Micro Entertainment: Sand
A downloadable game for Windows and macOS
This game is part of the Micro Entertainment Pack, a collection of tiny desktop games I developed for fun.
A classic falling sand-game, this time based entirely on (probabilistic) Margolus cellular automata.
Features:
- Classic Falling Sand Elements - sand, stone powder, salt, water, oil, acid, lava, metal, spout, torch, wall, plant, fire, wood, ice, clone and secondary elements saltwater, ash, and steam are all present.
- Good performance - The entire screen can be filled with particles with no issues.
- Tiny, unobtrusive graphics and Micro Mode - The game only occupies a fraction of your screen real estate, and can even be displayed in half size on high DPI displays, making it perfect for discreetly playing at work or while watching something on your computer.
Currently I prioritise mac binaries, as that's the only platform I play these games on, but am also building for other platforms. They are written in Rust and have a dependency on the C library SDL2.
Download
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Comments
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Nice! Love the style and especially the idea of formulating it formally as a Margolus cellular automaton.
I can’t recall all the rules of falling sand games: Is there any way of getting rid of lava? Also, I had a hard time, properly mixing salt and water—the salt-water formed a barrier between the two.
(Other experience reports: Windows build was playable on Wine/Linux, albeit with only okayish performance on my work laptop.)
It should be possible to build from source on Linux to get a native binary, which might perform better. I will tweak the physics a bit, i'm not happy with some of the relative falling/dispersal rates. The salt water being a barrier and the lava being indestructible are symptoms of this..
Edit: Thanks for the feedback!
I've now released a new version with improved physics, I think. The gravity effects are now relative to the medium, so salt should move through water more quickly. I also tweaked lava so that it's possible to destroy thin spreads of lava using copious amounts of water. If there is a lot of lava, you get a nice boiler instead.. A side effect of the physics tweaks is that steam escapes faster from water giving a nice "boiling" effect.
And another new version, now with ice, wood, ash, improved burning behaviour and a clone element.
Really cool! :)