Since a lot of stuff is going on, I thought it would be a good idea to give you a quick overview of what's going on - so you understand our current plans.
Developer Preview
We're currently in what we're calling a "Developer Preview". We have made this cool editor, and all these tools to publish and play games, and we want to test them out. We already have hundreds of developers making games and giving feedback, and we're updating and improving every day. It's a big big job, but it's what we love doing.
If you're interested in joining the developer preview you can sign in here and follow the instructions to add the game to your Steam account.
The Engine
The engine is Source 2 with a c# layer on top. Similar to how Garry's Mod is Source 1 with Lua on top.
Our c# system is awesome. It hotloads on save, and the hotload takes a few milliseconds. It feels great to develop in. It's also networked, so you can edit your c# code as the server, and the changes will get sent to the clients so everyone has the same content.
We stopped using the Entity system and moved to a GameObject and Component system. This moves a lot of the work away code and into the Scene Editor. This is a lot more fun to use as a developer. It changes to be very WYSIWYG.
Standalone Exporting
Our vision for s&box isn't just a game platform, it's an engine. We hope to let you export the games you create in the engine to be able to sell them on Steam and other places. We are currently working with Valve to license for this. There will be no licensing fees or royalties.
It's our hope that in the future we'll be able to export to other platforms.
Monetizing
We will let developers monetise their games on the platform - but we want to be careful about it. We don't want to get into a situation where every game you click on has some pay to win system, and the buy button keeps moving around so you accidentally click on it. We want to explore options that are fair to players and developers.
Sandbox Mode
We realise that people expect an official Sandbox mode from Facepunch on the engine, and have been weary about doing that. But the more we thought about it, the more we thought about a few new features that justify making it - so we're currently working on that, and won't release s&box until that's done.
Sausage Men
We're working on Human models - calm down!