomorrow
2 days ago
Creator here. It is not Conway’s Game of Life.
Soup of Life is an artificial life simulation with moving agents that have genomes, energy, and heritable traits like size, morphology, and behavior. Organisms are born, feed, reproduce with mutation, and die in a continuous 2D world with different ecological zones that bias evolution in different directions.
Unlike Conway’s Game of Life, which is a deterministic cellular automaton on a fixed grid, this is an evolving ecosystem. You see predator–prey dynamics, trait trade-offs, niche specialization, boom–bust cycles, and extinction events. There is no explicit notion of species. Lineages and niches emerge naturally from reproduction and environmental pressure.
For most people it works best if you go in unprepared and just watch what happens.
As someone who, indeed, went in unprepared to just to see what happens, I was also left wanting in knowing what exactly I was looking at. It all just looked arbitrarily random to me.
As I've heard it said regarding art, part of the appreciation comes from knowing _how_ it was made (and why), not merely from what was made. We don't appreciate Warhol's soup cans because they're soup cans -- it's everything else about them that makes it art.
So, my recommendation is, make the narrator a default panel on the opening screen. Give folks a narrative description of the events occurring up front, and then invite them to explore the work from there.