Cyber Go

July 2022

Cyber Go
p5.js Creative Coding Board Games Game Theory JavaScript
View on GitHub Live Demo

Overview

Go is an ancient two-player abstract strategy board game originating in China over 2,500 years ago. The goal is to surround more territory than the opponent using black and white stones.

This project provides a premium digital implementation of the game on a standard 9x9 grid, reimagined with a high-end retro-futuristic cyber-arcade aesthetic.

Key Features

  • Automated Liberty Checker: Computes stone liberties in real-time, instantly resolving capture states for connected groups of stones.
  • Suicide and Ko Rule Enforcement: Prevents invalid placements according to formal Go tournament rules, including the Ko rule to block infinite loops.
  • Flood-Fill Territory Estimator: Evaluates finished board configurations to calculate final scores, highlighting captured territories using flood-fill algorithms.
  • Glassmorphic Cyber-Arcade HUD: Displays turn status, captured stone counters, and game states on a sleek, glowing translucent interface.
  • Responsive Mobile Play: Adaptive canvas size adjustments and touch-sensitive coordinate mapping for mobile browser viewports.

Technical Implementation

Built with modular ES6 JavaScript inside a p5.js canvas environment. The game engine uses an adjacency list structure representing the 9x9 board coordinates. When a stone is placed, the engine runs recursive flood-fill checks (Depth-First Search) to determine connected groups, calculate liberties, and trigger chain-reaction captures.

Technologies Used

  • p5.js for rendering the neon game grid and glowing glass stone aesthetics
  • ES6 JavaScript for game loop management and DFS graph algorithms
  • HTML5 & CSS3 for glassmorphic control overlays and arcade HUD styles
  • Adjacency Graphs & Flood-Fill for group connectivity and territory boundary scoring

What I Learned

This project provided excellent hands-on experience in:

  • Implementing advanced graph algorithms (connected components, DFS flood-fill) in a real-time web interface.
  • Resolving edge cases in game rules (suicide prevention, Ko loop detection, and adjacent group updating).
  • Designing neon vector drop-shadow glow overlays that perform efficiently on low-spec hardware.
  • Structuring robust game state machine variables that handle turn-transitions, passes, and game-over conditions.