There are projects that start to cater to a small community of people interested in a specific niche, a lucky few growing to attract mainstream attention. One such project that tries to break the mold is The Sandbox. A virtual place where people can release their creative juices and profit from the work that they created. The Sandbox wants to bridge the gap between real life and the metaverse by creating a platform where people can create digital artworks and let others interact with them online.

Graphics and Style

With the pixelated aesthetic that the game uses, I think a lot of people will associate The Sandbox as similar looking to popular games like Minecraft and Roblox. It is somewhat close thanks to the voxel elements and the sharp, edgy design that people can create and interact with inside the game but has more depth and more vibrant colors. 

It gives off that create-your-own vibe since the elements being voxels looks easy to work with. The animations are also somewhat sharp for a game that is made for boxy-looking characters and a lot of tools are at a creator’s disposal using Sandbox’s own VoxEdit software.

Gameplay

It’s hard to write this part of the article since there isn’t really one gameplay for The Sandbox. During its alpha stage though, it is like an RPG where you walk and run around the map looking for quests that NPCs scattered around the map will give you. Other quests and missions will unlock as you level your avatar as it accumulates experience points as it finishes quests. 

There are multiple organizations and companies who are partnered with the game including the likes of ATARI, Binance, Deadmau5, Care Bears, Adidas, and much more. They own a plot of land in the game’s metaverse and each plot of land will be explorable for all players when the final version of the game is out and each of them will have different activities that players can engage with depending on the theme/concept of the organizations who own that plot of land. 

There’s an entrance fee for visiting these LANDs that players will have to pay with SAND (the in-game token for The Sandbox) before they can interact with it. This ensures that the creators will get paid for everything they do inside the game as everything you create in the game are NFTs and can be bought and sold in the game’s marketplace.

Tokenomics and Earning Mechanics

SAND is the token used for every transaction and activity in the game. It is an ERC-20 token and the game is built on the Ethereum Network. They’ve since migrated to the Polygon network to lower the gas fees in the game to make the game more eco-friendly.

There’s also the form of currency players can use to purchase LAND and assets in the game. As of writing (August 29, 2022), the price for 1 SAND is $0.98.

Final Thoughts

I believe The Sandbox is a promising title. Just looking at the partners this game has backing them up is a testament that there are people who are willing to bet on the success of the game. The game also looks easy to pick up since it doesn’t have the complicated controls that most of the games being released nowadays have. 

It can also be a gateway to introduce people to the complicated world of NFTs and online ownership of items on the web since it is at the heart of operations for the game and they can learn of these things as they go. Creators can also monetize their works of art inside the game making an almost seemingly independent world on the internet.  The Sandbox is still in its early stages and I can’t wait to see how it will progress as we move to a new chapter of Internet history.