Alternatives
Products that do what Conway's Game of Life, but as a div full of Braille characters does
I built this many years ago to try out rendering images in textboxes, using braille characters as groups of 8 pixels. You can try different fonts to see how the spacing changes too.
- 1IS
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
2025 · benholmen.com
- 2SG
https://github.com/vnglst/stacked-game-of-life
Feb 2026 · stacked-game-of-life.koenvangilst.nl
- 3AD
2021 · github.com
- 4VG
2021 · coderelay.io
- 5TD
TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
Apr 2026 · github.com
- 6IM
This is a little toy project of mine that lets you simulate digital logic graphs. It was inspired by Minecraft's Redstone and the Piet esolang. It's got some serious drawbacks-- you write circuits as PNGs and simulate them with a Python interface. It's slow to run and slow to experiment with. And it is certainly difficult to use for people with any kind of color blindness. But despite that, I hope this can still be a fun toy!
2022 · github.com
- 7LC
2021 · lifeee.netlify.app
- 8TITetris in a PDF▲1,289
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris. It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box. All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at…
2025 · th0mas.nl
- 9
- 10CF
2021 · codingfont.com
- 11AM
Hello HN! We’re a small creative studio specializing in real-time 3D experiences. Netlify approached us to design and build an interactive experience to celebrate reaching 5 million developers. Inspired by the classic game Marble Madness, we created a gamified experience where users control a ball through playful, interactive levels. The goal was to blend marketing content with the look and feel of a game to engage users. The app is built with Three.js [1], using our custom render pipeline and shaders, and uses Rapier for physics simulation [2]. The 2D content is overlaid on the WebGL view…
2024 · 5-million-devs.netlify.com
- 12DT
2019 · github.com
- 13
- 14EW
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 15M3
2021 · doersino.github.io
- 16MA
I always believe in using what one makes, which is unfortunate because I made Monocraft. For the past year I've been stuck looking at those pixels while I code, so over the weekend I tried my hand at making a version of Monocraft that was more legible. Introducing Miracode, a Minecraft programming font that is actually usable! Using a custom algorithm, I've converted adjacent pixels from the original font into strokes, which allow for a more smooth look while maintaining that Minecraft-y look. Give it a try and let me know what you think!
2024 · github.com
- 17FP
2018 · play.typedetail.com
- 18GO
Hi HN, when learning Golang (and topology), I ported a simple GOL in C (https://github.com/Jeadie/GoL) into Go. I then added a bunch of features - Playing on other fundamental polygons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_polygon#Examples_o...) - Considering all possible update rules (of which, there are many). Looking to get back to this project soon. Would love some feedback + ideas.
2022 · github.com
- 19HG
2014 · rgb.0-z-0.com
- 20MC
The latest 3Blue1Brown video [1] about the M. C. Escher print gallery effect inspired me to re-implement the effect as WebGL fragment shader on my own. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldxFjLJ3rVY
Apr 2026 · static.laszlokorte.de
- 21IM
2012 · nomatteus.github.com
- 22IM
Inspired by games like Turing Complete/Virtual Circuit Board/Logic World, I tried to make a mix of aseprite and wiredworld/wired-logic, the idea being the user can build a digital circuit using a "fullstack" pixelart creation workflow. The circuit is just an image. The primitives are (i) connected wires which have undefined, 0 or 1 state during simulation (displayed brighter or darker in function of the state) and (ii) NANDs, which are little pixel triangles. During simulation the user can interact with any wire by clicking on it, toggling its state, which is cool for messing…
2024 · github.com
- 23
- 24AAASCII Automata▲103
ASCII AUTOMATA is a tool to analyze the visual connectivity of characters in textmode fonts. It works by scoring edge connectivity of each piece and finding the best matching neighbour piece. Every time it places a piece, it "grows" towards the edges it touches by placing a matching piece. The red heatmap shows how frequently each character is used, useful for analyzing the fonts. I initially made it as a tool for myself. When I design textmode art fonts it is sometimes difficult to figure out if a specific character would actually be useful for drawing or not. I wanted a tool which would…
Oct 2025 · hlnet.neocities.org
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