I know i'm quite late about this but found out about this gem through the jams calendar and as someone who's been fascinated by Raylib Hex challenge this year earlier, PICO-1K Jam and JS13K i thought why not give this a shot, i see a resemblance and familiarity here,  and i love the concept too lol!

Okay so my game is... a tiny black-and-white game where a Langton's Ant searches for food, changes the world as it moves, and has its movement controlled by a Brainfuck program. I want to see how much game I can get out of an absurdly small set of rules.

LINK:  https://kirbx01.itch.io/tracefuh

The heart of my TINY game is... watching a stupid little black square accidentally create complicated behaviour from almost nothing. I found this concept while studying Conway's game of life and sister concepts so this game is closer to my heart as i m fond of the concept behind it, if this information helps.

I’ll consider it finished when... it is playable in a browser, the ant can find food, the world changes through Langton's Ant rules, and the actual movement logic runs through Brainfuck.

Something I want to learn or try is... writing a real game around an esoteric programming language and keeping the entire thing deliberately tiny while also make the experience enjoyable. Post finishing i want to try add music to it too, let's see how it goes.

My first step is... making the smallest possible black-and-white Langton's Ant simulation in one HTML file.

My next check-in will be... 3 hours past now, since i m short on clock :()

Yeah...so...second update after 2 hours i was able to do something using the brainfuck logic and JS and it did take more time than i banked on.

I'll keep this one detailed since people who are not familiar with Langton's Ant and Brainfuck get an idea of what it does. You can ofcourse have  a look at the Literal Definition here, in short it's a two-dimensional cellular automaton where an ant moves on a b/w grid, turning based on the color of the square it enters: if it is white turn right and flip black and vice versa. 

How it plays

1. Click any cell to drop food (not the ant's own cell). You get 200 "thoughts" one per step. 
2. The ant runs automatically from the center, facing left.

What happens each step

- Flips its cell: white turns it right, black turns it left exactly how Langton's ant behaves.
- Sniffs straight ahead up to 6 cells. If it smells food, it works out which direction to face and steers toward it; otherwise it wanders on a totally random turn.
- That decision is chosen by a 39-character Brainfuck program (,>,>,[->+<]<<[>>>[-]<<[->>+<<]<[-]]>>>.) fed three inputs: food nearby, desired turn, random turn. 
- It returns desired if food is nearby, else random. Too basic for now but impressed that i made it exactly how Langton's work till now.

You just have a win condition, reach food in less than 200 thoughts and it's done; or you lose, in lose you've two conditions either you just escape (touch the ends) or die (run out of thoughts) :*(( 

I am planning to upgrade the base now and check on levels rather than making it just 205 lines of code of basic functions and let the mutations and arena more free to the players logic since it's supposed to be strategical (i decided that i'd try obfuscation if it gets any longer removing abstractions and doing something unique but that's quite a waste of time for the time i've left i might do it later so keep following this page if you want to. :3

This is my final comment on the game and a lottt of progress have been made!!!!

The game now contains a lot of things unfoldable, and as classified earlier this is an emergent game hence whatever decisions you take is too randomised and youve to CAREFULLY place your bets on placing food for ant, you must be pretty familiar with Langton's Ant by now if not check the first reply of this thread. 

Since my last check-in, I’ve... made a lot of changes.

1.  Added a whole set of training since learning brainfuck is as bad as it sounds, literally lol! It will still take so i recommend going through guide and this quick and easy lookbook
2. The game has HELP button which you MUST check out before doing anything because it's better to understand before just diving in or maybe you can. 
3. After training which is 3 levels only out of which two mazes are 5x5 and third one is 7x7, PLEASE LOOK THE BOTTOM PANEL (EDITOR) TO UNDERSTAND BEFORE EDITING and yeah before pressing space edit your brainf### code to understand. 

Well you may ask, how did I implement so

•  i coded a real Brainfuck interpreter, re-run from scratch on every ant step. Each step calls it once with exactly 3 inputs (nearby, foodDirection, randomDirection) and reads back one output, which becomes the ant's extra turn (0–3). The reason why youve more chances to fail if your food is closer to edges.

• The tape is 5 cells with a hard-clamped pointer, so >/< can never walk off the end, and cells hold arbitrary integers rather than wrapping at 255. Output is normalized modulo 4 the only consumer is the ant, which can turn 0–3 quarter-turns, so a raw value like 7 would be meaningless as a rotation. Brackets are pre-compiled once into a jump table by loadInstinct() instead of being re-parsed each run, which matters because it executes 200× per level on a live-editable program. Two safety rails protect player-written code: a 9,999-iteration cap so [+] kills the turn instead of freezing the tab, and the editor refuses unbalanced brackets (striking them through), so the jump table is never missing an entry. Pretty much a beginner with this language so i did take Opus 4.8's assistance in case you wonder, but it was mainly for writing javascript implementation of the logic i had :D

After all the core engine for game.js was made i had to make sure about the UI, the sound and gridding and canvas for viewport.

1.  Used MSDOS font for fonting and yellow for HELP, purple for TRAINING, red for final IN GAME mode, these are the legends. The sizing is 24px uniformly.
2. The sound engine uses the Web Audio API to generate simple square-wave sounds without external audio files.  Beep(), Fail () and Chime () provide step, loss, and victory sounds respectively. Audio starts only after user interaction, keeping the browser's autoplay restrictions happy.
3. The help is totally opaque which had to take a lot of time and it's all present in ui.js (I m later going to link the files for reference, the gh link).
4. Rest you can figure out and have fun playing around and check the repo and tweak at your end, dont forget to credit me.

The file is 36KB and original file when you locally set it up withe everything is 90KB, so it's really small (and i feel that as a victory) and i did try obfuscating eventually and golfing my code just so that it looks more neater and there is lesser room for slopped over engineered illogical implementations!

I REALLY HOPE Y'ALL love my idea for this and i m totally free for any amendments for future too as i m going to keep optimising the bytes of this codebase and other stuff to toss around in multiple jams. I had really fun experience building it! :D and i hope the creator likes it too. 

• FINAL GAME: https://kirbx01.itch.io/tracefuh
• GH LINK : https://github.com/kirbx01/tracef-

Hey Tracefuh, thanks for submitting!

This reminds me strongly of Conway's Game of Life - as you mentioned it was one of your inspirations, I'm not surprised! How did you stumble on.. Brainfuck.. lol, I've never heard of it but I guess that's the point.

I hit a snag pretty early in my playtesting. Your instructions say you can type to edit the ant's instincts. However, I couldn't figure out how to type to edit anything? There's the TRAINING section below, mine looked like ",>,>,[->+<]<<[>>>[-]<<[->>+<<]<[-]]>>>." - I wondered if that's what you meant was editable? Although I can't type to change anything here. The instructions do say "TYPE any Brainfuck in the editor below the board" so I'm thinking that was the goal! Maybe the input is frozen or I'm not understanding how to write Brainfuck code lol.

So far my experience has been clicking a cell and watching black squares fill the page. Like with Conway's Game of Life, I didn't enjoy it until I started to appreciate what was happening under the hood. Then I got really interested in it and, not surprisingly, there's an enormous community of fans for that game. I'm curious to know if this could become something like that!