S&box is an upcoming open source game development platform, built using a modified Source 2 engine. Out on 28th April, it’s the work of the very same Garry Newman behind the legendary Garry’s Mod, who’s been working on a spiritual successor at his company Facepunch Studios (also the developers of Rust, and originally known as Team Garry) since 2015.
Inasmuch as I am qualified to judge, S&box sounds like a robust tool – it’s got features and systems for visual scripting, open world terrain, and creating shaders. The developers are also supporting VR, but hey, nobody’s perfect. The latest, bestest news is that Facepunch have just struck a deal with Valve to let people export their S&box creations as standalone Steam games, without paying Facepunch a fee.
“We signed the new license with Valve this week, allowing us to allow people to export games from s&box’s editor and ship them as standalone games on Steam without paying us anything,” Newman writes on the project’s blog, via Gaming On Linux. “This has been a bit of a complicated journey, but with a lot of reassurance and compromises, we’ve got there.
“We still have work to do on our end,” he goes on. “We need to create a license between Facepunch and the people shipping games, then double and triple check everything is legit, but I wanted to share this progress with the community so they know that Valve did the bizzo.”
“When it’s ready we’ll be piloting it with a few select people,” Newman concludes. “The first out the door is likely to be My Summer Cottage.”
What is My Summer Cottage? It appears to be the house equivalent of My Summer Car – the “ultimate Finnish life simulator”, in which 1-to-4 players fish, hunt, forage, go to saunas, play slot machines, hurl bottles, and generally disgrace themselves.
“MY SUMMER COTTAGE is powered by s&box, a game engine based on Source 2!” the game’s developers Small Fish write on their Steam page. “We kind of weren’t able to confirm this officially before, but now that the agreement is almost done, we can finally confirm that this game is running on the s&box engine.”
You can read more about s&box on the public development roadmap. Will this be the hit Garry’s Mod was? Well, there are a lot of game creation tools in circulation these days, but the Gmod association and the seeming simplicity of publishing on Steam should earn it a few devotees. You can find out more on the s&box Steam page. Oh! I’ve just got the pun.
