I love these kinds of sandbox games, Orb Farm is super nice to have it running directly in the browser for a little procrastination break. Although my favorite is probably The Powder Toy [0], I've been following this project for years.
The guy that created orb.farm[0] is the same guy behind sandspiel.club[1], which is a browser-based Rust/WebGL powdertoy-like implementation. I added it to my phone's home screen so my kids have been playing with it for years!
Background image is distracting, otherwise, very good ! It could be gamified with points and fish reproducing, like try to find a way so that users have to maximize some kind of goal while making tradeoffs. Like city building games
Game probably needs some way of making the player feel more invested in the game. Maybe you can only place so many particles per day, and then you have to wait until the next day. Or you can pay to get more particles now.
If you could pay for some bonus materials that would be great too. Though I'd rather unlock them randomly from a kind of loot box system.
And how come I can't level up? I don't feel like I'm making any progress without an XP bar. Clearly this person does not understand game design.
Not everything needs to be a fully developed game. Sometimes people make things for gasp the fun of it and not to build a comprehensive game that will appeal to everyone and their demanding cousins.
OP is stating his love for the worst parts of games. This would be like someone saying they love pages filled with ads, chat bots, pop-ups, auto play and scripts which take seconds to load.
In a similar vein, grass floats, and supports rocks, which are water tight. The rocks can support sand, and therefore more plants. The rocks also stack.
Nicely done take on the form. The original game of this type was a Japanese Java applet known as "Falling sand game". I'm not sure it's preserved anywhere though.
I'm pretty sure I played a similar game in like '95. It was called Logo. It had a turtle, and you could use the turtle (and your imagination) to draw pretty things on the screen. You probably played it too.
Fun! Also funny because I've gotten into container ponds, medaka (Japanese ricefish), daphnia/moina and other microfauna over the last 2 months. It's an interesting hobby. The biggest thing I've noticed is how much local bees need a water source.
You need to build a stateless fish tank via replicas. It's pretty common that a new feature gets introduced into the upstream. You never even see it until one of your tanks crashes. That's why it's critical to have a backup strategy, n+1 redundancy, and a robust change control process to limit contagion risk.
I used to have a roommate that had like 12 tanks going all the time. I couldn't even complain, because I hosted my own kubernetes cluster, so I understood exactly why he needed them.
:) Love seeing this at the top of HN! This project, along with sandspiel (by the same creator), are some of my biggest inspirations!
If you're not aware, there's a relatively deep technical explanation of how sandspiel was built which I found interesting. If you're into orb.farm then you'll probably find it interesting, too: https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel
And, shameless plug, I've been teaching myself Rust/Bevy/ECS lately and am creating a simulation ant farm. The project is still in its infancy, and is nowhere near as cool as these, but https://meomix.github.io/symbiants/ for some ants that scurry around and emergently create piles of sand. Pan/Zoom launching in a couple of hours, feeding them hopefully in the next week or so. If you have ideas for simple features I'd love to hear them or if you want to follow along with the project check my profile for a Discord link.
I am a sucker for falling sand games, thanks for making this. Makes me want to make my own, I've been brainstorming ideas of complex "ecosystem" games for a while but never thought to just use a sand engine!
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Making Sandspiel
I am a huge fan of Sandspiel, which Max described in this article from 2019, and recently I was delighted to discover that he and TodePond have been doing a huge amount of wonderful work since then.
What happens when you combine Sandspiel with a Scratch-like blocks based visual programming language that lets you look inside and see how rules work, tweak and modify them, and even define your own rules for different types of particles? And then form a community around it for sharing and learning from each other and building on top of each other's work.
Here is Max's and TodePond's brilliantly ambitious visually programmable sequel, Sandspiel Studio!
I've written more about Sandspeil Studio and related topics of artificial life, cellular automata, and visual programming, and quoted some interesting discussion with Max and TodePond from their Discord server (they actually already knew about most of this stuff, but they love it as much as I do), in the "Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?" discussion, in reply to api's comment about Digital Artificial Life:
api 67 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/pa...
Digital Artificial Life -- as in evolving program ecosystems, artificial chemistries or cellular automata that can manifest life-like phenomena, etc.
Haven't done much with it in a while but was very into it in college. It's both a minor scientific field (would probably be grouped under both theoretical biology and AI research) and a hobbyist field with some really interesting projects.
DonHopkins 67 days ago | prev [–]
That's one of my long time interests and hobbies, which I write about on HN and discuss with other people frequently. I'm supposed to be doing something else right now so I'll quickly drop a few disorganized quotes and links here. (Sorry I didn't have time to be more concise!)
A few years ago I ran across Max Bittker's beautiful "Sandspiel", which is a delightful cellular automata toy that simulates sand and other rules:
A few days ago I saw him tweet some amazing stuff that resonated with me, which then led me to discover what he's been working with Lu Wilson (TodePond): Sandspiel Studio -- user definable rules using a block based vis...
WTF. What starts out as boxes turns into some kind of recursive self-referential nightmare which can generate IFS fractals and then... wait that's not affine, stop, help, and now it's totally destroyed all frames of reference.
That's not a tech demo, that's an epistemological nightmare, that is.
This is maybe a bit too specific to Clojure and more generally about concurrency in it, but Rich Hickey introduced Clojure with an ant simulation demonstration. The video quality is not great, but there's an article (sadly not up anymore, but on the way back machine):
104 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 178 ms ] thread[0] https://powdertoy.co.uk/
[0]: https://maxbittker.com [1]: https://sandspiel.club
If you could pay for some bonus materials that would be great too. Though I'd rather unlock them randomly from a kind of loot box system.
And how come I can't level up? I don't feel like I'm making any progress without an XP bar. Clearly this person does not understand game design.
I think you're being a bit too critical for what just seems like someone's fun little project.
Not everything needs to be a fully developed game. Sometimes people make things for gasp the fun of it and not to build a comprehensive game that will appeal to everyone and their demanding cousins.
OP is stating his love for the worst parts of games. This would be like someone saying they love pages filled with ads, chat bots, pop-ups, auto play and scripts which take seconds to load.
It also needs swag: cute little square plushie stuffed animals for each type of element.
I now have a glass-free orb (square).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling-sand_game
I used to have a roommate that had like 12 tanks going all the time. I couldn't even complain, because I hosted my own kubernetes cluster, so I understood exactly why he needed them.
If you're not aware, there's a relatively deep technical explanation of how sandspiel was built which I found interesting. If you're into orb.farm then you'll probably find it interesting, too: https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel
And, shameless plug, I've been teaching myself Rust/Bevy/ECS lately and am creating a simulation ant farm. The project is still in its infancy, and is nowhere near as cool as these, but https://meomix.github.io/symbiants/ for some ants that scurry around and emergently create piles of sand. Pan/Zoom launching in a couple of hours, feeding them hopefully in the next week or so. If you have ideas for simple features I'd love to hear them or if you want to follow along with the project check my profile for a Discord link.
https://studio.sandspiel.club/
Making Sandspiel (maxbittker.com):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34555913
https://maxbittker.com/making-sandspiel
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34561910
DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Making Sandspiel
I am a huge fan of Sandspiel, which Max described in this article from 2019, and recently I was delighted to discover that he and TodePond have been doing a huge amount of wonderful work since then.
What happens when you combine Sandspiel with a Scratch-like blocks based visual programming language that lets you look inside and see how rules work, tweak and modify them, and even define your own rules for different types of particles? And then form a community around it for sharing and learning from each other and building on top of each other's work.
Here is Max's and TodePond's brilliantly ambitious visually programmable sequel, Sandspiel Studio!
https://studio.sandspiel.club/
Here's my profile, where you can play with the version of Max's flower growing rule that he shows here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifyYITDq1oo
...to grow underground potatoes and fancy flowers:
https://studio.sandspiel.club/user/clanzgor8006109mtjooi348t
I've written more about Sandspeil Studio and related topics of artificial life, cellular automata, and visual programming, and quoted some interesting discussion with Max and TodePond from their Discord server (they actually already knew about most of this stuff, but they love it as much as I do), in the "Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/part of?" discussion, in reply to api's comment about Digital Artificial Life:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698163
api 67 days ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Ask HN: What weird technical scene are you fond/pa...
Digital Artificial Life -- as in evolving program ecosystems, artificial chemistries or cellular automata that can manifest life-like phenomena, etc.
Haven't done much with it in a while but was very into it in college. It's both a minor scientific field (would probably be grouped under both theoretical biology and AI research) and a hobbyist field with some really interesting projects.
DonHopkins 67 days ago | prev [–]
That's one of my long time interests and hobbies, which I write about on HN and discuss with other people frequently. I'm supposed to be doing something else right now so I'll quickly drop a few disorganized quotes and links here. (Sorry I didn't have time to be more concise!)
A few years ago I ran across Max Bittker's beautiful "Sandspiel", which is a delightful cellular automata toy that simulates sand and other rules:
https://sandspiel.club/
A few days ago I saw him tweet some amazing stuff that resonated with me, which then led me to discover what he's been working with Lu Wilson (TodePond): Sandspiel Studio -- user definable rules using a block based vis...
WTF. What starts out as boxes turns into some kind of recursive self-referential nightmare which can generate IFS fractals and then... wait that's not affine, stop, help, and now it's totally destroyed all frames of reference.
That's not a tech demo, that's an epistemological nightmare, that is.
You might like these projects:
"Coding Adventure: Ant and Slime Simulations" by Sebastian Lague:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A
Code https://github.com/SebLague/Ant-Simulation
"C++ Ants Simulation 1, First approach" by Pezzza's Work:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81GQNPJip2Y
Code: https://github.com/johnBuffer/AntSimulator
https://web.archive.org/web/20160409080236/http://juliangamb...
Video directly: https://youtu.be/dGVqrGmwOAw
Making Sandspiel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34555913 - Jan 2023 (10 comments)
Making Sandspiel - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19793835 - May 2019 (9 comments)
Sandspiel – A falling sand game built in Rust and WebGL - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18696291 - Dec 2018 (185 comments)
The source code is there.
ps. not my downvote, corrective upvote BTW