[Rendello]

I never did the collision physics, but I used to love making graphical demos with "falling sand"-type simulations.

One of the first was "rain" [1] by semi-randomly walking blue pixels down the screen and not clearing the buffer. But then the screen would go all blue, so I made them pop up to the top and do the same walk but as black pixels. It came out as a rain-on-the-window effect:

https://x.com/Rendello_/status/1231426590380318729

Eventually, I started just using one pixel and moving it really fast to render scenes. This is basically what raster rending does anyway, but instead of doing every pixel, the random walk will only hit a subset of pixels every frame and will make a really cool scratchy effect.

In PICO-8: https://x.com/Rendello_/status/1258243668626063361

In TempleOS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-wpUcDFZaI

[darknavi]

Porting it to TempleOS sounds like a fun journey

[Rendello]

It's how I learned lower level programming. TempleOS is a lot of fun but the community around it is very 4chan/kiwifarms. I never jived with that.

During the pandemic I was showing my buddies the game I'd made in TempleOS on Discord, and after a bit the conversation moved on and I was just playing idly, and my character died. The screen went black and error text showed up. My buddy interrupted the conversation with "wait, does the game just segfault when you die!?".

"Of course not. The game didn't segfault, the operating system did." The bug lasted for months and would just kill the entire OS every time you died. It was a lot of fun.