What's in the Box?

The tools you can use to create your experience in The Sandbox Game Maker.

🔨 What Are The Tools?

Having a big idea or a dream project helps to concentrate your efforts, but when it comes down to execution, having the right tool on hand always makes the difference.

So once you have an experience in mind, what does the Game Maker offer to get your unique creation up and running? Well, let's look under the hood!

The Sandbox Game Maker is built to give you enough preset to get building without coding knowledge while offering enough flexibility to make your experiences customizable.

To achieve this there are some key tools available to you in the Game Maker.

⛰️ Blocks

In order to craft your LAND, to sculpt and design the actual topography of your experience, you’ll be using voxel BLOCKs. These are 32x32x32 voxel cubes, which represent the equivalent of 1 meter in the Sandbox Metaverse.

Blocks can be solid 🧱 or transparent 🧊, they can also be set to allow collision or to not allow collision, which will allow players to pass through them. These variables can be combined and used to achieve different results such as being transparent and permeable, which can be a great way to create a body of water. You can even set blocks to do damage 🔥 to entities who make contact with them.

Each block can be placed using a variety of brushes, either 1 by 1 or applied to a whole area with a simple click and drag of the mouse 🖱️.

Blocks come in a variety of colors and textures that can be used to build a range of biomes and settings 🏝️🏞️🌅, and if you can't find what you need, you can even create your own custom blocks using the free VoxEdit tool.

♟️ Assets

Assets are available to drag and drop into your world. With an active community of creators, there is a full, ever-expanding library of characters, creatures, treasures, plants, buildings, vehicles, and objects at the ready to deploy in your experience.

Adding these assets to your world is as simple as choosing it from the Library, adding it to your toolbar, and then dragging and dropping it exactly where you want it.

Once in your environment, you can click on the object to display a Properties Panel with a range of options to define how that object will interact with users and other objects.

🚦 Logic

The Game Maker comes with a range of ready-to-use plug-and-play logic bundles. These offer quick and easy ways to bring your assets to life.

You can set the Behaviour of an object to be a hostile enemy or a protective ally, build an ecosystem of creatures in a food chain, or customize an object to be a collectible treasure or interactive switch.

While these presets are all you need to get started building an immersive experience, you can take control of further customizations by using the message and tagging system. This system allows for objects to receive and respond to triggers you create, deepening the potential for complex relationships and interactions.