The Falling Sand Game

The Falling Sand Game is a real gem. It's more of a webtoy than a game (I know, I hate that phrase, too, but that's what it is!). As you may have noticed, I've been pretty into the types of games where you set something up and then watch it run, the physical simulation type things. I guess it makes sense - I was a physics major, after all!

Anyways, this is a lot of fun to play; unfortunately, I have no idea who to credit for it. Sometimes it's known as World of Sand, too; the Falling Sand Game website has the following to say about it:

"Falling Sand Game", also "World of Sand", (2005) is a Java applet first found on the Dofi Blog via Fark thread, later enlarged and rehosted by Chirag Mehta. The game has been popular on community link sites like Digg and Delicious and involves four main falling particles: sand, water, salt, and oil. Each of these particles have special properties that can be manipulated; among these include burning, desiccating, growing, eroding, and more. Along with these four, main particles are auxiliary environmental manipulators: Wall, Fire, Plant, Spout, Cera (or wax), ???, and Eraser. By putting these together, one can thoroughly enjoy the modeling and construction of very complex structures and systems. There is an additional special feature that can be turned on, off, or told to remain in place. This is called the namekuji. In japanese, "namekuji" means slug, naturally for the properties of a slug when salt is poured onto it. Several different versions exist, varying from applets with zombies, or human bodies, that have their own unique properties to applets where auxiliary environmental manipulators have additional properties.

So anyways, give it a go. When you've played the original, you might also want to check out Pyro Sand, Pyro Sand 2, and Hell of Sand, my favorites of the mods.

By the way, all of these games were built with Processing, which I've been pushing quite a bit lately - it's just such a nice environment to quickly bang out cool Java applets with. FYI, the source for Pyro Sand has been released, and "You're welcome to use it in whatever way you please. " according to this forum post. At some point I may try to find the time to refactor this code a little bit and release a more OO version with some explanation of what's going on.