In late 2018, World to Build started as a completely over-scoped idea for a game with a team of just 4 developers; a sandbox game that brings the magic of creation to the next generation of developers. We all had grown up with sandbox games like Roblox, Minecraft, and Garry’s Mod that shaped us into the young adults we were at the time, and felt that the magic that made those games special was missing today. Passion struck, and we immediately jumped into development of our dream game.

Over the next few months our team grinded away at creating the foundation for what would be the “next big sandbox game,” ultimately creating a basic game and website in a few months that was released to players on December 30th, 2018. At this point World to Build had a small following from adjacent communities that joined us on launch day to celebrate and check out what we’d been up to. Our team of developers was growing, and we had learned so much about game development already.

Our team wasn’t a group of professional game developers, and we didn’t have any investors or publishers backing our development. World to Build started as, and ultimately ended as, a passion project fueled completely by the love of creativity and funded by a shoestring and caffeine. Money wasn’t a concern of ours, and we were happy to put in the sweat to make what we wanted to make. Seeing the amazing creations from players around the world made it worth it every single day!

By the end of 2019 we had entire categories of new features that expanded our game into its own ecosystem and allowed us to truly don the mantle of “sandbox game.” Players could customize their avatar, buy and sell cosmetic items (hats, pets, clothing), make friends and clubs through the website’s social features as well as in-game, and make entire games with our custom game editor and built-in Lua scripting. The team and community hosted building contests, created memes, live streamed games, developed fun lore for our cubey logo friend (also known as “Spirit”), and so much more.

2020 was a tough year for many due to the pandemic, though our team was fortunate enough to be able to work together on this project the same ways we always had remotely. This year also brought a big change to World to Build through the release of voxels! To some this is a surprise to hear, but World to Build was not always a voxel-based sandbox game. Originally we had an aesthetic that attempted to emulate action figures, but we felt it was restrictive and in some ways cornered our game into being derivative.

Throughout a portion of late 2019 and early 2020, our team was hard at work rewriting old code and introducing the concept of voxels to every aspect of our game. Instead of our team creating 3D meshes of hats and avatars for players to customize, players would be able to make their own body parts, hats, pets, and more out of voxels in our new voxel editor. Anyone could swap out body parts and cosmetics as they please to customize their character, bringing us more in line with our goal of giving players a place to “make your own everything.” Additionally, you could make designs out of voxels that could be placed in your games or shared for free with others to add more detail and character.

At this point, World to Build was no longer a messy project created by some young punks in their mom’s basements. World to Build was an impressive project—created by some young punks in their mom’s basements. We had hired talent to create top quality animations and emotes to bring our characters to life, to create entire libraries of sounds for users to use in their game, and our team had even rewritten our client and website to adhere to all of the new knowledge we’d acquired over the last two years. Our small team of newbies had grown into a powerhouse of sandbox development, and we were (and still are!) incredibly proud of ourselves.

Throughout 2021 we continued to make new features as players found new and exciting ways to have fun on our platform. We made massive performance improvements, fixed networking issues, and continued improving and adding onto the ways you could create and implement voxel designs into your games or outfit. World to Build had also been attending local (to our HQ in Raleigh, NC) game and game development conventions to reach out to local talent and potential players. We had also kept in touch with the college many of our developers came from in the area to have their game development QA (Quality Assurance/Testing) class put World to Build through the wringer every fall, as well as to keep an eye out for any young developers looking to travel the World to Build journey with us.

By 2022 our team had seen many new faces as well as said bye to some. World to Build allowed many of our teammates a buff when applying for, and landing, actual professional game development jobs. Our team that had once been mostly dreamy-eyed students at college was now mostly professional game developers in both our day job and on our side project (World to Build). Team members that worked on World to Build would go onto work at various independent as well as funded studios both locally and across the country!

At this point World to Build was continuing to release new features and updates like the inventory system, a custom Lua engine, and even some internal improvements like build automation and Lua documentation site generation. The team would go to local events, continue to welcome new faces to the team, and host World to Build in-game community events.

2023 was a slower year for World to Build, and while players loved the game just as much as our team did, this project that started without a plan was maturing to the breaking point of needing a plan. Much discussion about growth strategies and whether or not we wanted to find an investor/publisher had happened throughout the years, but we always felt that the best move for our team and vision was to stay independent. We had worked with many developers who eventually graduated from our team to enter the games industry, and while this was enough for many, the partners felt that this limbo of being a stepping stone for young careers and a sharpening stone for new developers was, while ultimately good, not furthering our dreams of bringing the magic of sandbox games to the audience we wanted.

While most of our history focuses on the technical strides and teamwork that we excelled at, it doesn’t go into nearly enough detail on all of the late nights and early mornings that our team discussed marketing, feature triage, called and emailed with publishers, budgeted our technology stacks, and even invested our own money into the game in hopes of seeing the game reach a wider audience. Money and fame wasn’t the goal, but what we had wasn’t sustainable long-term, even with the extreme generosity of our playerbase through our paid memberships and in-game currency purchase services.

I would hesitate to say anyone on our team is an expert when it comes to sandbox platforms as a genre, but we might be as close as you get without a paycheck; through the years of developing World to Build we watched as many platforms attempted to create what we wanted to, some with tens or hundreds of millions of dollars behind them, yet none of them saw any success worth the investment. We took notes, looked at graphs, and connected dots on a cork board like that one “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” meme, eventually coming to much deeper understandings of how sandbox, UGC (User generated content), and games in general as ecosystems work and grow. Without droning on too much, what we found was a very steep hill to climb in order to get out of the valley we had been frolicking in for so long. This is not a fun thing to admit, and it’s actually very difficult when you’ve invested countless hours of blood, sweat, and tears into a labor of love like World to Build was for us.

We didn’t have the time, resources, and, at times, the energy to keep pushing the various approaches we felt would benefit the game. Ultimately we decided that while World to Build was in-fact, still our dream game as both developers and players, it was never meant to be more than it was at this moment. It was never meant to get millions of dollars of investment only to be held down by the thumb of some corporation. It was never meant to have billions of players, games, and items in the shop only to lack the magic and character that we strived to create all these years. It was never meant to be a 9 to 5 for our wonderful development team in order to simply “pay the bills.” World to Build was exactly what it should have been, and it wasn’t meant to happen any other way.

World to Build was a home to thousands of players that logged on to make something awesome to show off. World to Build was a community of friends, sharing a creative space. World to Build was an independent game that taught more to our team about development, teamwork, and humility than a decade of anything else could have. World to Build was a labor of love. World to Build was our dream game to develop. World to Build was a sandbox game that brought the magic of creation to the next generation of developers, and that’s all that we ever wanted.

Thank you for playing our game!