Gmod’s spiritual successor, S&Box, is now on Steam

Having originally released way, way back in 2006, the legendary Garry’s Mod is pretty darn long in the tooth by now and long overdue for a successor of some sort. That’s precisely where Facepunch Studios’ mysterious S&Box title comes into the picture, which now has its own Steam page.

It’s not that Gmod is no longer capable of producing questionable memes, of course. It’s just that S&Box (pronounced “sandbox,” wouldn’t you know it) has been in development for a good long while now as a true and worthy successor to the legendary title. “This is our attempt to create a worthy Garry’s Mod sequel,” says Facepunch’s website pitch. “It will eclipse what is possible in Garry’s Mod rather than simply be a modern version of it.” Now that the game/game creation engine has finally made its way onto Steam proper, we have our first update on the state of things, and a host of goodies to look forward to in the near and far future.

S&Box still has no release date, but it’s coming

“We have made this cool editor, and all these tools to publish and play games, and we want to test them out,” says Facepunch Studios’ first update on Steam. “We already have hundreds of developers making games and giving feedback, and we’re updating and improving every day.”

Whereas Garry’s Mod was in and of itself (kind of sort of) a sandbox gameplay experience, S&Box is going to be a wholly different beast. The project started its life on Unreal Engine (ugh) only to eventually transition over to Valve’s Source 2, which is truer to Facepunch’s original roots. More specifically, Facepunch explains that “The engine is Source 2 with a c# layer on top. Similar to how Garry’s Mod is Source 1 with Lua on top.”

We can expect this to be a fairly powerful tool, in other words. “It hotloads on save, and the hotload takes a few milliseconds. It feels great to develop in. It’s also networked, so you can edit your c# code as the server, and the changes will get sent to the clients so everyone has the same content,” says the blog post.

“Our vision for S&Box isn’t just a game platform, it’s an engine. We hope to let you export the games you create in the engine to be able to sell them on Steam and other places. We are currently working with Valve to license for this,” promises Facepunch. Crucially, it says that “there will be no licensing fees or royalties” in place. How’s that for exciting?

The fact that “hundreds” of developers are already producing S&Box prototypes in the closed beta, as it were, is impressive in its own right. This tells us that things are moving along at a delightful pace, even though we still don’t have anything resembling a release window.

For the common folk such as myself, it may be particularly interesting to hear that a Gmod-tier Sandbox Mode is once again on the docket for S&Box as well. Facepunch explains that, even though the studio has been “weary” about including something of this type, the team has come up with “a few new features that justify making it.” To that end, S&Box won’t be coming out until a Sandbox Mode is fully developed and good to go.

This is a double-edged sword, to be sure, as a layperson’s Sandbox Mode is, from the look of things, the biggest blocker to the game engine’s release. Yet, Gmod‘s accessibility and wackiness are what made it the blockbuster it ended up being. Now that we’ve got Roblox and, heck, Fortnite competing for a similar niche, S&Box is going to need every edge it could possibly get.