Conway's Game of Pacman
https://conwaysgameofpacman.xyz/### Conway's Game of Pacman
TLDR: This is a game that looks like pacman, but the walls move like Conway's Game of Life while you collect bitcoin. You can record your score using **any** nostr profile. You get one free game a day and then pay me sats. You can zap profiles on the leaderboard. It is way harder on mobile than on desktop.
# You can be a winner at Jon Conway's Game of Life
I've been fascinated by [Jon Conway's Game of Life](
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_Game_of_Life) for years. There are more rabbit holes within these rules than are possible to explore in this post. Suffice to say, if you're not familiar with Conway's Game of Life or cellular automaton, go check that out now.
A couple of summers ago, with no coding experience, I took the first plebdevs course by @bitcoinplebdev solely because I thought the advertisements were hilarious. I saw the [nostr](
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G10GuRXn_MA) ad and started with that one first, but quickly realized that I needed to back up and start with the plebdevs front end course. Immediately, I wanted to play around with css. So, I found someone else's Conway's Game of Life, cut and pasted the javascript that I still didn't fully understand at the time, and made this:
https://conwaysgameoflifewithatwist.vercel.app/Mostly, I wanted to make it look cool, but I figured I should learn SOMETHING about javascript while doing this. So, I made it possible to interact with the model in real time. If you move the arrows, the Conway's Game of Life will treat the white dot you're moving as a live cell.
Naturally, that led to this:
https://conway-s-life.vercel.app/which I will not apologize for.
# Pacman
Anywho, I only recently learned that you can literally just tell an LLM to make you a program, and it will. I had been using these things to fix my code, but they will literally write TONS of it from scratch. So I made this:
https://www.turtlewordgame.xyz/ mostly to see if I could, but partly to see if I could make something that someone could load up in the Fedi app and use all the WebLN features. Plus...you should just check out how much data that NYT Games app collects...
But there's more action in action games than word games, so I'm making this:
https://checkmate-zeta.vercel.app/ It's going to be great, but it's really complicated, and I'm losing faith that **other** people will actually enjoy it.
But everybody loves the classics. That's when I had this vision of Pacman, but the walls are Conway's Game of Life...and they kill you. I'm pretty sure that @grayruby is going to tell me it's too hard, but bear with me. There are other cool features.
# Bitcoin
Also, instead of collecting glowing dots, you get bitcoin in this game. It's not real bitcoin, but it's called bitcoin in the game, so I think that's neat and maybe you will too. Each bitcoin is worth five points, in addition to the points you generate as each generation of Conway's Game of Life progresses.
# Spaceships
I've added some iconic Conway's Game of Life items as you go, just in case the universe starts to die out.
# Kind of a nostr client?
One of the things [TURTLE](
https://www.turtlewordgame.xyz/) taught me is that people love a good leaderboard. So in this game, you can sign in with an npub. That's right, you sign in with an **npub** and not an **xpub**. In other words, you send Edward Snowden to the top of the charts if you want to.
If you go into the game, you'll notice that the profiles of Edward Snowden, Jack Dorsey, Lyn Alden, and @k00b have all made appearances, but as of this writing, it was really all just me. I guess I'll find out quickly how offensive this idea is. But, even if someone else puts you there, being on the leaderboard may get you...
#ZapsAnd I added **real** zaps. Currently, it only logs zaps that are done using WebLN (think Alby, Fedi, Zeus), but I may change this. Also, you technically only get one free game a day, but there are currently ways around this, which I won't share, but most folks on sn are way more technical than me to begin with. We'll see how people respond, but I'll probably leave these.
# Mobile
I made these cool looking buttons, so you can play on mobile, but it's much harder.
# Ghosts
They kill you. Currently, you can't kill them. Life isn't fair.
https://stacker.news/items/1412346
