It has been awhile since Grubs was public. We are very excited to share that it is available to play again, and will stay public for the foreseeable future. There is plenty we changed, lots we plan to add, and new bugs to squash, so read on!

I actually started re-writing Grubs about 6 months ago. The s&box scene system was very new, so I started it knowing it wouldn't be completed for awhile. Networking was very immature, libraries were not possible, and even if they were, the Facepunch SDF library had not been updated for scene yet.

Over the last 6 months, our team has grown a much deeper appreciation for the s&box scene system. There are features we've wanted to add that seem like much more realistic goals now, and a lot of unsolvable entity system bugs that we don't have to worry about anymore.

That doesn't mean that there aren't a slew of new bugs and issues that we have to address that are specific to the scene system, though.

We have plenty of new bugs to address, but some of them aren't necessarily in our own control. Our biggest source of errors at the moment is actually the Facepunch SDF library that we use for our terrain. That said, this library is incredible for us, and Grubs wouldn't be possible without it.

Grubs has some cool updates (new backflip animation, anyone?), but we definitely aren't happy with the game in its current state. There is a lot of polish, balancing, and bug fixing to be done. There are also some awesome features we are looking to add.

Players will soon be able to create presets for their grub teams. You will be able to dress grubs, name them, and save these customizations, so you can easily swap between your teams. We also hope to allow custom sound banks, which changes how your grubs sound in-game.

We want to add a level editor, so players make their own levels, and hopefully terrain materials, which can be uploaded to our custom backend. Players will be able to play and vote on these levels, via a level browser inside Grubs which automatically downloads and applies the level for all connected clients. Players will be able to preview these levels, and sort based on popularity, rating.

Other new features will include heavily-customizable game rules (want to make a game where everyone has unlimited goats and nothing else?), new and improved bots, awesome new weapons, and more!

Yeah, we do too. Sadly, most of our team members have full time jobs or are in school. Motivating a team is difficult without financial compensation. If we could get paid to work on Grubs, we would have a much more polished and complete game much sooner! 

For now, we work on Grubs in short bursts of motivation. Developing in a work-in-progress engine that breaks often can be tiring, but we believe in the future of s&box. We also do not want to put all our eggs in one basket - keep an eye out for other s&box games that we are chipping away at.

As a reminder, Grubs is fully open-source. We welcome pull requests, issues, etc. Furthermore, you can play Grubs right now on s&box! Try the #playtest channel in the s&box Discord, or the #grubs channel in the Ape Tavern Discord if you are looking for people to play with.

Lastly, I want to share some fun statistics. Grubs has now had over 8400 unique players. Many of these players have played over 1 hour, which is astounding to me. There are people I do not know at all who have played our game for over 20 hours. 

We are incredibly thrilled by the support we get from the community. When I started Grubs almost 3 years ago now, I did not expect the amount of love it would get, or the amount of people that would rally behind me to help me make it. To all the players, contributors, developers, and Facepunch - thank you. Grubs was my first foray into game development, and you all made it an incredible experience.

We will have lots of updates soon - and we'll try to keep everyone up to date with our news posts. Feel free to leave feedback on what features you are most looking forward to in the comments of this news post - it might help us prioritize work!