Thanks to everyone who participated in the jam! I'm super excited to play all the games.
For those of you who participated, and it's your first time using s&box, how did you like the engine? What are some things you wish were improved? I would love to hear your feedback so I can pass it on to Facepunch.
Coming from a place of the majority of my experience being Unity experience and 6 months or so of Unreal Engine. There's a nice feeling of "It just works", especially from the Unity background. The UI was the only place that gave me some trouble for a bit. Especially since when you search for documentation a lot of the links just don't seem to work.
This was a top result on google for searching for something networking related:
https://sbox.game/dev/api/Sandbox.Network.GameNetworkSystem/OnConnected
Yet it goes to a dead link for me, had someone else confirm it was dead as well. There's tons of these so I had to rely on discord searches far more than anything else. There's even links from the old documentation that link to the new https://sbox.game/dev/api and those are dead as well so it can be hard to find what you want.
Other than that it was really smooth, since networking mostly works out of the box things feel much better. Unity has bounced around a ton between networking systems, with my first major game I made I used Unity's new (at the time) UNet which was immediately discontinued after my game was released and took months of work to move to a new system. So it'll be interesting to see how long term support for these things goes.
When external builds are fully working I think just as a standalone game engine it will definitely be able to hold it's own.
A pretty comfortable engine for me! I don't have any experience with Unity but it feels incredibly simple to use despite what many people think of Source. The tools are up to date and what I love the most is the seamless cloud integration. One thing, I know this still in development but most people struggle with the lack of documentation and tutorials which is to be expected for a new platform. Hopefully as the platform grows this eventually gets sorted out.
This was my first time using S&box, and while it was tough at times, I鈥檓 really glad I stuck with it.
I came in with a vision for the game that I couldn鈥檛 fully realize, mostly because I spent a lot of time just figuring things out — how components work, how to manage scenes, and especially how to handle the UI system, which took me a lot longer than expected.
I also ran into a lot of frustrating issues with code and testing, which slowed me down and meant I couldn鈥檛 polish the game as much as I wanted.
But despite all of that, I鈥檓 happy I was able to finish something and submit. It may not be perfect, but I learned a lot, and I鈥檓 proud that I didn鈥檛 give up.
Hey there!
This was the first time using s&box for both my project partner and me, and generally, I enjoyed it. The number of components it comes with makes it really easy to whip something up quickly. There were a few times I wrote custom classes only to find a component that already did what I needed. For instance, the sound component was seamless, allowing you to create a list of WAV files, randomize them, and play them anywhere without worrying about file pathing.
I appreciate how easy it is to publish and load your game via s&box. No issues with that whatsoever.
Although we didn't use it, the action graph is really cool. I think it makes the tool much more accessible for anyone intimidated by programming.
The cloud assets were an excellent idea; I found they worked best for models. Need to fill out your scene? No problem, just search for what you need and plop it in there.
That being said, it seems like s&box needs work, particularly on the material side. Sometimes, we would use cloud materials on assets, and scene files wouldn't pick up the references. You'd play the game in the editor, and it appeared fine, but after publishing, those assets had missing textures. I found this issue to be very inconsistent.
Similarly, we also had issues with overlapping naming. For example, I created a shader called "water." Then, when my partner and I loaded up the game, we each had different water. I had my own, but his game was using the s&box water shader. Luckily, I was able to fix this simply by renaming it.
Other than that, I found the documentation and online resources somewhat lacking, but I know that's something that will come with time. In a weird way, part of me kinda likes that all the info isn't there yet; it reminds me of the old internet days.
Overall, really good job, guys! Looking forward to watching s&box progress. Thanks for hosting this jam too!
