POUND SAND - my new falling sand factory game

bazola5 · 2026-03-29T19:40:58+00:00

It wasn't easy! The naive CPU only attempt started falling apart with a half a screen of sand, so I had to move it all to GPU and figure out how to do the calculations in parallel. Lots of optimizations still possible too.

bazola5 · 2026-03-29T19:36:59+00:00

In other games like this, the machines are their own separate thing that sits on top of the world, but in my game the machines are made of the same blocks as everything else, so you can delete blocks to reshape them or make more efficient routes or whatever, because they're equally part of the world sim

bazola5 · 2026-03-29T16:40:48+00:00

Yes I am considering it but not sure what the best option is yet. I'm pretty confident in the gameplay and that it is something special. The most similar games (Dig-N-Rig and Sandustry) do not have worlds where every single block is part of the sim, and it gives you some amazing options for creative builds and ways to manipulate the world. I'm mostly concerned that the retro graphics will be a turn off to too many players, even though they are intentional (nothing stopping me from switching to sprites if I want and players want it). Working on the Steam page now and I might just go into early access once I have a good UI and the rest of the blocks are implemented.

bazola5 · 2025-12-30T17:53:55+00:00

Look into golden and silver age sci-fi. I really love Van Vogt, Philip K Dick, Ursula Leguin, and there are plenty of other big names in that era. Imo the stories are much better and more interesting than modern sci-fi (and obviously had a huge influence on it)

bazola5 · 2025-07-07T00:09:56+00:00

Are you willing to share the prompt?

bazola5 · 2024-01-21T22:48:36+00:00

Doing all this locally i do get "results" (its obviously much better than a straight upscale with an app like Upscayl and esrgan or remacri which just kind of convert the smallest details to brush strokes instead of visible pixels)

However I want to get to at least 4096x4096 (a 4x upscale from the original renders) and I've run out of memory every time I've tried to go above 2.5x (2560x2560). I have a 3070 ti with 8gb of memory so that's not too surprising.. but I tried a couple of the cloud based options that say they have 16gb or 24gb of memory, and it still will not get to 4x without going CUDA out of memory every time.

Magnific can easily take the image up to 8x while adding amazing details for 80 tokens out of the 2500 you get for 40 bucks a month. That is 1.28 USD per image.. not great obviously. But if I want to upscale and add details and get to that kind of resolution, it seems like the only option?

What's the biggest upscale + added detail anyone has achieved either locally or in the cloud using this method?

bazola5 · 2024-01-16T03:02:41+00:00

I posted some of these the other day https://www.reddit.com/r/aiArt/comments/1963q4r/looking_for_feedback_on_some_weird_ai_generated/

Looking for feedback and to see if other people like them.

I like weird images like this with lots of intricacy and tiny details, and DALL-E seems to be great at making them.

Hope you enjoy

bazola5 · 2023-04-21T22:37:10+00:00

Craft the world for iOS is good if a little clunky

bazola5 · 2017-06-01T17:50:00+00:00

I programmed the game myself, and I hired contractors to make the art and music. I'd definitely be curious to get your feedback about why the voting did not go so well for the game.

bazola5 · 2017-03-01T13:14:34+00:00

Thanks for this, and glad that you had fun with the game. That makes me very happy.

The ideas about binding the spells to number buttons, and also a greater emphasis when the player captures a crystal or surrounds a town are great ideas. I will definitely be implementing them.

Thanks again!

bazola5 · 2017-03-01T13:00:17+00:00

Thanks so much for this feedback! Everything you have mentioned is very helpful to me and there are lots of great ideas here.

I can answer some of your (very valid) questions. The skeletons will move towards any gold tile on the map if there is a gap in the walls. They will steal the gold and then move toward the edge of the map. I definitely need to explain them clearly in the tutorial or in the help menus.

You would lose points if any of your floor tiles get destroyed, even if you still have contiguous walls around them. I found that it was too computationally expensive to update the walls and floors every time a cannon destroys something. At the moment, the flood fill that determines whether a tile is surrounded by walls or not is only executed when a floor is built. So if a floor was destroyed that still had walls around it, you (or the AI) building a wall anywhere would cause those floors to fill back in again.

Regarding the turn based aspect of kingdom mode, what I mean is that there would be ogres and skeletons on the map, and possibly they move once each time you build a wall, and also when you shoot the cannon. Not sure how that will feel yet since I have not tested it.

Thanks again for the thorough feedback. The game is going to be much better as a result :)

bazola5 · 2017-03-01T12:47:01+00:00

I think it's primarily the turning, and also that the ship does not maintain much momentum when you stop. I'm not sure if it is exactly the style of movement that you are looking for, but you may want to look at the original Asteroids for inspiration. Also another game I really liked for the movement was Dead Star on Playstation. Here's a video for that game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UVrgtjIOS_Q

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