In what felt like a very very long month, S&box grew on me right away to quickly become my new favorite engine. I'm a very long time unreal engine user, and there's still a lot of things I like about it, but I find C#, components, and the scene system make a lot more sense to my brain.

I think I would have really liked unity if I ever gave it a shot but I saw too many red flags to ever want to use it.

Not having to use C++ is a big plus. If I want to make a plugin (library) I don't have to learn a bunch of weird and complex things, I can easily extend mostly whatever I want with the same code I'm using for the game.

I said it in my last post and I'll say it again, I am super proud of what I created here, almost entirely solo. The only things I had help on were having the icons for the upgrades made by blstrmanx, and the track that plays during gameplay made by okinoth. I made a dynamic music system that adjusts based on what is going on during the game and okinoth did a great job understanding and making music that worked with this system out of the box.

I've always wanted to make a game with this specific art style and I'm glad I finally got to realize that in a very shiny package. Launch site is a bit rough around the edges because of how big it is, but I am still in love with the giant rocket and the skybox I made for it.

This section is mostly focused on what I wish went better with the game, and I don't have a lot of bad things to say about the engine. Documentation could be a lot better but that's to be expected, and there's some missing features like foliage that are coming anyways so I'm not too worried there.

This was my first S&box game, and as such there was a lot of bad code near the beginning that when built upon made everything held together by duct tape. I used the facepunch player controller for my character, threw out half the stuff, and by the end really wished I had just made my own streamlined for my game. There's also too much stuff hard coded to the game mode I settled on, and any changes will require a big refactor.

The UI is not amazing, I think the menu came out really well but ingame is not very cohesive and I went with a very half baked solution for telling players how to use their special because I noticed it was being under utilized. I didn't have a lot of experience with CSS or Razor going into this project so I'm not too shocked, it's one of the areas I have to improve on for the future, and I do really really like the workflow here.

I decided to go with singleplayer out the gate so I could focus on making a game and not worrying about learning networking. I think objectively this was the best thing I could have done for the timeframe, however I think the game would be a lot better with multiplayer. But this is another thing that will need another massive refactor because there is no code that works with multiplayer in mind currently.


I think I regret the class system, most people didn't end up choosing anything but the first selected class, so I ended up making the first selected class random to try and add more variety but that felt like a hacky solution. I have some ideas on what I could do to make it better and more streamlined, because it's obvious people want to just get in and destroy robots and not worry about which classes have better stats or weapons. I am very proud of the entire menu execution though, and I think if it was a standalone game it'd still be perfect.

I need a break from this project. A month straight will probably do that to anyone, but once I'm feeling up for it I'm going to refactor a LOT about the game. I don't expect this to take very long because I know a lot more now than I did initially making those systems. This refactor will include multiplayer, better optimization, and new UI. With all the art assets ready for this I can focus purely on the code side which will be very fun.

Enemies will no longer be hardcoded into the roguelite mode, and I have some ideas for what I want to make the main mode be that will be interesting. If it's not already obvious, I was super inspired by Serious Sam, and the original mode I was making was very similar in gameplay to the Resident Evil Mercenaries mode, however I scrapped it because I figured my time was better spent making the arcadey roguelite mode.

I am also planning on another project in S&box currently, however I think I want to learn some more fundamentals in this rewrite before I tackle it and I'm very excited for what it could be. I'm also working on a few libraries I think will be very useful.