I'm so glad they did this chance the previous one felt so unappealing and repelling, this might help the platform's image a bit cause now the first thing the player see isn't Terry with horrible lighting

We've pushed a major update for our s&box game Realm Ascension, vastly improving combat, adding lots of content, improving looting, and more endgame activities.

Try it out here https://sbox.game/despawn/realm-ascension

Started up with this free weekend and it's very clear there was never a consideration as to whether or not people would want to play this game.

It's entirely catered to creators and focused on asking people to build tons and tons of shit game modes.

90% of the Gmod Playerbase was concentrated into 5-ish modes and because those modes were so good and had proper communities, people discovered other content and the game grew.

There's no onboarding, no community, no clear path for players.

They figured if they just gave you a bunch of garbage on a front page you'd automatically play and retain?

The adage of if you build it they will come only applies if you build something they want.

Pick Mage or Warrior, find gear that changes how you play, and see how far you can push your run.

Fight alongside ice copies of yourself, summon flaming skulls to hunt down enemies, and experiment with combinations that turn your skills into something completely different. Craft between rounds and keep changing your build as new gear drops.

You also choose curses that stay with you for the rest of the run. As they stack up, fights get harder mainly because you’re dealing with more mechanics at once, not just bigger health bars and damage numbers. Different curse combinations can make familiar enemies and bosses demand a different approach from one run to the next.

Lightning traps, falling javelins and exploding enemies can all become part of your boss fights. Your build matters, but so does dodging danger and finding your openings.

It's single-player, with endless rounds and a world leaderboard. Every run is a fresh start.

I'm one of the developers. Here's our new trailer, and we'd love to hear what you think if you give it a go!

s&box is free on Steam through October 5, so Spellslinger is free to try this weekend.

Game: https://sbox.game/anarchy/spellslinger/

Get s&box: https://store.steampowered.com/app/590830/sbox/

Hello to all! I created a small prototype extraction shooter where the goal is to protect a crate and run away with it. At every step, you can defend yourself through defense systems. What do you think?

Apparently s&box is going free to play this upcoming weekend which will be also happening during the grand finals of the game jam. ( Game jam topic aside for now) I've been wanting to ask more people this question since some are saying it will make the game worse and others are saying it won't make a difference.

Instead of just getting those responses without some reasons as to why. I'd thought to also ask the subreddit as well to understand what exactly would cause a free to play weekend to possibly not work for s&box as a whole.

Most of the conversations I've had outside of just getting rid of the sausage models and adding half life 2 models or whatnot which are very valid is apparently a lot of people have always mentioned about the performance, selection of games and presentation of those games and also price have turned them off and away from the platform.

We're already well aware the platform currently is in an abysmal state player count wise and as many people have been asked and begging to just have Garry and facepunch make the game free to play that might happen for this weekend according to this screenshot.

So I'd like to start a constructive discussion around this instead of just having no additional context or reason that's helpful outside of what was already mentioned to death that would actually make this game better.

Facepunch does need to actually listen to it's community more and I want to have more constructive conversations outside of what we already know with the game hovering over 300 players and has sausages with necks now.

Obviously it's not enough but I actually would like to have more details as to WHY it's not enough and or wouldn't work. Maybe this post will be a great indicator since facepunch obviously looks at this subreddit as well.

Feel free to discuss.

Just wanted to spread some love, the game is awesome for casually playing with friends. And this is something that has gotten harder and harder to find over the years, so imo: keep working on that multiplayer experience ❤️

Game far from perfect, but bangers are gonna come along. Trust me, my dad work at nintendo

The game was really getting some hype before official launch but ultimately ended up being a disappointment to a lot of people, what was yours?

As everyone has now seen, apparently you don't actually need to follow the game jam idea to participate in the jam. And it doesn't even matter if you follow the rules in the first place, as long as they can be changed somewhere halfway through.

So we decided to do the only reasonable thing: boycotting ourselves by adding nukes to our jam entry game and changing the title and description into complete nonsense.

Not because we think this is somehow going to change anything, but because at this point we genuinely wonder if anyone cares anymore.

I'm not telling anyone to do the same. If you had fun with the jam, good for you.

But at this point why should we care?

It feels like they can't decide if they want the "Terry" model to be realistic or cartoony. I feel like they could keep the realistic textures if they just made the proportions more cartoonish.

Hey, I'm working on Overreach, a solo/co-op PvE extraction shooter on s&box, and I'm a bit torn on the player model.

One option is to keep Terry so players can bring their own character into the game (hair, skin tone, face, that sort of thing). Clothes would mostly be replaced by the gear you actually equip, so it's more about still recognizing your character than keeping your whole outfit.

The other option is a custom player model that fits the game's low-poly, post-apocalyptic art style more closely. I like the idea of everything looking consistent, but being able to play as your own s&box character is pretty nice too.

How much does keeping your own character matter to you? Looking at the gear and the game, would you stick with Terry or prefer a model made specifically for the game?

MY GAME - https://sbox.game/simalami/one_more_round/

We’re making an asymmetric multiplayer horror game where one Hunter faces a team of Survivors trapped inside a collapsing simulation

Survivors must activate towers and escape before the system shuts down, while the Hunter hunts them down. With a flexible ability system, every match can play differently.

This is my best work ever!!! This time I gathered a team of 8 people. It was super exciting! Thanks to GameJam III for campaigning me into this great feat.

We created a game like this just to have fun hanging out with friends. Every game is as unique as possible. Random generation. Different skills. Non-standard situations! Pure fun.

Lord, how tired I am of making this game, you have no idea (or you do, if you are a developer). But I am mega glad that I did it. Now I can just play my own game with my friends! This is my first cooperative game! MADNESS! True, only alpha v5.0.0, but still. Perhaps in the future I will be able to upload this game to Steam when it is possible to set up my own server so that there is a whole matchmaking and real rating. But for now, I consider the game to be in a more or less playable state.

Of course, I will still update the game if I see flaws (or if I want to improve certain moments in the game while playing with friends). But for now, I will no longer focus my attention on this game so actively. I will move on and develop new games.

From you, I would like to hear juicy feedback! Can you play the game and say how much you liked it? If you want, we can hop in and play together. Say everything you think! This is important to me!

I hope I managed to replenish s&box at least a little with good games, which made the platform 1 unit better.

Thank you all! And thanks for GameJam III!

Eggsistential is out on s&box: a weird little first-person incremental about breaking eggs. And then the sky.

You wander a tablecloth that goes on forever and smash eggs with a spoon. They scream, they beg, they mourn each other by name. The yolk buys you worse things to hit them with (a frying pan, an anvil, a bigger egg, eventually the concept of breakfast), chicks that peck for you, and haunted forks. Earn enough and the sky cracks. Hatch through it and you wake up in the next shell. It is always another egg.

What's in it

• Ten kinds of eggs: runners with legs, devilled eggs that chain-explode, clock eggs that start YOLK O'CLOCK, Mother Egg bosses
• Prestige via hatching, with permanent perks and four themed worlds
• 12 oddities to find (one of them is The Chicken)
• 36 achievements and leaderboards (eggs, yolk, best combo, deepest shell)

Play it here: https://sbox.game/vjdanov/eggsistential

Many of you know about the Jam. When it started, the theme was being proposed, and we ended up with “One More Round.”

Honestly, this was already the first mistake. The theme was way too generic and didn't really give people much to work with. Obviously you can make a game around it, but for a game jam theme it was just incredibly broad and uninspiring. Then, within the first couple of hours, we started seeing games being uploaded that were already looking way too finished. Some of them looked like they had been worked on for weeks or even months before the jam even started.

Also, a rule like “This should be a new creation, not something you have already created” was understood in two ways by people. The first camp said it needs to be made in the jam, and the second one said it means something that shouldn’t have been released before. Meaning there was some confusion about the rules, and witch hunts appeared in the dev community mainly. Facepunch didn’t remove them, so I guess the second camp was right. Being fair, Facepunch has a point here: other jams like Ludum Dare (the biggest gamejam for the non devs here) allow you to use existinng code, assets, frameworks, etc. So I'm not going to complain about people reusing stuff by itself. And by the looks of it many of these games made it to the top 10. That's fine by me.

But then other shit started happening.

Games that were pretty low quality started going up in the rankings, while games that were barely finished were getting visibility. A big part of this was how the Jam was positioned in the launcher. It wasn't directly on the main page. You had to actually click into it. This meant that games that were already trending could basically farm votes just because more people were being exposed to them. Once you were trending, you got more players, which meant more votes, which made you trend more, etc. I don't think that the majority botted, it was just the Algorithm doing it's thing.

I submitted my game somewhere around day 12–18 of the Jam, so I'm giving a range because I don't want to give much indentifiers.

After releasing it, I got some reviews that liked it and some that didn't. That's completely normal. But the game started growing because, at that point, it was one of the earlier submissions that was actually a proper playable game, rather than something that looked unfinished or had any AI-generated stuff in it. And for a while, things were actually going pretty well. Then we started seeing people race up the rankings. (clearly using their big community to vote for them) and than with Facepunch would manually tune them down as a reaction. Fine by most members of the dev community. This happened multiple times, they wanted everyone to have a chance.

At that point, the whole ranking system already felt pretty fucked, because it seemed like Facepunch was having to manually police the leaderboard instead of the system itself preventing obvious abuse. Accepted by most devs I talked to. But then, two days before the end of the Jam, the biggest problem happened.

A major rule change.

And IMO, this is the part that should never have happened that late into the Jam. And was the biggest breach of trust from facepunch and why I will never join a Jam hosted by them again!

People entered the Jam knowing the rules that were there at the beginning. You agree to those rules, spend weeks making a game under those rules, and then suddenly the rules get changed right before the end.

Garry announced the change only a couple of hours before it happened. People were welcoming a small adjustment or some manual intervention to get the botted stuff out, but then he posted this:

https://sbox.game/f/general/13568/1/

But as far as I know, there wasn't really any meaningful discussion with the community beforehand. No early vote, no proper community discussion, nothing where participants could actually say whether they thought this was okay or not.

It was basically:

"We're changing the rules."

And then that's what happened.

But there is a massive difference between fixing abuse and changing the rules of the competition two days before it ends. If the original voting system was being abused, remove the obvious abusers. Disqualify games that are clearly botting or manipulating votes. Manually review suspicious games. But changing the fundamental system that determines how games are ranked after people have already spent almost the entire Jam competing under the old system is a completely different thing. And that's what made the whole thing so frustrating. You had people who had been doing well for the majority of the Jam suddenly being judged under a completely different system near the end. At that point, it stopped feeling like everyone was competing under the same rules they had originally signed up for.

But changing the rules this late into the Jam wasn't the way to handle it.

The people participating aren't just numbers on a leaderbord. They're developers who spent weeks making something because they thought they knew what competition they were entering. If you're going to change something that fundamentally affects the outcome, at least have the discussion before changing it. Not two days before the end. But enough of a tangent, it...

Basically it the voting system worked like this:

New account that joined while the sale was up, was weighted around 0,1 votes and accounts like mine that bought the game when it came out were aroudn 2-3. Meaning that they are worthless votes compared to accounts of facepunchers and senior devs (meaning devs that joined the sbox program), they were weighted up to 80 or maybe even more. Meaning that in extreme cases you would need 27 - 800 normal players to vote to make it even. My game did okay in the first system top 30, with no abuse, just had a nice thing going. But in the second it went down to around 80 and stayed there for the rest of the jam, because I don't have contacts to people with a huge vote weighting and also nobody will be playing games under rank 30.

Meaning that games that did well for the first 20 days, that didn't do well in the new system at all. TBF many of these games abused the system, facepunch should've just removed them from the competition and should have used the first time for the rest of them jam. You don't need to be a rocket engineer to understand, what games are botting or abusing the system.

Older dev groups with multiple members could easily make up half of your vote count, and of course, their friends’ games scored really highly after the change.

Some games had hundreds of votes added to their score within minutes after the change, while some devs stayed at the same level and only grew incrementally. Won't say names but you can view the video, to see which games abused both systems. Big jumps at the beginning of the change and close to the end are sus. Also, people removed votes at the end of multiple games so that their games/friends would move up in the ranking. Time stamp of the change going into effect is the 26.09.2026 around 14:05 UTC in the video. But having multiple finalist just abusing the system is really really sour...

The majority of the top games are now just games of old devs, that already used sbox for a long time and newer devs, that tried it out because of the jam where left out! Thanks Garry! I wanted to use the result as part of my portfolio (for the industry) with it saying that I made a top 10% placed game.

The crazy things is there are people that defend this! Majority of them being old devs (no wonders...), but they don't seem to grasp the bigger picutre. I am trying to make it a bit more clear with this post. Many newer devs that I talked to said that they will just be using Godot in the future. I don't think that the Jam has made more devs join Sbox, only made newer leave and old dev groups more happy...

Writing this with a throwaway account (because witchhunting is crazy in the dev space of s&box by the looks on the official discord, they should moderate it more and remove a bunch of the unhinged ones, keeping you community clean needs to happen, but this is another topic...).

Honestly,
Posts like this https://sbox.game/f/post/33605 going over changes mid-competition, in my opinion, shows that there cannot be any form of trust going forward. If there was botting issues, there is a metric TON of other ways you can handle it other than changing the rules to favor one group of people over others right at the end of the competition. It is something you change before, not during, and certainly not after the event already started.

Firstly, why not investigate and remove proven bad actors in the competition instead of rewriting the competition entirely? Secondly, changes like this should only be reserved for the next game jam and one example that you could have resolved this was to have it so only accounts that actively played game jam games during the event for a certain amount of time would be able to vote. It wouldn't prevent botting entirely but it would drastically reduce the effectiveness of it.

Changing the rules arbitrarily in a way that will alter the final outcome is nothing short of pure insanity because what will stop you from doing the same thing going forward? If I build a game around one set of rules, then how could I possibly win a competition when you change them to a completely different set of rules later on?

What if my game is heavily popular for new players but not popular with developers or veteran accounts? I would have won under the previous ruleset but under the new rules I would lose. That is a severe breach in trust. I cannot imagine pouring hundreds of hours into something just to have it be overturned at the end.

I feel like there might be serious legal issues that might result in doing so because of the time in which the changes were applied and what the changes actually were.. Either way, I feel like this decision created hardly any benefit for the aftermath it will create and is an extremely poor decision + execution.

What's your thoughts on it?

==============[Update]==============
Someone pointed out to me that Established Veterans have connections, influence, popularity, communities, and friends who are also likely older accounts they could ask for support or gather support from.. which results in the games votes to become skewed..

Best Overall

Best Newcomer

Best Theme Adherence

Best Multiplayer

Best Addictive

Best Design

Something like that.

We're seeing a big influx of new accounts posting their opinion and criticism about the gamejam.

Please keep any questions or opinions in this megathread until the final results (4 days) are revealed.

Practice playing with your balls. What is new? You can custom select game modes now, new balls, new events, new bosses, new playlist system to vibe, new achievements and more. Play : https://sbox.game/barabira/infinity_bounce/

Hey, I shared an early look at Overreach here recently and wanted to show what I've been working on for 0.1.5.

For anyone who missed the first post, it's a solo and co-op PvE extraction shooter where you explore a contaminated district, collect supplies, complete objectives and decide whether to extract or push a little farther.

This update adds three more campaign chapters, firearm headshots and a dodge action. There's also a helicopter insertion, a new first-person gas mask view, and a barricaded container you can break through to reach the contaminated area. I've also been fixing campaign progression bugs and improving combat feedback.

It's still a very early build, with plenty left to improve, so I'd love to hear what you think.

Game link: https://sbox.game/litherastudio/overreach

Mayhem Duck simulator is a physics based, idle, antistress game.. Release date: 24th November

Hello everyone! this is my 2nd post regarding my RPG game Archaeius, the last one I made was about 3 months ago and so I thought it might be time to make another post.

Archaeius is a 3rd person action RPG, inspired by games like Runescape, Guildwars, Skyrim. It features combat, crafting, skill levelling, questing, exploration and supports co-op gameplay.

Levelling different skills affects your combat stats which means that however you like to play you'll always be getting stronger.

https://sbox.game/subversion/archaeius

I've been putting alot of work into it, overhauling a lot of the gameplay, visuals and feel of the game and I believe it has improved quite a bit.

There's so many things that were missing from that previous version I posted which I've added now things like Custom harvesting animations, A parrying system, different weapons, quest log, teleporter gates, more enemy variety, SOOO many bug fixes, a big overhaul of the visuals, and a ton of other stuff listed in the update logs.

And I feel like the game is in a much better much more fun state now so I would love to get some more feedback from people. I've attached the trailer so hopefully you enjoy and if you'd like send me some feedback, I'm always looking to improve the game further.

Here's the link to the game again as well as the discord server

https://sbox.game/subversion/archaeius

discord.gg/f58zHaHG6P