If you make a game or a map and people play it, we'll give you some money. The more people play it, the more money we'll give you.

This is a way of monetising without encouraging each game to add microtransactions. My hope is that this will encourage people to make games that others want to play - rather than trying to make games that are the best at extracting money from you.

https://sbox.game/news/the-play-fund-838fff99

An update on the Sandbox mode, exporting games, monetisation, and a ton of new features!

Click here to read the latest development blog[sbox.game].

What is Tech Jam

Today we're launching our first ever Tech Jam[sbox.game].

This is something I've thought about doing for a while. The Game Jams are great, but there's a lot of boilerplate involved in making a game, and it's not always that important. And inevitably the larger, multi-discipline teams always stand the best chances of winning.

So I wanted to do something that solved all that. Throw away the vegetables, and the plate, and the table - and just concentrate on the meat.


Getting Started

It's pretty easy to get started..

1. Click the Log In button on the top right of the s&box home page[sbox.game]
   
2. Log in with your Steam Account
   
3. Click banner at the top[sbox.game]
   
4. You'll now have s&box in your Steam Account

Our engine is pretty easy to get into. It's got a scene editor, GameObjects and Components. All code is in C#. Shader code is in hlsl. It has super fast hotloading.

We have a bunch of documentation[sbox.game] here, but please let us know if you're finding anything difficult and we'll try to make things more obvious.


Pass it On

It's not in your favour to do this. If you're smart you'd keep it to yourself and increase your chances of winning with less competition.

But please pass it on to someone that could be interested.

You know who I'm talking about. Maybe they've been posting screenshots of their Source Engine maps for 15 years and have never actually released their maps anywhere. Maybe they're always posting videos of impressive stuff they've made in Unity, but never actually release anything because it's not feasible to spend 20ms rendering clouds in any game.

I know it's really our job, and we're trying, but you stand a better chance than us. Maybe you could just shoot them a message and tell them about s&box. Let them know what we're trying to do. Let them know it's all free so they have nothing to lose. Let them know a lot of the skills they already have, like from GMod, CSS, Unity and C#, are transferrable. If they refuse, maybe get militant about it. Make everything about s&box. When they post a photo of their kid's birthday on Facebook, post about s&box on it. If they still refuse to enter the contest, unfriend and block.


Expectations

I'm expecting to be surprised. If that's possible. The scope of things that you could submit is huge, but the actual thing you need to make can be quite small, laser focused.

I'm expecting people to make awesome looking maps like things we've never seen before in the Source engine. Using the volumetric lighting, bloom, dynamic reflections. All that good stuff.

I'm expecting people to create scenes in the scene editor, by arranging models, setting up lighting, some ambient sound, and cool particles, all to make something very special.

I'd expect people to create verlet systems, liquid systems and other dynamic physics systems to make really interesting interactions.

I'd think someone would be able to decypher the shader system to make things impressive and beautiful.

I can imagine someone using some open web api to stream in data that they could then use to create world geometry and textures on the fly, creating a procedural world.

We posted our monthly devblog over at the main site. Click here to read it[sbox.game].

Since a lot of stuff is going on, I thought it would be a good idea to give you a quick overview of what's going on - so you understand our current plans.


We're currently in what we're calling a "Developer Preview". We have made this cool editor, and all these tools to publish and play games, and we want to test them out. We already have hundreds of developers making games and giving feedback, and we're updating and improving every day. It's a big big job, but it's what we love doing.

If you're interested in joining the developer preview you can sign in here and follow the instructions to add the game[sbox.game] to your Steam account.


The engine is Source 2 with a c# layer on top. Similar to how Garry's Mod is Source 1 with Lua on top.

Our c# system is awesome. It hotloads on save, and the hotload takes a few milliseconds. It feels great to develop in. It's also networked, so you can edit your c# code as the server, and the changes will get sent to the clients so everyone has the same content.

We stopped using the Entity system and moved to a GameObject and Component system. This moves a lot of the work away code and into the Scene Editor. This is a lot more fun to use as a developer. It changes to be very WYSIWYG.


Our vision for s&box isn't just a game platform, it's an engine. We hope to let you export the games you create in the engine to be able to sell them on Steam and other places. We are currently working with Valve to license for this. There will be no licensing fees or royalties.

It's our hope that in the future we'll be able to export to other platforms.


We will let developers monetise their games on the platform - but we want to be careful about it. We don't want to get into a situation where every game you click on has some pay to win system, and the buy button keeps moving around so you accidentally click on it. We want to explore options that are fair to players and developers.


We realise that people expect an official Sandbox mode from Facepunch on the engine, and have been weary about doing that. But the more we thought about it, the more we thought about a few new features that justify making it - so we're currently working on that, and won't release s&box until that's done.


We're working on Human models - calm down!

• Home Page[sbox.game]
  
• Game List[sbox.game]
  
• API Reference[sbox.game]
  
• Documentation[docs.facepunch.com]