Sandbox is the real Garry's Mod 2, Facepunch say

Half-Life: Alyx is out, and where talk of Valve and Half-Life goes, so too does Garry's Mod follow. You know Gmod for all the silly Source games the players made with it: Prop Hunt, Trouble In Terrorist Town, Jazztronauts, and the like. Original Gmod maker and Facepunch Studios founder Garry Newman has jumped on the Valve-talk train with a tease that they're currently working on Garry's Mod 2, which it turns out is something called Sandbox that they've been developing for quite a few years.

It started with a Twitter meme, as news apparently does now. Newman posted a teasing indication that he's working on "Garry's Mod 2." Or maybe just wants to be? Although we've known that Newman planned a Gmod sequel for years, hearing about it now is that's exciting for plenty of folks, myself included, who have fond memories of getting up to shenanigans in custom servers running various Gmod game servers.

According to PCGamesN, who reached out to Newman, "it seems the game being referenced in the tweets is actually Sandbox," the Gmod-like game engine that Facepunch have been working on for a number of years.

On the Sandbox (S&box) site, Facepunch say that "our intention with Sandbox is to take a powerful game engine (UE4 right now) and build a hotloading C# layer on top of it. The idea being that you will never have to touch C++, you never have to wait for things to compile, you never have to close the game while developing."

That said, the last official update on Sandbox was back in 2018 and Facepunch's description "UE4 right now," doesn't exactly sound final. Another Twitter user beneath Newman's post shared a screenshot which they say is from the now-deleted Discord server for Sandbox. In it, Newman said at the time that Sandbox was on hold while the team switched engines to something "a lot more familiar" and were waiting for the new engine to be available. Facepunch Studios may have been waiting on access to Source 2 or could even be pivoting to Unity, which they've used to develop Rust.

At the moment, the only thing we know for certain is that Sandbox = Gmod2. Newman did respond to one user a couple days ago saying that it wouldn't make sense for them to create a VR-only Gmod, so we can rule that out.

After its long silence, perhaps we'll hear more about Sandbox soon, now that Newman is publicly making references to it.

Or maybe not.