Thank you very much for playing my game! And thank you for your feedback :D
Since you asked about the "stomp". The first week of the jam I was making this game with the idea that it would be a local multiplayer party game. Up to 4 players, need to use tetris-like sand shapes to build a path upwards toward the lifeguard chair. First to reach the chair is the winner. You can still see remnants of this original design in elements such as the camera, which was originally designed to be very far away to allow multiple players to follow their character. Like in the final entry you played, you could destroy the sand shapes you built by hovering on them with the cursor, and press the sand shape spawn button to erase them instead. Each sand shape is made of individual cubes. The stomp mechanic destroys nearby cubes, regardless of the ownership of the sand shapes they are a part of. So the purpose of the stomp, was to give players a tool to mess up with each other's plans, without being neither as precise nor as powerful as the erase functionality they have over their own shapes. After about 1 week into the jam, I realized a local multiplayer only party game would be an ill fit for this jam, since I participated in previous jams and I remembered Rook Rules and Rheia streamed the entries on their own. I could've still made the original design work by adding bot AI for the other players. I'm not an expert about enemy AI, but with the limited experience I have with it, I expect that writing behaviors for a game like this one may have been quite challenging for me. So I ultimately decided instead to make it into a single player game with linear levels. As it is right now, the stomp no longer serves any purpose. I had some ideas for levels with preexisting sand barriers you would need to stomp through to progress. Or pre existing shapes you would need to stomp out to collect the sand to build your own. But these ideas never made it into this version of the game. I did consider removing the stomp entirely from this version, but it was already quite polished and I think felt quite cool to use, so I just decided to leave it in.
The game actually does have per-level restrictions on sand. Each level has a pre-defined and limited amount of shapes you can spawn in a specific order. Normally, the game is intended to display a crosshair at the current position of the sand spawner. With a little digit counter for the remaining sand shapes you can spawn for that level. And when you erase shapes, you regain those specific shapes in the specific order they were erased in. However, in the build I submitted for the jam the crosshair seems to break after the first time it's displayed. I only found out about this bug during Rook's stream. I have since investigate the issue, and it should be fixed in the post jam patch I'll release once the jam's rating period is over.
Thanks again!