Neat, very cool workflow!

I could imagine an extension of this concept down the road that possibly quantizes the colors from any input image down to a few colors, matches it to the closest reference color, and then renders it as sand.

Damn, this is cool. I never would've thought of that. Does this just map image colors to sand particle types?

This is awesome, I love the effect! Great work.

Personally when I want to make a lot of progress I work on the stuff I'm most excited about, even if it's not the most important thing to accomplish at that point in time.

Usually by the time I'm finished with that I'm actually excited to work on the more challenging stuff too.

Awesome, have fun!

You can take one of these theme ideas and combine it with a genre (e.g. platformer, strategy, etc...) to help narrow it down further.

Example: "One Bullet". If I wanted to make a platformer I might make a game where I need to line up my akm to defeat all the enemies in each level in one shot.

Everyone's process for this is a little different in my experience. Sometimes I come up with ideas from playing with knick-knacks on my desk.

Another thing that might help is to go look at some Game Jam themes.

Here's a cool site I found: letsmakeagame.net/game-jam-the...

Awesome, makes sense! Looking forward to seeing it in action.

The biggest thing is not to get stuck in the trap of blindly following tutorials. Use the tutorials to learn what you need to solve your specific problem and ditch them as soon as possible.

Start with a super simple game idea with just one or two mechanics. Learn how to implement each mechanic in the game engine of your choice by watching tutorials/searching online.

LLMs are very powerful learning tools too. You can ask it things like "how do I make my character jump in Godot?".

Neat! I know nothing about how the physics of these types of games work. Do pixels just attempt to move downwards at a constant velocity until they hit a surface or is there an actual accelerative force towards the bottom of the screen?

I was pleasantly surprised by Space Marine 2 in this exact way. I bought that game not even realizing there was a multiplayer mode. Not only does it exist, but it's actually great and complements the main story really well.

This is cool. How hard would it be to make it so that explosions send little sand particles flying all over the place?

I wonder how many devs try to go down the latter path and pull their hair out during playtesting when players don't get what they're going for.

Designing levels that clearly signal what the player is supposed to interact with next is hard (see HL2 dev commentary). I've always seen yellow paint as a shortcut. Minimaps too, to a lesser degree.

It's SO much better when games use subtle environmental cues to guide player attention.