I'm still working on a way to generalize animations like this, without using manually Photoshop to stylize each frame of the animation. I've been working on my website occasionally over the course of a few years, which is why the site doesn't seem very unified yet. I intend to keep this HalfHourHacks blog active, though, so stay tuned.
Read more about cellular automata. Here is a screenshot from my earlier interactive C# app that draws images from simple cellular automata rules:
(Code has now been uploaded to GitHub here).