The Sandbox pushes new engine build: lighting, animation and template overhauls

In Brief:

• The Sandbox has taken a new engine update live for its creator tooling, pointing to upgrades in lighting and animation, fresh templates and game examples, and reworked editor workflows.
• It arrives after an Aug. 12 beta that rebuilt how the engine handles scenes, and a July 23 release that broke two legacy APIs.
• Rather than spelling the changes out in the announcement itself, the company put the complete changelog on its Creator Hub.

The Sandbox has rolled out a new update to its creator engine, according to a company post on X.

Four areas were named in that post: improved lighting and animations, additional templates and game examples, smoother workflows in the editor, and what the studio described as “Tons of fixes + reliability improvements.” Instead of listing individual changes, it directed readers to the release notes hosted on the Creator Hub at create.sandbox.game/updates/10.

It reaches a creator community that has already absorbed two engine shifts since July.

Coming off a scene system rebuild

Core architecture was reworked in the Aug. 12 beta. Everything placed in a scene — meshes, characters and cameras — was folded into a single unified system, and prefabs were promoted to what the notes termed a “true first-class building block,” editable and savable in place, with per-instance overrides that preserve the connection back to the original.

The Outliner and Inspector were rebuilt in that release around the unified scene node tree. Prefab bugs responsible for accidental deletions, ignored settings, older prefab files that refused to open and broken sessions that corrupted scenes were also addressed. The same pass cleared a navmesh debug visualization crash on WebGPU as well as incorrect alpha blending in WebGPU postprocess masks, which had been corrupting selection outlines.

A second wave of compatibility shims carried over from 13 to 14 was stripped out in version 14.0.2, with nothing put in their place.

July update broke two APIs

The breaking changes came with the July 23 release. Legacy *.anim.json animation state machine configs no longer function at runtime, which leaves only serialized *.animconfig.json resources. VirtualJoystickOptions.hidden was also dropped after its deprecation period, with enabled: false taking over.

An “engine-upgrades” AI Assistant skill now ships with new projects, along with a standalone migration script that converts old configs and rewrites the references pointing at them. By default the script only runs dry; passing –write commits the changes.

That same update brought in the MoverComponent locomotion stack — with Walking, Falling, Flying, Airplane, TopDown and Vehicle modes — plus MoverCharacterPawn and MoverPlayerController, which take the place of hand-rolled per-pawn movement. Opt-in top speed caps, reduced steering at high speed, and per-wheel tuning for brakes, friction and power share were added to VehicleMovementComponent.

Fog support and WebGPU/TSL authored background and environment nodes were added to scene environment data, meaning shader graph fog and sky setups can now drive a scene instead of relying purely on texture-based environments. GPU timing landed in the profiler, and InputManager gained an API for skinning, repositioning or switching off on-screen touch controls.

The minimum SDK was raised to 13.3.7, with 13.0.0 acting as the auto-update recovery floor. Installs older than that are stopped at startup until they update.

Templates keep expanding

Work on templates started before this release. Four Asset Libraries arrived with Game Maker 0.12 — The British Museum, Architecture, Interior design: Furniture and lamps, and Terrain Colors — together with three Game Type Templates covering Shooters, Action RPG and Business Tycoon.

Smiley Factory, built by The Smiley Company, sits on top of that tycoon template. Within a 15 to 20 minute limit, players operate a Smiley branded production line, crafting apparel and plowing earnings back in to open up more rooms.

Jam running alongside

A Beta Creators Game Jam using The Sandbox Studio opened on Aug. 12, following July’s Alpha Creator Game Jam. Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb serves as lead judge.

Prizes total $7,500, split $2,500 for first place, $1,600 for second and $1,000 for third.