Digging up a sand game from 2006

Do you remember falling-sand games? They were a trend around 2005/2006: A fun particle simulation of sand, water, plants, fire, and similar substances interacting.

On Christmas, Liam O’Connor’s “Micro Entertainment Pack: Sand“ reminded me of the genre. And then, I remembered, that I too had created such a game back in the day.

Some time in 2006, I implemented some basic falling-sand game in Delphi during school programming classes, I seem to remember. It was actually quite challenging to get something like this to fly in a single-threaded environment without access to shaders and such. I managed to make it work in Blitz3d, a comparably performant Basic dialect with DirectX 7 support (i.e. with no shaders yet either :(.).

It’s been great developing the game in the open together with the Blitz community. One can still find the process on blitzforum.de. We came up with some fun mechanics that were special when compared with other falling-sand games of the time.

So, I dug up the source and compiled a fresh version of this 2006 game to be archived on github.com and, of course, here on itch.io. … and naturally, I lost some hours, playing around with sand, water, and oil again myself.