Hows things going, whats coming? Updates are on the way for several features everyone has been asking for. The current task as of writing is a full UI overhaul, replacing the UI for VR and desktop. Both are being totally redone to be much more user friendly with high Accessibility. You can view them on the nightly branch of the game, with updates coming nearly every day, Monday-Friday. The curse of Sandbox games When I refer to a sandbox game, Im talking about the kind of game that is solely about user created content, with no core game content outside content packs in service to the content creation. Im not talking about an open world game with sandbox elements, as those are full games, just with sandbox elements added on. A third type would be any game with mod tools, as those are usually much, much more limited in scope. The final type which could be argued to be a pure sandbox game, with modding added, would be procedural games, such as Minecraft and No man's sky. Both examples have a core gameplay and content though, which is a component to success. Some of the first kinds of sandbox games were level editors for games, where mod tools were basically the entire engine tools that were used to build the game. This type of control would and did allow for completely making a new game though the engine tools. Over time, these types of tools were either dialed back as to what you can do with them, or they ended all together. The most popular pure sandbox game of all time, Garrys Mod, started out as one of these. Garrys mod started out as a modded level for hl2, a single player game with sandbox elements. The enduring popularity of this type of game has generated countless other pure sandbox games, very few successful. Games that are great for development, have a fixed amount of content. You always have a rough idea on the amount of content needed to finish the next level or scene. After weighing your resources (People, time, money, skill) you can boil down to a small manageable set of content. This ability is a massive boon to development time, you always know if you're moving towards your targeted release. When you start out working on this kind of game, you usually have a good vision of what the gameplay is going to be. As you progress you can measure your gameplay funness, knowing if you're moving in the right direction towards that vision. If we convert that into a quick list, it might look like this: Fixed content, per Scene/Level/Map Fixed content allows for game centric performance optimizations, which might be a deal breaker on complex games. No one likes to play at 10-30fps. Scope of game can be adjusted to resources on hand, mainly People and time. Always have a rough estimate on progression though projects life towards finishing. Single type of gameplay, which is the same vision as the entire game Can adjust gameplay as development progresses, to refine and adjust towards the vision You might already begin to see why sandbox games are very difficult to finish. I personally think that each one of those bullet points are a must for finishing a game at any kind of reasonable timeline, to an acceptable quality of game. Lets walk through each of those points. Sandbox games are inherently about the content the users build and provide for the game. The users create the levels and scenes. You dont get the ability to control the quality of the entire game, you are giving up that control completely. Now you cant easily divide out what exactly is the core content of the game, limiting your ability to delegate out what exactly the artists and level designers should be working on. This causes friction for your artists, who then struggle, struggling members of the team drag everyone down with them. Having fixed levels, with either a linear path, or a boxed in, open world, allows you to control where the players go and see. This provides good reduction in workload for artists, allowing them to produce lower quality distant assets, or reuse general assets over larger areas. Both are great for workload reduction and improving morale. Sandbox game levels and scenes are not created by the development team, so they are fully out of our control. This means the performance is mostly up to the creators of the content. Optimization and performance tradeoffs are a difficult thing even for seasoned developers. For a casual user just wanting to make something fun this is a massive mental burden on them. Games are all about serving the users, giving them a great experience, learning about draw calls, mesh culling, fragment shader performance, etc are not fun. No team has unlimited resources, so depending on the scope of the game, you might be making a single player game with 6 unique levels, lasting a total of 6 hours of gameplay. Or you might be making the next open world game, with 50sq km of terrain, thousands of npcs and dialog. A sandbox game has no core content like this, but it hopes to support both kinds of game content created by users. This is a pretty tall order, because part of making either of those games perform well enough to be playable, is to create the game in the first place. Very much a catch-22. You cant know what types of things the terrain system might need, without creating art with it, up to its limits before raising them. You cant know how performant your physics engine will be, until you scale it up with real world content. In sandbox games, the players will smack all of your limits, the very first day you provide a build of the game. Its just the nature of players to learn the limits of the sandbox. Some of these players will blame the developers, for not accounting for their creations limitations without any thought as to why the developers didnt prioritise their use case. Since sandboxes then are trying to cater for all types of content creation within their tools limits, they then must support as many general gameplay types to match the content. If your tools let you build water, users will want to swim in it, see props float in it and create water vehicles / boats. You might have a first person player running around, though standard state machine driven movement. But maybe its desired to also run a third person GTA style animation driven movement, where the player slowly turns and steps around realistically. Now you have to cater to two different kinds of gameplay, along with all the supporting systems and content added. All unknown on how it fits into the original gameplay vision for the game, since there usually isnt a strong one. Ive always said, sandbox games kill studios. They have unending scope, where even after finishing them, users will want updates to expand the tools. If you want the sandbox to keep succeeding into the future you work on it. This keeps the studio shackled down to it, never able to fully shift to another project 100%. Unlimited creation means unlimited development time. How does this affect lavender? Throughout the entire development of this game, since before we even started, Weve had this on our minds. This isnt the first type of game we wanted to publish, but it is the first one I've personally had the absolute drive to create. I can still see the vision now to this day. Ive been struggling deciding how to provide as few limits as I can on users, I want to enable users to create anything they want. But this is one of the core problems with Sandbox games. Ive been struggling with this back and forth for years at this point. Weve seen other sandbox games come and go struggling with these exact points, maybe even without knowing why. We still dont know the right way to finish this kind of game, as developing a fully open ended sandbox is the same as building a game engine, a gameplay framework, and then a bunch of frameworks for users to create in. Its very much not traditional game creation. This struggle has brought some really low lows for me personally, drifting away from friends and family. Ive spent so much time telling people I just have to finish, then I can finally be free, even though you can never be free of sandbox games. These last few months have been brutal on my mental health along with being chronically sick during the last half year. Ive done my best to just keep working in spite of it all, but this depressed state of mind leads me to make rash decisions, along with doubling down on bad decisions after the fact. I can say that Im now doing much better, finally feeling healthy again, laughing and having good times with friends. Ill keep doing my best, and bringing this game closer to 1.0. See you at the next meetup. -June