The Sandbox ships engine update with lighting, animation and template changes

In Brief:

• The Sandbox pushed a new engine update live for its creator tooling, citing lighting and animation improvements, new templates and game examples, and editor workflow changes.
• The release follows an Aug. 12 beta that rebuilt the engine’s scene system and a July 23 update that broke two legacy APIs.
• The company published the full changelog on its Creator Hub rather than itemizing the changes in the announcement.

The Sandbox shipped a new update to its creator engine, the company said in a post on X.

The post listed four buckets: better lighting and animations, new templates and game examples, smoother editor workflows, and what the company called “Tons of fixes + reliability improvements.” It pointed readers to release notes on the Creator Hub at create.sandbox.game/updates/10 instead of detailing individual changes.

The update lands on a creator base that has been through two engine shifts since July.

Coming off a scene system rebuild

The Aug. 12 beta reworked the engine’s core architecture. Objects in a scene moved onto a single unified system covering meshes, characters and cameras, and prefabs became what the notes called a “true first-class building block,” savable and editable in place, with per-instance overrides that keep the link back to the original.

That release rebuilt the Outliner and Inspector around the unified scene node tree. It also fixed prefab bugs behind accidental deletions, ignored settings, older prefab files that wouldn’t open and broken sessions that corrupted scenes. A navmesh debug visualization crash on WebGPU and incorrect alpha blending in WebGPU postprocess masks, which had corrupted selection outlines, were fixed in the same pass.

Version 14.0.2 removed a second wave of compatibility shims carried from 13 to 14, with no replacement.

July update broke two APIs

The July 23 release carried the breaking changes. Legacy *.anim.json animation state machine configs stopped working at runtime, leaving only serialized *.animconfig.json resources. And VirtualJoystickOptions.hidden was removed after deprecation, in favor of enabled: false.

New projects ship an “engine-upgrades” AI Assistant skill plus a standalone migration script that converts old configs and rewrites references. It runs dry by default; –write applies the changes.

That update also introduced the MoverComponent locomotion stack, with Walking, Falling, Flying, Airplane, TopDown and Vehicle modes, alongside MoverCharacterPawn and MoverPlayerController, replacing hand-rolled per-pawn movement. VehicleMovementComponent picked up opt-in top speed caps, high-speed steering reduction and per-wheel brake, friction and power-share tuning.

Scene environment data gained fog support and WebGPU/TSL authored background and environment nodes, so shader graph fog and sky setups can drive a scene rather than only texture-based environments. The profiler got GPU timing. InputManager got an API for skinning, repositioning or disabling on-screen touch controls.

Minimum SDK moved to 13.3.7, with an auto-update recovery floor at 13.0.0. Older installs are blocked at startup until they update.

Templates keep expanding

Template work predates this release. Game Maker 0.12 added four Asset Libraries, covering The British Museum, Architecture, Interior design: Furniture and lamps, and Terrain Colors, plus three Game Type Templates for Shooters, Action RPG and Business Tycoon.

The Smiley Company built Smiley Factory on the tycoon template. Players run a Smiley branded production line, crafting apparel and reinvesting earnings to expand rooms, inside a 15 to 20 minute limit.

Jam running alongside

The Sandbox opened a Beta Creators Game Jam on Aug. 12 using The Sandbox Studio, following an Alpha Creator Game Jam in July. Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb is lead judge.

The prize pool is $7,500. First place takes $2,500, second $1,600 and third $1,000.