Cloud map & Return from my adventure

PolGuys is a party racing game for up to eight players. Everyone drops onto the same obstacle course at once, hammers swing, platforms fall away, speed pads launch you into places you didn't plan on going. Touch the crown first and the round is yours. Fall below the islands and you watch the rest from above.

Between rounds there are coins to spend on colours and taunts, achievements to chase, and leaderboards — seasonal, and now all-time.

I've been modding for a long time: Minecraft, Arma 3, Onset, Garry's Mod. I'm on a serious Unreal project right now too, and honestly, I don't enjoy it. Unreal feels like a huge pile of everything — I once lost an evening just adding a dummy loading screen.

I'm the kind of person who wants the finality. Not shoddy work, just the result more than the ritual. Most engines make you do an enormous amount of work before simple gameplay exists, and almost none of them are built for community content. Unreal and Unity aren't made for modding by default, and projects like Nanos have to pull real stunts to get around it — cooking assets in Unreal just to smuggle them across.

And what strikes me is how much s&box already hands you today. The editor is right there, in the engine, no separate pipeline to learn. Prefabs mean a hammer or a moving platform is built once and dropped anywhere. Assets drag straight in. Code changes land in the running game without restarting it, so you keep testing instead of waiting. Half of this update was built by making a change and watching it take effect a second later, without ever leaving the game. That kind of iteration speed isn't a detail — it's the difference between finishing something and abandoning it.

I don't like tricks. I want to create, have fun with friends, and build something people can join in on. s&box is the first engine that has actually felt that way: drop in a few components and you have a game, not a 3D application.

This one was an exercise: how far can we go making content together?

So — cloud maps. Starting now, you can build a course, upload it, and everyone can play it. Someone joining your lobby downloads the map on their own, without doing anything. That's the whole loop, and it works today.

A template will follow, along with tutorials. It targets PolGuys itself, so you get the entire game with it: every asset the official courses are made from, plus an editor tool to lay out your own.

I know things are still missing, and I'll say so. But none of this needed a trick. I decided players should be able to publish courses, and a few days later they can. That's what makes me think s&box is heading somewhere genuinely communautaire — I'll go into the details in a forum post soon.