Dev Blog #8 – Buildbox 3 Update

Hi Boxers!

With our new release quickly approaching, we’re kicking things back up a notch with a bi-weekly update on our progress! 💪 Our priority is to help you have the best possible experience using Buildbox.

So, every other week, I’ll be talking with the executive team here at Buildbox to help fill everyone in on what’s coming soon to the software. I’ll also be answering some questions brought to our attention from community leaders like Jae Taekna, who is the community manager for Discord and the Buildbox forum, Sean who manages support, myself with social media, and the rest of the team.

Let’s jump right in!

Buildbox 3 Release Update

Let’s talk Buildbox 3! Okay, guys, we’ve had a bit of a holdup, but we’re very close to the final release. It took slightly longer than our development team’s initial estimates to port all of the Buildbox 2 components to BB3. However, we felt that they were crucial for ease of use, and it was worth the additional effort and time to do this correctly, especially for our existing users. Once these ports are finished, you will be able to create any Buildbox 2 style game inside of Buildbox 3 in the same way.

While we will not be setting firm launch dates at the risk of upsetting customers if delays occur. We want everyone to know we’re very close.  The major obstacles of the BB2 component porting have been solved, and the team is hard at work finalizing, bug fixing and stress testing the environment.

Ease of Use

We’ve had some existing customers bring up concerns about transitioning to BB3 and the ease of use for non-coders. We’re fully aware of this, and the team is working hard to make sure that the software is just as easy to use as Buildbox 2. Porting over the BB2 components is a huge part of this plan, which is we delayed the launch. Users will be able to build games the same way as before inside Buildbox 3. There shouldn’t be any significant learning curves.

We will also be focusing more on nodes and smart assets to make the process of building out game levels much easier. We have a new hire at Buildbox hard at work on creating these. And we’ll be moving them beyond internal as we open up more resources for the community as well. Our plans for the future include providing Boxers the option to upload their custom smart assets and nodes to the Asset Library. We want to increase the amount of tools available to our users.

The entire process of making Buildbox 2 style games will be straightforward and easy to do without code. Plus, you’ll be able to make many new games, and as the platform grows, this will only improve. We are NOT in any way pulling away from codeless as being our primary focus. We’re just adding coding as an option to have community enabled standard for building nodes and smart assets.

Buildbox Update

Upcoming Features

On the forums and message boards, we’ve seen quite a few requests for checkpoints to be added to Buildbox 3. Good news! We are planning to add checkpoints and many other features to BB3 as part of our BB2 conversion process. Now, that we’re done with all of the core BB3 functionalities. We are ready to bring more non-coding features from Buildbox 2 along with some new awesome options for creating fun interactive games.

There have also been some inquiries about tutorials. We created tons of video tutorials (thanks to Zack 😀) in the past on YouTube. Although we have a lot of excellent content, searching through our YouTube tutorials and playlists to find specific how-to information can be tough. So, we decided to change our approach and focus more on learning materials in the form of written document tutorials and internal help files to make it easier to search and learn.  Our goal is for users to figure out how to overcome any issues or obstacles that they encounter by searching through help documents instead of scrolling through videos or searching the forum for answers. Of course, we’ll still be creating video tutorials, but the focus will be on written searchable text through our knowledgebase center.  

Upcoming Fixes

There are also plenty of upcoming fixes in the works. We are currently looking into improving performance issues with Android export and have already made some optimization improvements. As part of the optimization process for Android, we’re focusing on shadow rendering and the physics engine. The development team had previously optimized performance for iOS with much success, and now they’ll be showing Android the same love.

Thanks for the support everyone, and check back here for development updates every two weeks!