January 2021 Project Update

Published in

The Sandbox

7 min readFeb 9, 2021

We began the year with a flurry of announcements and updates to kick off 2021 as the year of the NFT in The Sandbox as we prepare for our launch.

The first wave of public sales will begin February 11th with CoinMarketCap as our partner. A new version of the Game Maker is coming out and our liquidity mining program has been extended. We have exciting details on this and other news below, so keep on reading!

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Public LAND Sale

February will see the launch of the first public LAND presale in The Sandbox metaverse. Users will have the opportunity to purchase one of 1,200 premium LANDS that will be up for sale starting from February 11th at 1PM UTC. Each of these LANDS will be bundled with two exclusive NFTs out of the five CoinMarketCap (CMC) heroes, namely, Brawler, Sage, Protector, Hothead, and Liquifier. 9 ESTATES will also be put up for auction on OpenSea. The highest bidder will get the six heroes in addition to the ESTATE they won.

You can read more about the sale and all its perks in our detailed article.

$SAND Exchange Listings

Our main utility token, $SAND, serves as the basis for all transactions within The Sandbox metaverse. The token allows users to access our platform, play games, stake, and earn rewards, among other things. Because of that, it is important to give our users as many ways to obtain $SAND as possible.

Which is why $SAND is now listed on two more exchanges: Bittrex and Upbit. Thanks to its listing on Upbit and the $SAND/KRW pair, the $SAND token has effectively entered the Korean market. $SAND is now listed on multiple platforms over the world: Uniswap, Huobi, WazirX, Upbit, crypto.com, Polionex, Kyber Network, Tokyocrypto, MXC, Bitmart, Simplex, Maicoin, and Bittrex.

Liquidity Mining

To give users the opportunity to gain revenue by providing liquidity to the $SAND/ETH pool on Uniswap, we have extended the liquidity mining program. Stakers can continue to earn $SAND tokens from the pool until February 26th.

Rewards are distributed pro-rata relative to a traders’ percentage of total liquidity. You can read more about the program and how you can participate by reading our article.

Wizzy Golden Giveaway

Stakers of the Liquidity Mining program, rejoice. If you were staking in the $SAND/ETH pool before January 25th, you have been whitelisted to win the Wizzy the Golden NFT. Claim it here.

Game Maker V0.5

Our biggest Game Maker update was released in December 2020 with new features, shortcuts, and improvements.

To prepare for our Pre-Season 0 event, the Game Maker will get a new update that will be focused primarily on performance.

We have made quite a few changes in our architecture and here are a few updates that you will be able to experience in the Game Maker V0.5:

Faster loading and response time of the Game Maker tools. This is the main update of the V0.5; it ensures less friction when creating
Improved performance on bigger experiences. Creators that are designing complex experiences with a variety of assets will find this update to be handy. The Game Maker will run faster and will have less loading time.

Lighting presets

When creating experiences, ambiance is everything. Lighting can play a key role in your game, which is why we have improved on the existing presets and have eliminated refraction errors on light surfaces as well as correcting color emanation.

New Templates

Three brand new experience templates have been added to those available for new experiences:

The Lab: An experience that lets you test out the different behaviors we have and different ways to use them
Training Grounds: A place where you can test out some of our assets and components and how they interact with each other.
The Bazaar: A revamped version of the old Bazaar experience that puts everything into one solid gameplay experience.

Chat Bubbles (available on the Multiplayer)

When playing in the multiplayer, players will now be able to see the first iteration of chat bubbles above the avatar’s heads. This is to ensure a smoother and livelier experience when chatting with other players in the social hubs.

NFT Inspect

From the Inventory, you will be able to access a new Tab called NFT. The NFT tab will show a full list of NFTs and ASSETS used inside an experience and identify the trending assets that other creators are using.

Fighting System UI & VFX

We’re constantly improving on our Avatar, Enemy, and Combat Systems. This time we have added visual queues to attacks that show damage numbers when hitting or blocking hits from an enemy.

We’ve also added and improved upon existing VFX to make combat queues much clearer.

Game Maker Fund Creations

The Game Maker’s Fund is currently supporting 17 projects. Some of them can already be seen at https://www.sandbox.game/en/games/top/

Apply to The Sandbox Game Maker Fund program today

VoxEdit Beta 8

A new version of VoxEdit was released on January 7th bringing new features to the beta version of our 3D animator.

Full body templates for body parts in Avatar creator
Fixed several crashes on the Library Panel
Fixed rendering bugs
Palette save/load fixes
Translation issues when adding rotation between keyframes
Profiled and halved load times, added async thumbnail loading for templates

You can check the full article detailing all the features and bug fixes.

Game Jam!

Our third TSB Game Jam came to a successful end on January 30th with 40 submissions. We were happy to see that the submissions were of quality matching its “Level Up” theme and 350,000 $SAND prizes.

The awards ceremony for The Sandbox Game Jam took place on Saturday February 6th and you can check out our livestream announcing the winners and a playthrough of their games below:

The winners of the season jam were..

In First Place: Force Majeure by Kimsen!

Game Overview: Force Majeure: The Saga of a Corrupted Kingdom. Will the hero ever find out what’s wrong in this world?

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In Second Place: Escape by Omoide!

Game Overview: The player is a warrior with a weapon. One purpose: to get out of the house safely.

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In Third Place: Grey Station by CyberDragon!

Game Overview: Part 3 of the Grey saga. Invade the underwater station to find out how to fix the zombie problem.

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After a successful third jam..

We will announce a fourth TSB Game Jam soon, so keep an eye out for our announcement !

Download the Game Maker and create your own game experience!

VoxEdit Contests

We are running biweekly VoxEdit contests over on our forum page. These contests are open to everyone and have various themes. All VoxEdit enthusiasts can submit their creations in these competitions. Every two weeks a new theme is announced and three winners win a LAND each and the opportunity to upload their ASSET to the marketplace. If you want to try your hand, don’t hesitate to participate for a chance to win a parcel of LAND!