The Sandbox of God: Remastered FAQs.
I know lots of you have a bunch of questions for the upcoming Sandbox of God: Remastered game, so let’s dive right in! If you haven’t read about the game yet, I suggest you hit this blog post and then come back here. So, let’s break it down.
Q: Why remake the Sandbox of God?
A: That’s a two part question, one part that I cannot answer right now but will soon. The second part: Sandbox of God continues to be the most downloaded game on my site, as well as the most popular (combining my stats and YoYo Games alone, the title has been downloaded over 150,000 times since release…and it’s on a ton of other sites as well). There had always been a number of issues with the Sandbox of God however that have prevented me from really promoting the game (resolution change, lack of Vista support, music that I didn’t license/didn’t own). Looking at the source code, I knew that porting SOG to Game Maker 7 would be a relatively good experience since most of the code was simply redundant, and there wasn’t anything major I had to change. About 10% of the code in SOG was incompatible with GM7/Vista and had to be rewritten for this new remake.
Q: How will the Lite/Pro versions work? Will the original Sandbox of God still be supported?
A: This is not the first time I’ve redone a game and upgraded it from “freeware” to “commercial” (ShellBlast) however from ShellBlast I’ve learned quite a bit. Instead of not supporting the freeware version and having a limited demo of the Remastered edition, I’ve decided to do two versions of the Sandbox of God: Remastered. One version is completely free, and has the entire game you remember from the original version, with some upgraded features, music, sound, and Vista support. The “premium” version will have all this plus two extra modes, brand new graphics, and the option to run the game twice and three times as fast. Because the Lite version is free and has the full experience of the original Sandbox of God, the “old” version that’s currently on the site will no longer be supported.
Q: How much, and where can I buy it?
A: I will announce where you can purchase the game at a later time. But the game will be under $5. I’m nearly done and it’ll be released next month.
Q: Will you be doing more remakes in the future?
A: I’m looking at possibly remaking one or two more games for the future.
Q: Why not just port all your old games to the new GM7 engine, so they can support Vista and have enhanced effects?
A: That’s a lot more difficult that one might think, in both practicality and legality. Vivid Conceptions would never be ported, due to the unique lighting engine written specifically for GM6. It also has a lot of “borrowed” assets from hollywood soundtracks and sprites from Golden Sun and some SNES games. To remake the game, I’d have to strip all of that out, and it’s just not worth the investment. Other games, like Liquisity, run fairly poorly on older computers and I’d want to rewrite the entire engine before porting it over, and that doesn’t really seem to be worth the time vs just making a whole new game.
Q: Why not add some more eras and powers in the Sandbox of God?
A: If this were a regular game with levels and such, I’d have no problems adding a few extra to the remake. But Sandbox of God is different, in that it would directly change a majority of the game if I were to add just a few extra powers or eras. I doubt I’d be able to match the original art style, and it would be very difficult to wade through the code to see how the new powers would effect other powers (not so much in terms of gameplay, but in terms of sprite placement, etc.) without this project turning into a two month timeline. If SOG:R does well, then that would just fire me up to do another sequel anyways. 🙂
Q: So what if I play the game and decide to buy the “pro” version? I have to start all over?
A: Nope! You will be able to easily transfer your save from the “lite” edition to the “pro” edition. Old Sandbox of God saves from the original game are incompatible with either version.
Q: Why not do a “realistic” art style instead of this weird boardgame graphical mode?
A: That’ll be explained in a future blog post actually, but there’s a very good reason for that. Plus, I wanted to keep costs down as much as possible so I could sell the pro version for as cheap as possible.
Q: Will it be Mac compatible?
A: A Mac version of Game Maker is coming soon, and if it’s fairly easy to port over games to that system, than I’m all for it and would certainly consider this game to be the first. But it really just all depends on how the engine is going to work on that platform, so I cannot make any decisions right now.
Q: Release date?
A: July, in conjunction with something that will be announced hopefully soon.
So there ya go. If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!
How did you create a transferable save system to run between two different versions of a game (lite and pro)? I think you did this in SoM, when you said that if there was ever a glitch, you could fix it without releasing a whole new version. Did you use GM’s save feature or your own code?
Anyways, can’t wait for it! 🙂
Wow 🙂 Nice post it answered lots of my questions 🙂
Waiting for July 🙂 hoping that no delays happens 🙂 also waiting for Kablooey 🙂
July, in conjunction with MY BIRTHDAY! 😀
@ blueflare:
What? Your birthday is in July, and the game is supposed to come out in July, so it definitely won’t be out until August at the earliest.
@ blueflare:
Yay! my birthday is in july too! 😀
@ victor1221:
Huzzah!
@ marioandluigi206:
Oh dear, you’re right.
@ Zack064:
It’s a modified save system that uses variables instead of save states. Save states are used by Game Maker to “freeze” a portion of a game for later use, but the problem with that is once you change any small portion to the game, that “freeze save” is no longer valid, and GM crashes. Instead I use a save system that depends on variables, so that I can add new things along the way without worrying about compatibility (though the downside of this is it’s a bit more work to implement).
And I will get this game out before everyone’s birthdays. I PROMISE!
oh man
if you break this promise we will never let you hear the end of it
yeah. if it’s late we’ll call you like every day until it comes out.
hahahahahaha
that is not a good thing to threaten
@ marioandluigi206:
Keep that up and you’ll have the federal police on you…
Sorry to get off of topic, but what do you think about the new GM8 features?
http://glog.yoyogames.com/?p=537
Are you going to get GM8, or keep GM7?
😯
@ Zack064:
Oh absolutely I do plan on getting GM8. In fact, it’s part of the reason why I was hanging on to Kablooey for a bit (I’d like that game to be in GM8. SOG: Remastered will be made with GM7.)
with the buying of sandbox of god: remastered, will it be bought online or will it be bought in shops or both if it is bought in shops will it be avalible in australia?
i run the original on vista sp2 and have had no problems with it