I thought of a couple of projects that @Icedrinker (or any aspiring programmer) might like:
- John Conways’s Game Of Life
Choose your favourite (or the most simple you can find) graphical tool for programming, and implement these beautiful simple rules and watch the wonderment unfold:
The universe of the Game of Life is an infinite, two-dimensional orthogonal grid of square cells, each of which is in one of two possible states, live or dead.
The rules are:
- Any live cell with two or three live neighbours survives.
- Any dead cell with three live neighbours becomes a live cell.
- All other live cells die in the next generation. Similarly, all other dead cells stay dead.
You can start with any configuration of live cells you like to see what happens - in some ways that’s the game.
- “Waving Hands” aka “Spellbinder”
I mention this here. It’s much more of a “project” than “Game of Life”.
These two have some things in common:
- Elegant simple rules that lead to wonderous complexity in outcome
- Minimal presentation requirements - they can literally be played on a whiteboard or pencil and paper (respectively)
→ great scope for “basic first, then lots of creativity in implementation later”
And “Waving Hands” is such a good game, if you build a server for it, people would probably play it.
Heck, I’d probably help get it going, if you want a collaborator…