Many features of my physics engine are ready, so I'm starting experimenting with gameplay ideas. Would you play something like this?

The game is wishlistable. Though, gameplay is not decided, release date is unknown, as I'm on R&D phase of development. But if you wishlist, you won't miss it when it's out.

You are a nanobot tasked with delicate medical procedures For some processes, you can slash and burn indiscriminately; but for others, you must extract the biopsy and guide it to the extraction. Careful not to destroy too much healthy tissue or lose the sample to the body's defenses!

i kinda want to be able to play everything you've demo'd

people have mentioned noita, but we gotta go back. ALL the way back, to Liero, the OG game of this genre (which doesn't have a good name) we played the shit out of liero back in school

Yea, I used those as references as well.

reminds me of pixeljunk shooters / noita

I imagine an improved scorched earth/worms with this engine. We all should be shooting at each other on a big jello planet.

I just watched a bunch of videos and I feel like some concept of material being 'underground' (possibly a background image) that tells the foreground whether it is 'not underground' and when it is 'underground' (surrounded by material in the Z direction). There would be friction forces when 'underground' (the idea being that your energy waves from a blast would get absorbed after a short distance by friction against the background instead of having the entire column having a jiggle-wave pass through it) The jiggling of the entire supposedly-underground structure making it feel like a tower of jello breaks the feeling of digging through terrain. A 2d spelunking/exploration/mining game with various hazards, chambers of water etc. would be really cool. The background friction bringing a large proportion of the pixels to rest could probably help you cull a lot of stationary pixels from the simulation and make much larger maps too right?

It's a good idea, and I agree about the problem it could solve, and previously I considered it, but after all decided going with another approach where stable material is being transformed into particles and back. So, everything is stable, but can be destroyed, dug, rebuilt.

....if you were being chased by a group of angry lemmings, building and digging their way towards you, shooting rockets at you, yes. Being difficult to control and being under pressure is a staple of a certain kind of older games.

haha, nice idea. Though, would require making lemmings smart