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My First Golang Program

Andrew Healey on October 02, 2019

I’m new to Go. Over the last week, I completed A Tour of Go and tonight I wrote my first program, an interactive Conway's Game of Life. I used Ebit...

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YuanHao Chiang • Oct 2 '19

Looks great! I also enjoyed learning Go immensely and use it for server-side. Never expected that it would work as a game engine so well!

Seems like it's time to start playing with Go again :)

May I ask what platform did you develop it in and if it is 100% cross-platform?

Andrew Healey • Oct 2 '19

Thanks!

I developed on Windows and it runs the same on macOS/Windows.

Ebiten games work on various platforms like desktops (Windows, macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD), web browsers (GopherJS and WebAssembly), and mobiles (Android and iOS).

😊

Jordon Replogle • Oct 2 '19 • Edited

Go actually works really well as a game engine: godotengine.org/

jeikabu • Oct 3 '19

Isn't godot C++?

Jordon Replogle • Oct 3 '19

Wow, yes it is... sorry for the misconception.

jeikabu • Oct 3 '19 • Edited

Given the name, it's mighty tempting.

The only reason it stuck out to me is because I know a game team using godot and doing their backend in Rust. I couldn't believe the client was golang and they wouldn't use the same for the server. lol

Andrew Healey • Oct 3 '19

Thanks for the link!

Philipp Armingeon • Oct 24 '19

Hey Andrew,

Very interesting article and project! If I may ask: How did you go about researching for your game of life project? Are there resources you would absolutely recommend? I'm also really interested in making my own version one day.

Andrew Healey • Oct 24 '19

Hi!

I read the Wikipedia article and watched an interview by John Horton Conway where he spoke about it.

If you create a grid and translate the rules into code, you’re halfway there!

Philipp Armingeon • Oct 24 '19

Thank you so much for getting back to me quickly! I'll check out that video!

Andrew Healey • Oct 24 '19 • Edited

Post your version if you make it 👍🏻

Gerret Halberstadt • Oct 3 '19

Nice, when I came across Conway's Game of Life I was fascinated by it (and did a version in MATLAB 🙈). In case you do not know, samcodes.co.uk/project/game-of-life/ might be interesting for you :)