Right now you can create maps in Hammer, but you can't really add any functionality. You can't add doors, or buttons, or hurt triggers, and you can't add logic. 

So now Scenes can be published and loaded as maps. Map projects can target specific games - which means that you can create maps using components that the game has programmed. And when you press play in the editor, you can play that scene in that game, straight away.

What's cool about this is that you can use ActionGraph to create a bunch of logic in your map, so you can have working doors and lightswitches, you can have death triggers, you can teleport the player around etc etc.

I'm testing this using Walker right now. So now in editor, you can create a new Walker Map - and it will create an addon project and give you a small scene showing you how do to some stuff. I'm no mapper, but I made an example map and published it here - you can play it in game from the maps tab.

This leaves Hammer out in the cold a bit, because you can't do any of that stuff. Don't worry - it's our intention to get this right in the Scene system and then make it all work in Hammer too.

You can now preview and edit animation parameters in the inspector. In the future we want to have an option to save these so they can be animated with the movie maker.

Use your memory and powers of deduction to match cards in this roguelike puzzle game. 

Can you defeat the Wizard on level 10? Probably not. You'll need to concentrate hard (and buy useful items) to even have a chance.

You can now add achievements to your games. Achievements can be unlocked manually, or can be linked to a stat value, so you don't have to worry about it.

They can also have a score associated with them, which is added to a user's running total. The gamer with the highest score at the end of the year is the best in the world.

Garry did a big reskin to make everything less dull, and I've used his feedback to make everything more compact with less redundancy.

Scene reference nodes now have a little thumbnail showing the target object, like with resource references.

Another little feature: when watching a running graph, you can see whether links are carrying true, false, or null based on their colours when they pulse.

A commonly requested feature was the ability to draw something over everything. For example, people wanted to draw a WorldPanel on top of everything else, so you could see it through walls, at a large distance.

So now you have render layers selection, which allow you to select layers to render on. This can be very useful for creating something like viewmodels, where you want them to render in the scene, with all the same lighting - but on top of everything else.

Our intention in the future is to allow you to create your own passes to select here, to create custom special effects, and to be able to further customize viewmodel rendering.

We tried to get a minimal store page up on Steam earlier this month, but the reviewers said we needed to submit a full build of the game to get the page up. So we did. That was about 3 weeks ago.

Published maps can now set up their own Stats and Achievements. How they're used is really going to be down to the map maker, and the game that the map is targeting.

To add a stat, you just use the Services stuff in ActionGraph - so you can tie it to any logic that you want.

And to unlock an achievement manually, same deal.

Again, there's no real way to use this functionality in Hammer yet. Our intention is to make it all work in Scenes, and then make Hammer able to use Scenes - so it's all kind of the same system.

The scene system got an event system. This allows you to send an event to every Component and GameObjectSystem in the scene.

I decided on making the event system interface based, since it's built into c# and the most versatile.

The Undo system isn't perfect, but it got a bit better this month.

Previously, for undo, we were generally keeping a copy of the scene after ever change, and loading that when you undid. This is the lazy way to do it.. and lots of people noticed that it was getting quite slow in larger scenes.

The new system saves individual GameObjects and Components, so it's a lot faster. It can go beyond that though, and you can provide a undo/redo actions, to be the most optimal it can be.

I've been ticking stuff off this month, thinking about what I need to make the actual Sandbox Mode. Faceposing is a big one of those things, so this month I made it so you can edit them in the editor.

There are now a bunch more options on the backend here for configuring your game. Some of these settings were in the game project itself, but we decided that they're better configured here.

We have a few different options that let you select some categories for your games, like singleplayer, coop, versus, 3 player, vr etc. The intention here is to allow us to filter the games a bit more logically.

There are also options on map selection. This will change whether the map selector is shown when opening your game, or whether they should be allowed to play without a map selection.

Trail renderers now have the option to align to game object rotation, instead of just align to camera.

There's also a new .sbox folder in your projects for project-specific temporary files and caches (such as cookies, asset thumbnails, and the download cache for cloud assets). Before these files were all stored in a single global folder inside steamapps.


If you're someone who's precious about every last byte of storage, you'll now free more of that up when you delete a project. More practically though, this change will keep things more organised and avoid the unnecessary work we had before with a single global temporary folder for all projects, like often having to redownload cloud assets because the version was different.

If you haven't already, you'll want to add as an exclusion to any existing project repos to keep this out of version control.

I enabled physics in editor and made a little tool to grab them. This is useful for placing props that you want scattered about.

I found myself wanting to open games from the website, so I added it last week, we can make this work for maps too

Before it wasn't always super clear what was going on with the cloud assets in your projects, when they were being updated, how you could avoid that, and why some things would just sometimes end up breaking after a while in big projects.

Now, they'll stick to a version unless you go and manually update it, and everything references the specific version you're using too.

If you abandon a project for months on end, you should now be able to come back and see everything just like it was. No error models from broken paths, and if the asset creator since decided to change the colour of your red fire extinguishers to be a tasteful lime green, that can't wreck the look of your game (unless you want that).

We've got more improvements to this experience in the works, but the hope is that this all being more explicit makes this nicer to work with, and gives you more of that control over what's in your game.

As you know, our intention is to let you export your games from s&box, to let you make money by selling on Steam without us asking for royalties etc. 

This month we started talking to Valve about it, and while there's nothing official yet, things are looking good.

Lots of improvements this month. Every week we're fixing things that annoy us. Everything is getting a little bit more refined every day.

Our biggest challenge is still getting and keeping players online. The only real way this platform works is if it's got a consistently baseline player count. That's something we don't really have right now. We have made a really fun editor, with lots of developers making interesting things.. but there doesn't seem to be anything that is keeping lots of players online consistently yet.

That's really what I've been stressing on for the past month. I've spent a lot of time on the editor - not so much on the game. We need to make the game work.