Simla

Simla is a “falling-sand” game, which is a genre of games characterized by simulating 2D particles. I wanted to get more familiar with Rust, so I decided to built out the simulation all in the language, powered by the wgpu library. Most of my low-level game development experience had been in C++ before this, so it was refreshing being able to still use a low-level language but with a lot of modern syntactical sugar. I also wanted to create a dev environment that was easy to move between workstations and that also supported cross-platform development and distribution, hence the wgpu backend. Using external libraries with C++ had always been a sore spot for me, so being able to leverage cargo was a real breath of fresh air for game development. Through just following the Rust book I was able to get up and running with creating a simple control loop that provided the mechanism for the simulation engine. To get prototypes of the game out faster I decided to also leverage the Pixels engine which exposed a very simple way of manipulating buffers of pixels that would be drawn. Right now the simulation supports sand, stone, and water, but I’ve been working on adding a few more particle types and optimizing the overall simulation. The project can be found on GitLab here.