Yawnoc is chaotic top-down shooter rogue-lite inspired by Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata

With the source code available along with the game, Yawnoc is a chaotic top-down shooter rogue-lite inspired by Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata that's out now. Note: personal purchase.

This is a thoroughly strange one. And to be honest, I didn't initially have the tiniest idea what it all really means. I tried reading up on it for a while, into some Wikipedia pages and other literature and my brain is now thoroughly fried. Basically, you run around shooting strange machines in a wave, then go and buy a bunch of upgrades and new weapons before jumping into the next wave.

From the Steam page the developer explains it as this: "Fight machines from different automata algorithms including Conway's Game of Life, Brian's Brain, and LowDeath. As you progress through the forest, the machines will begin to follow different cellular automata rulesets that change their behavior. Master each algorithm to learn how to quickly exterminate machines in every area!"

Playing it helps you understand it. Depending on where you hit them with your bullets, will change what they do. Some do nothing or fire back, others grow and grow some more, a few might launch what appear to be mortars or some sort of grenades at you. It just gets weird. After a few waves a hostile but more living-like creature was running around firing everywhere, I took them down, and when finishing the wave they woke up and it was another living being like me and they decided to join me to help out. Nice.

During a wave enemies flicker about all over the place, and sometimes send you into what looks like another dimension when things get…weird.

I've only begun scratching the surface of it but it has a really nice overall idea. And the Linux version does run great.

Be sure to check out the release trailer below:

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Not only does it have full Native Linux support but it also includes the source code as well. As per the readme in the installed folder:

Yawnoc is written in Python, Pygame, and ModernGL. Developed with Python 3.11.7 on Windows 11 & Ubuntu 20.

The source code is hacked together to help ship the game in a reasonable amount of time, so while it may be easy to tinker with since it's Python, changing complex mechanics may be messy.

Steam launches the yawnoc executable, but the source can be run with a valid Python environment from yawnoc.py. The rest of the code is in the scripts folder.