Sand Saga Insider: April 2024

Patrik Harag, 2024-05-01

It’s been a month since SandSaga.com was officially released! *

I consider the release to be successful. It seems that the core gamers have transitioned and are going directly to the new domain. SandSaga.com has gained top spots in search engines for queries like “sand saga” and similar.

However, many people are still playing on the old page here at Harag.cz (perhaps up to 50%). The original page has a stronger position in search engines for queries like “sand game” or “falling sand game” and some people just stay here. Also, some students can supposedly play here with their Chromebooks, while SandSaga.com is blocked for them. Haha. I can't help here.

An interesting achievement was recorded on April 25th, when minutes of playtime on SandSaga.com exceeded a million minutes. That’s almost two years! And since then, this indicator has nicely progressed.

Enough with the statistics, let’s now take a look at the summary of additions from April.

April Additions

Added new tools for scenario creators (modders), the guide improved

New scenario: Cheese Game by Mecanix – thanks for the first community creation!

Engine Update 24w15a
• Introduced temperature tools
• Improved tree interactions with powders and fluids
• Improved solid bodies handling in fall-through mode

Engine Update 24w17a
• Introduced birds and butterflies
• Improved Move tool – it can be used to move solid bodies and entities

Birds and butterflies are actually a bigger change than it seems. I had to make major interventions into the engine and added support for entities. Previously, everything was an element, now there are elements + entities. Entities can have more complex state behavior and they operate on a completely different principle than other elements. It’s probably not visible, but the fish was also re-implemented, it is now also an entity.

Further Development

I want to implement bird & butterfly spawning and improve the behaviour of all entities (currently it’s just silly random walk). There are many other ideas, but it’s unclear which ones will be implemented. I will try to update Sand Saga every two weeks on Sunday. This means that the next one would be on May 12th. We’ll see if this will work.

Conclusion

I would like to thank everyone for the kind feedback!

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* It was in beta version since February 18, 2024. During the beta period, people completed 3,300 scenarios and logged 78,000 minutes of playtime, approximately 5% of players tried out Sand Saga.