NEON Game of Life
Neon cellular-automata sandbox
Free · In‑App Purchases · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Grow glowing, living patterns from a single tap. Paint a spark, hit play, and watch gliders streak and guns fire across a hypnotic neon grid. The Game of Life, alive.
NEON is Conway's Game of Life, reborn in neon. Paint a handful of glowing cells, hit play, and watch them breed, drift, and collide — gliders streak across the grid, pulsars breathe, and a Gosper gun throws spaceships into the dark.
It's a sandbox, not a screensaver. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free.
THE SIMULATION — free
— 12 rulesets: Conway (B3/S23), HighLife, Day & Night, Amoeba, Mazectric, Coral, Diamoeba and more — plus a B/S rule builder for your own totalistic rules.
— Toroidal grids sized to your device, driven by a GPU compute kernel that keeps up.
— A per-cell procedural neon shader — no sprites; every living cell is drawn live.
PAINT & EDIT — free
— Paint or erase with a fingertip; a live loupe magnifies exactly the cell under your finger.
— Region select: marquee any rectangle, then copy, cut, clear, save as a snippet, or export as RLE. Paste it anywhere.
— 20 canonical snippets (block, glider, LWSS, pulsar, queen-bee shuttle…) with live toroidal previews. Drag to stamp; rotate or flip before you drop.
— Symmetry brush — 2-, 4-, or 8-fold mirrored drawing.
— Full LifeWiki RLE round-trip: paste, fetch from a URL, or open a .rle file, plus a raw-text editor over the live grid.
STUDY — free
— A 15-pattern Discover catalog: Gosper gun, Simkin gun, acorn, R-pentomino, replicator, garden of Eden — with provenance.
— Timeline scrubber — pause and rewind all the way back to the first generation.
— Population sparkline, live cell count, generation counter, and stability detection (still life / period-N oscillator / extinction).
— Minimap and stats HUD, both toggleable right on the canvas.
SHARE — free
— Pattern links: every soup encodes into a neongameoflife:// URL you can drop in a message. No server, no account.
— Record the canvas to MP4 or GIF. Full iPad keyboard shortcuts.
NEON PRO — optional
A one-time purchase, family-shareable, no subscription. Every tool for building and studying patterns is free; Pro is the finish — more speed, surface, and instrumentation.
— Fast-forward to 1,000 generations/second.
— Arbitrary grid sizes and a 16×16 custom snippet creator.
— iCloud sync of your library across devices.
— An interactive Home Screen widget and a Dynamic Island Live Activity, each running a live mini-sim.
— Pattern labels that identify gliders, oscillators, and still lifes and track them as they move.
— An activity heatmap that renders cell-flip frequency as a cool-to-hot overlay.
— A 3D time-stack you can orbit — every generation stacked in space, from a single instanced draw.
— A neon palette editor, animated themes, and cell trails.
— 15 alternate app icons drawn from classic patterns.
PRIVACY
No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs, no analytics. Your patterns live on your device and, if you opt in, in your own iCloud private database. Share links carry the pattern inline — nothing touches a server.
Built in Swift + SwiftUI, from a 2019 SpriteKit experiment rebuilt from the compute kernel up.
NEON 3.0.1 — polish & fixes.
— Paint now lands exactly under your fingertip, and the loupe shows precisely the cell you're drawing.
— The 3D time-stack runs on a new engine: it handles big grids and long histories smoothly, builds in the background, and can be cancelled — no more freezes or crashes.
— Rewind the timeline all the way back to the first generation.
— Higher top speed — up to 1,000 generations/second with Neon Pro.
— Create custom grids up to 10,000×10,000 (with a heads-up when a size may be too big for your device).
— Toggle the minimap, stats HUD, and cell trails right on the canvas.
— Clearer labels on the top-bar buttons.
— Steadier iCloud sync.
— The selection toolbar no longer hides behind the stats panel.
The developer, Enzo Maruffa, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Enzo Maruffa
- Size
- 27.3 MB
- Category
- Simulation
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 18.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 18.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 18.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 15.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 2.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- In-App Purchases
Yes
- Neon Pro $2.99
- Copyright
- © 2025 Enzo Maruffa
