Pixel-Life

A grid-based life simulation where simple rules create complex, emergent ecosystems.

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🌱 About the Project

Pixel-Life is a cellular life simulation prototype built in Unity, focused on emergent behavior, rule-based agents, and high-performance simulation.

The world is a large 2D grid composed of simple blocks such as Water, Grass, Dirt, Humans, and Predators. Each cell follows minimal rules — yet together they form a living system where populations grow, spread, collapse, and recover over time.

Grass slowly regrows from dirt, humans wander the world to eat and reproduce, and predators hunt humans to regulate population. The entire simulation runs on a fixed timestep, ensuring consistent behavior regardless of frame rate.

Pixel-Life is both a technical exploration of emergent systems and a sandbox for experimenting with artificial life, ecology, and large-scale simulations.

🎮 Controls

• Left Click — Paint selected block
• Mouse Wheel — Change brush size
• 1 — Select Grass
• 2 — Select Water
• 3 — Select Human
• 4 — Select Predator

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🧠 Core Features

• Large-Scale Grid Simulation — Thousands of cells updated efficiently
• Emergent Life Behavior — Simple rules create complex population dynamics
• Ecosystem Loop — Grass → Humans → Predators → Space → Regrowth
• Dirt Regrowth System — Dirt has a chance to grow back into grass over time
• Fixed-Timestep Simulation — Behavior is independent of FPS
• Unity Jobs + Burst — Parallel, cache-friendly simulation updates
• Checkerboard Cell Updates — Prevents write conflicts in parallel jobs
• In-Editor Painting Tool — Spawn terrain and life interactively
• Deterministic Simulation — The same seed produces the same evolution

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🧩 OPEN SOURCE — BUILD YOUR OWN

This project is fully open-source! Explore how emergent life, fixed-timestep simulation, and high-performance grid updates are implemented, or use the project as a foundation for your own artificial life or sandbox experiments.

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/AlinLucianBrb/Pixel-Life