Thank you so much for being interested in the project and going so far as to include it in your video! I am extremely honored. It's so incredible that you highlight so many small creators and their work.

I am really sorry that you had trouble getting the demo working. If you have time and energy, I would very much appreciate hearing any specific details you can share about what happened when it failed to run: an immediate crash? A window that opened without any image displayed? Any information you could provide would be helpful for me.

Thank you, again!

Hey, thanks! You should be able to test it on Mac (as long as you are willing to install Python and some libraries) if you grab the code and follow the setup instructions in the README: https://gitlab.com/NPC-Dev/groundcollapse - unfortunately, I don't currently have a Mac to use to package a binary version. Feel free to contact me if you have any trouble.

It's not really related to Cellular Automata (although that paper looks super cool, and I should read it!). Instead, it's using Answer Set Programming, a form of constraint solving, to ensure that tiles always get placed in a valid arrangement. This means that, rather than writing rules for how each cell should change based on its neighbors, you simply write a list of tile types that can go next to each other and let the constraint solver build something valid.

You can then also add any extra constraints you want, including optimization constraints (such as "maximize the number of different tiles in the area," or "minimize using the same tile next to itself"). I believe this can extend easily to things like requiring pathability by marking certain tiles as having a path through them in certain directions, and adding constraints like "this path must connect all the way through the level chunk from at least one of these points to at least one of these other points," or many other possibilities! But I haven't yet had time to test that out.