The Eternal Sand Dream

THE ETERNAL SAND DREAM

This was my first major solo Node.js application. The premise was an attempt to answer the question: "What would it be like if all that remained of the world was sand, and the only thing left to do was to scrawl your epitaph into the ground?" 

PERSISTENT, PROCEDURAL MULTIPLAYER

The desert featured items buried in the sand, procedurally generated sand dunes, and a real-time day/night cycle which dynamically shaded the 3d voxels of sand, meaning their appearance would change depending on sunrise/sunset.

Players globally shared the same space and could see each other. When a player explored beyond the boundaries, new terrain would be generated and stored in a database server-side, which would then persist to all other players using sockets.

A COMMUNAL CANVAS

Players had the ability to leave behind messages and reserve a plot of land to prevent vandalism. Mostly, however, art was laboriously created by tediously plodding along, leaving behind a permanent set of footprints.

RETROSPECTIVE

After nearly a year of work, I realized that, based on usage, that the desert was simply another bathroom wall - most users simply drew some genitals and left the site forever. However, occasionally I would find notes of people confessing their deepest thoughts, and wandering far away sometimes led to beautiful artwork.

Source code available here: https://github.com/j7caiman/sand
(184 commits, 22 branches, >20,000 lines of code)