Sand Lords

Sand Lords

⚠️ EARLY TEST BUILD — PLEASE READ

Sandlords is a sandbox simulation game I worked on where the world is designed to feel alive and reactive,  simulates its entire world on your GPU. Every grain of sand, every drop of water, every fire is computed in shaders, every single frame. It is much heavier than it looks.

IF IT RUNS BADLY — do this first:

Settings → Simulation → World Detail → Low, then start a new world.
This is the single biggest performance control. It shrinks the simulation grid
and costs far less GPU. (It applies to the NEXT world you create.)

I eventually put this project on hold because making it work properly across different platforms became much more difficult than I expected. Since the simulation relies heavily on the GPU, which makes supporting lower-end hardware and multiple platforms a major challenge.

Even though development is currently paused, I still think this project turned out really interesting, and I wanted to share what I built.

Requirements:

MINIMUM (estimated — not yet verified on real hardware)
OS: Windows 10 64-bit
CPU: Quad-core
RAM: 8 GB
GPU: Dedicated card with compute support (GTX 1060 6GB / RX 580 class)
Notes: Run World Detail: Low

RECOMMENDED (the machine it was developed and tested on)
OS: Windows 11 64-bit
CPU: Ryzen 7 7700X or similar
RAM: 16 GB
GPU: NVIDIA RTX 3060 or better