u/bazola5

I made a little timelapse of mining some dirt and routing it to machines in my falling sand factory game POUND SAND, hope you enjoy it.

Steam page is here https://store.steampowered.com/app/4568000/POUND_SAND/ Wishlists haven't been great, I think that screenshots and short clips do not properly convey the gameplay like a longer video does. Should I put this timelapse video on Steam?

Another big thing, I know the player character sprite is pretty basic and blends in against some backgrounds. I'm working on fixing this - I was hoping to get away with simple for the demo but I think it's holding the game back. Would love feedback on this - even though the character is simple, it has some animation with the visor glowing, and when you vacuum up items the colors in your middle section match what you have picked up. But it seems not enough, or maybe just looks bad in short content, I am not sure. Thanks!

It's been a month and my falling sand factory game POUND SAND has come a long way in a short time. The biggest gain is performance - even huge worlds (larger than 4k by 4k) run at 60 fps most of the time, and there are still more gains possible. But I'm putting that on hold for now to focus on getting the demo ready - the amount of time it would take to mine and process an entire 4k world is many hours, and I think most players won't want to do that.

The demo should be available within the next two weeks, and the plan is to include the tutorial plus one fixed sandbox level (no level gen in the demo). Maybe disable the player upgrades but leave the pattern unlocks so the player can get the full production chain experience in the demo world if they want.

Would love feedback on the Steam page and on the game visuals, and wishlists are hugely appreciated!

Current feature list:

Huge worlds possible (4000 x 4000 and beyond), the falling sand engine is very performant and mostly optimized

Lighting engine

Lots of machines and a full production chain ending in METAL and SPICE, alternate recipes and paths

Blocks and machines you place can be deleted on a block by block basis to rearrange them however you can imagine

Tools - vacuum, mining laser, jetpack, and flashlight. And when you vacuum blocks, you can see the contents inside the player

Tech trees to unlock upgrades and new patterns

Random map generator with some interesting parameters available to adjust

UI is implemented for everything but its not pretty yet, but there is a 16 slot pattern bar with drag and drop you can use for building

Nice fluid movement system and block placement system

Sounds and music (placeholder at the moment)

Next to implement:

Tutorial (and demo)

Modifiers for maps to do things like add lakes to the surface, hit the planet with meteors to create craters before the game starts, things like that

Campaign and story

Bonus game modes such as "only uranium blocks", or "simple blocks don't yield materials so you need to hunt for more rare ones", etc

Autosave system

More optimization

Thanks for taking a look at my game!