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Sandbox User Interface

The Sandbox’s UX is entirely represented by the metaverse experiences that are developed and deployed on top of The Sandbox platform (and, more specifically, on top of LAND). The Sandbox’s open-source nature gives creative freedom to designers and developers looking to build on top of LAND to create meaningful user experiences. This is made possible through two distinct tools to The Sandbox: GameMaker and VoxEdit.

GameMaker

GameMaker is one of the key components of The Sandbox platform, allowing users to create their own games and interactive experiences. GameMaker is a drag-and-drop game development tool that enables users to create games without writing any code. The Sandbox provides a simple visual scripting system that allows creators to define gameplay mechanics by connecting different nodes together.

GameMaker has a simple and intuitive interface, allowing creators to easily create and customize game elements. It also provides a wide range of assets and resources, including models, textures, animations, and sounds that can be used to create unique games and experiences.

The Sandbox provides a library of pre-made elements that can be used to create games, including characters, items, and environments. These elements are stored in the form of ERC-1155 assets, which are unique and tradable digital items that can be owned by users.

GameMaker is built using TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript, and uses the Pixi.js rendering engine. The Sandbox has made the GameMaker repository available on GitHub, allowing developers to contribute to the tool’s development and extend its capabilities.

The Sandbox provides a variety of tools and resources to help creators get started with GameMaker, including tutorials, templates, and a community forum. With GameMaker, creators can bring their ideas to life and create unique games and experiences on The Sandbox platform. The GameMaker tool’s ongoing development is vitally important to The Sandbox’s overall adoption and growth. This is because its no-code, user-friendly design allows for virtually anyone to be able to use it to create playable experiences within The Sandbox. The concept of creative freedom and the removal of coding barriers is what allowed Roblox to grow its own metaverse into tens of thousands of different experiences and 65 million active users.

VoxEdit

VoxEdit is a 3D voxel art tool developed by The Sandbox for users to create, animate, and export voxel models for use in The Sandbox's virtual world. Voxels are small cubes that can be used to build 3D objects in a video game or virtual world. VoxEdit provides a user-friendly interface for building 3D models and also has advanced features, such as scripting and animation to create more complex behaviors for the models.

To start creating a voxel model, users can choose from various templates or create their own from scratch. They can then use the various tools provided in VoxEdit to build and shape the model, including adding or removing voxels, and painting the model with different colors and textures. VoxEdit also provides an array of prefabricated shapes, which can be used to speed up the modeling process. One of the main benefits of VoxEdit is that it enables users to easily animate their models. Users can create animations by moving the voxels of their models over time, and it also allows users to add multiple animations to their models, which can be triggered by various interactions within The Sandbox. 

VoxEdit is built using Electron, a framework for building cross-platform desktop applications using web technologies such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. The tool is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems as of Q3 2023. The VoxEdit repository on GitHub contains the tool’s source code, which is written in TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript. It also provides additional features, such as type-checking and class-based object-oriented programming. TypeScript compiles down to JavaScript, which can be run in a web browser or on a server.

One of the most important aspects of VoxEdit's source code is its integration with The Sandbox's smart contracts. Voxels created in VoxEdit can be exported as ERC-1155 tokens, which can then be traded on the blockchain using The Sandbox's internal marketplace or external markets, such as OpenSea. The VoxEdit repository includes a TypeScript library for interacting with the smart contracts, which makes it easy for developers to create custom integrations with The Sandbox.

This code creates a new voxel model, adds a single voxel to it, and then exports it as an ERC-1155 token with the name "My Voxel Model." This token can then be traded on The Sandbox's marketplace or used within the virtual world. VoxEdit’s integration with The Sandbox's smart contracts makes it easy for developers to create custom integrations, and its user-friendly interface enables creators to easily bring their ideas to life in the virtual world.

In other words, this makes it extremely easy for designers to design, create, and port their voxel creations into marketplaces, such as OpenSea to sell to LAND developers.