Sand Castle Clamour

Sand Castle Clamour is a homebrew game by Traill where you build 3D sand castles to match a premade model. it was released on 22 August 2023 for the 2023 64brew Game Jam.

You can get the ROM from the download page by using the password builditup or from Drive. You can also get the source code from Github.

Sand Castle Clamour style and gameplay

As the name implies, Sand Castle Clamour takes place on the beach. It’s fairly non-descript, but I guess that helps with focusing on the minute details of building your castle.

The game has five levels, each of which begins by having a few seconds to observe the target model followed by the building phase. When the time comes to start building, the model is removed and you’re left with an empty 10×10 grid on which to replicate it.

The objective of each level is to copy the design of the original sand castle as closely as possible. There is a time and block limit to each stage, and they vary with the complexity of the sand castle that you need to build.

Levels

Level 1

The first level in Sand Castle Clamour has you build four small towers surrounding one taller one in the centre. They each have these little protrusions to make it a bit more complicated.

Level 2

The next level is the first one that looks like a castle. It has four walls: the front one has a door, the sides have small windows and the back has a large window.

One thing that took me forever to notice was the roof that covers the whole thing.

Level 3

Level three is a tall central tower with two outcroppings all surrounded by a short wall.

Level 4

It reminds me a bit of a spider, this one has a lot of legs that all end up converging onto the central column.

Level 5

The most intense of them all, this model uses 188 blocks in total. This is the only level to use the outermost cubes of the board.

Honestly my favourite of the bunch.

‘Summer’ theme

Sand Castle Clamour is based on building sand castles on the beach and watching them get swept away by the tide. What could be more summery than that?

Credits

The game was made by Traill. No other credits were provided.

Review and conclusion

At first, Sand Castle Clamour is very confusing. This primarily stems from having to remember a difficult control scheme and then having to memorise a pattern with 100+ blocks. Traill himself has said that he didn’t have the chance to do some proper playtesting before releasing the end of the game jam.

That said, it is a very unique idea. There is some symmetry to the sand castles so it isn’t all doom and gloom. Though the game does have a few exceptions to it like the doors/windows on level 2 or the legs on level 4.

I think the game could have otherwise been improved by letting the control stick rotate the camera since it’s a bit hard to see the inner blocks on the models that have walls like level 2 and 5. Also I did have to contort my hand quite a bit to press C-up and C-down at the same time as the A button to place blocks in a vertical column.

Once you get used to the controls, the game isn’t really that difficult. I managed to get all stages done within 2-3 tries, the only exception being level 2 that took me a solid 20 minutes before I realised that it had a ceiling.

Overall, I think that Sand Castle Clamour not only has a difficulty curve but a fun curve. It’s really hard to get a hang of it but once you do, it’s smooth sailing. I think that with a few ‘training’ levels before level 1 would have helped ease the difficulty a little bit