Small Sands by zimny11
Hello all!
A little chill game. Help Small Sands deliver the last block to the pyramid. The stone block is extremely heavy, so a lot of Small Sands will be needed to move it. Or maybe there is something else that could speed things up?
Send Small Sands to collect resources and assign them to different tasks. Delivering water and food will produce more Small Sands. All Small Sands resting in the house will think hard on new technologies. The rest is for you to figure out. Good luck!
Recommended to play in itch.io full screen mode.

Known bug:
Menu and Win screen are shifted/rescaled on bigger monitors.
You can use beams without producing any. In theory you should be able to do that only after producing 8 of them.
Controls:
Start Game - Spacebar
Interact - Mouse Left Click
Move - Mouse
Tools:
Game: Godot 3.5
Sprites: Piskel Online
Font: BitFontMaker2 Online
| GitHUB | https://github.com/zimny11/SmallSands |
| itch.io | https://zimny11.itch.io/small-sands |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/small-sands |
Ratings
| Overall | 98th | 3.732⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 106th | 3.607⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 143th | 3.429⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 47th | 4.089⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 130th | 3.679⭐ | 30🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 135th | 3.481⭐ | 29🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 33🗳️ | 44🗨️ |
It did take a bit for me to work out what to do, one I figured out moving the mouse to the edge of the screen to look it became clear. It is a little slow going but it suited what the goal was, also got me excited as the block got closer to the finish.
If there was any audio it did't work for me.
Cute game, I liked having to figure out the game mechanics without much guidance - it added to the mysterious feeling.
UI is not intuitive and could use some work. Took me a while to realise that it is actually a number (weird font) above the main building.
I did experience some motion sickness after 10 to 15 minutes of playing, and I had to stop. I think it's because I have to play on 34" full-screen and constantly move the screen left and right. It could be improved by allowing the player to zoom out a bit and perhaps smoothing out the camera movement. Always a tricky issue.
Another improvement I would like is camera controls via keyboard.
I love the small animations, and there is good “Wuselfaktor” at the end, so it's fun to watch the little peeps running around :D
The progression at the start feels well paced, maybe at the end it takes a bit to long to get enough together to get that stone moving. Since you can't improve anything at that point, you end up just watching and feeling a bit stuck.
Wonderful game! Fantastic effort in such a short amount of time, I loved the last games you've made so I had to find out what you've made this time around! I enjoy the way you make games, and the way you're allowed to figure things out. I dislike long drawn out tutorials. Love the oldschool art and animation style, I appreciate the details like the wheat grains disappearing when harvested. Thank you for the entry <3
@jk5000 Thank you. I not that big fun of tutorial (at least those explaining everything step by step). For me they kill a bit of fun of discovering, but I get that at least some tutorial would be good, so I absolutely get that feedback. As I mentioned above, it was either music/sound effects or one more feature that I really wanted to add (jugs for water carrying).
@flightless Thanks for playing and commenting! Love the meme :D
@sdcorpse Thanks! Appreciate.
@akacooh UI needs improvements for sure! I wanted to stylized number to look a bit like hieroglyphs, I guess it did not worked out that great, and making same system for free workers with dots would be better. Thanks for the feedback.
@rpgwanderer Yeah! It is so satisfyingly just looking at them running around :) At first I thought about adding some time limit, but then decided against it as it will not allowed to just stop for a moment and look at little workers running around. Thank you for playing!
@kanagg Thank you! Sorry about motion sickness. My screens are way smaller, so I guess I did not noticed that because of that. I thought for a moment about zooming in and out, but I was worried about art scaling and getting some weird graphic artifacts. I do not have much experience with camera yet. Thanks for the feedback.
@belle Thank you so much! Comments like this are really making me happy <3 Yeah, I'm "team no tutorials" too. No one reads them anyway XD
I grew up playing management and strategy games, so I love seeing little people running around doing what I tell them to do! Scratches an itch that never stops itching. Impressive that you're out here doing all this developing on your own!
Overall, fantastic effort in such a short time! Keep it up! ❤️
I was really confused by the scroll speed and the small size of the viewport. Then I activated my brain and realised your game is zoom dependent on the browser.
Have a look:



From 120% to 80%, the best zoom option for me was about 105%
In Godot 3.5, for 2d game exported in WebGL, the best way to avoid this is to set the Project Settings > Mode to 2d and Aspect to Keep

Other then that, I had fun, it's a fun relax game and showing your stock on item in the building is a great addition to have less UI
@anekich Thanks! I wanted it to be a calm experience. This is one reason why it is slow, but of course I could have balanced it better.
@scott-redrup Thanks for playing and commenting! Oh it would take a long time. I think with starting few it moves one pixel every few seconds XD
@togis Thank you so much! I had no idea why the issue exist, but it makes perfect sense now. Thanks for the help and for playing! I'm a huge fan of UIs integrated into the game :)
@lisek-gagatek Thank you for the feedback. And for playing of course. My idea was, that if you have spare workers you just send them to move the stone block, but of course it could have been balanced better. One more time, thanks for the feedback, it is something to think about in the future.
@sphinx Thanks! I'm not a fan of tutorial. Most people don't read them anyway XD Happy to hear you invested your time to figure it out. Hope you had fun time :)
I went into it without reading any instructions and really enjoyed figuring out what was going on and how the little world works.
Ýou managed to put a lot of things in the game for the compo. Great work!
I liked that I could look both horizontally and vertically. Only being able to see the top or bottom of the stalk helped it feel taller than it really was.
Towards the end, I recalled all 38 of my busy villagers back to town for a huge meeting. The word? "It's time to summon the giant eyeball in the sky." They all left in a swarm of bodies to join the other workers laboring at the stone. It only took a minute or two. And then...

@sudocoffee Thank you! Happy to hear the game was intuitive enough for it to be pick up without instructions.
@ms-malloc Thanks! Sorry, about the number. I tried to make it look a bit like hieroglyphs, and the readability suffered because of it. Probably using same dot system like everywhere else would have been better.
If you want to improve it, spending an hour on sounds is usually a great investment of time.
@artallester Thanks!
@rongo-matane Thank you! The starting idea was to build whole pyramid and to have way more upgrade, but knowing from previous LDs I cut it down and it still was close... too close. Yes, I got few comments on camera movement motion sickness, so I'm guessing, as you suggested, zooming it a bit out would be better. Kind of worried then wheat would not felt as tall as it is now, but that maybe making it even taller and movement on it fast to compensate... Yes! I regret choosing adding one more feature over some sound effect now. One more time, thank you for playing and for the feedback!
@jajo Thanks for your kind words! I didn't want to make standard menu that displays resources, but I guess some feedback notification for resources gathered still would be nice.
Maybe a zoom-out would have made the experience more agreeable.
I strive to be able to create a compo game of this quality! I see on the github you just upload a 7z, ot would be nice for curious people like me to expose your project structure so we can delve into how you made it.
@baturinsky Thank you for the feedback! I wanted to make it chill experience, but I absolutely get your point!
Anyway, this was really great! The research mechanic was definitely the highlight for me - the moments when I completed one and suddenly both a new "house" appeared and a previously background element turned into a gatherable resource were awesome. And upgrading the existing ones with ropes and pots and wheels was very cool too. It was also interesting as a gameplay mechanic - usually, in this kind of games leaving workers idle is a bad idea, so you constantly have to find stuff to do for them. But here, it actually helps you, making it both a more relaxed experience, and adding a balancing act of should I focus on gathering more materials to gain more people, or research faster? I really loved it.
In general though, it did feel more fun in the early-game than the late-game (similar to some other games in the genre). Once you complete your research, and have enough workers to stop engaging with the "wheat running out so you have to switch stalks" mechanic, it kind of turns into a maintenance game, where the only thing you do is occasionally replenish the ropes and pots or send more workers to the brick. And that phase did take a bit long, like others have said. Still, it wasn't too bad.
Overall, I really enjoyed it! It was a fun and relaxing experience. The graphics were also nice - I especially liked the very tall wheat stalks and the parallax background. Awesome entry!