Noesis Interactive recently had the chance to interview Mike Tomaino about his pet project Platinum Arts Sandbox. In it, Mike talks about why he started the open source project and how successful he was in using it to teach kids in the art of level design. Watch the video to see some samples of kids putting together their first levels. While you're at it, why not download sandbox and give it a try yourself?
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First - Thank you Noesis and Stenchy for this opportunity :D
Second - I haven't put it on moddb yet but we have a new version 2.2.4 that can be downloaded on our site at Kids.platinumarts.net I'll try to put it on moddb today. Also we have a winter release coming with some special surprises including a sidescroller mode :D Take care.
-mike
Calimer for the win, fun times were had many years ago. =P
Very nice to hear from you Spector. How have you been? What have you been up to? And yes those old times were certainly some great ones. I have a lot of those old shows saved, I should make an archive somewhere. Do you happen to have any? We should pool them together. Take care buddy and feel free to stop by our channels, forums, whatever any time :)
-mike
Is it possible to mod in a sword or something?
Yes definitely. The RPG even has melee attacks and spells though they have been made into vegetables and fruits to keep it kid friendly ;D I'm trying to do the RPG in a way that if I want to make a more adult oriented RPG that I can just swap out the models. Take care!
-mike
sweet! Like the new version.
But there's no button listing when you hit the ESC key? I keep forgetting the keys to use. :)
That's a good idea :) For now there is a text file in the main folder called cheatsheet that has a bunch of commands. There are a bunch of updates including keys to save and put in materials (instead of having to dig through menus, hehe). Glad you are enjoying the release, more good stuff to come :) Take care.
-mike
really nice work! i just love the fact that u took it to a school and they loved to use it... this should definately get into more school as some sort of creative class :D great work really love it!
Several schools actually :D and at a summer camp for kids. I even got to use it at a Middle School too and teacher and kids loved it. The goal really is to get it into more schools so any help with that would certainly be appreciated!! All it takes is one parent that wants it enough in that district, hehe. Take care!
-mike
Would it ever be possible to have this save in X amount of map file formats to allow this to be used for a variety of games?
I would love that to happen. Radiant for example is open source as well so hopefully we could make sandbox export radiant type games :D You can export maps as an obj format so you could technically do it through that method though I haven't tested it. I think hl1 or 2 could import obj into maps. So the simple answer is yes :) Take care!
-mike
This looks really cool! I'm gonna download it tonight and see what my younger siblings can do with it.
Awesome, I would be very excited to know how they liked it! Feel free to send over screens too, we love seeing the work done by gremlins. Take care!
-mike
This is why free, open-source stuff is awesome. If you want another coder, designer, or advertiser I'm very good at all three.
I vote all three!!!! :D Spreading the word and any advertisement help in general is HUGE!!!! Feel free to stop into our IRC sometime :D Take care!
-mike
Really interesting project. Getting this stuff into school is a fantastic achievement :-)
Thanks :) It certainly was my biggest PR challenge to date, but well worth it. One situation was for kids that needed a little extra help with their studies and when I showed them Sandbox the teacher said it was the most motivated he's ever seen them. And they were actually getting their work done so that they'd have a chance to use sandbox :) Take care!!
-mike
I've pointed this out to a teacher who's started using World of Goo with the students. :)
Awesome thanks so much! Hopefully they use it sometime :D If they like world of goo maybe Phun would be a good choice too, though I have never tried it. If they ever do try out sandbox please let me know, I am very interested in hearing about that kind of thing :) Take care and thanks again!! That kind of help is huge :D
-mike
Sweet! I've been doing some work with Cube 2, might have to check this out some time. Glad to hear Hirato's on the team too, keep it up!
I'm slightly disappointed at the " useful programs list", why was the msvc site shown when calimer was clearly talking about codeblocks
why aren't the GNU guys being thanked for gcc, make and mingw, what about SDL that's being used for all the rendering and audio (using an OpenGL rendering path of course :P)
and one of my key applications, which I use that wasn't mentioned either, is inkscape. there's random tidbits of scalable vector graphics in the newest developmental release, and even more in our current developmental repo, even though they all had to be exported as png's
the wine project should probably be thanked too, since I run codeblocks in wine occasionally to compile a windows binary... calimer hates that :P
that's really I have to complain about, good interview!
Sometimes you are a little cranky but <3 all the way :D And in fairness I don't think any inkscape stuff is in the current releases out, but certainly a lot to come :D But codeblocks is a big deal and super easy to compile sandbox with, you don't even need to worry about extra libraries, just use our project file. And gcc and sdl? Sheesh if we thanked everyone the video would be 8 years long, haha. :D Glad you liked it so much H, hehe. Take care!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
-mike
PS new release out soon? what????
Good game! but I can't figure how how to spawn in creatures and I can't find a tutorial on how to do that. So i would give this Game a 6/10
The FAQ is generally a good place to start, as the four year old I babysit would say, you silly goose!!!! Hehe :) Here is a link to the FAQ:
Kids.platinumarts.net
If you have any more questions please ask :) In our help section there is also the contact information so you can come in and ask us too :D If you have trouble in the future please get a hold of us :D Take care!!!!!
-mike
Hello,
I am in a game design curriculum right now. I've seen some other level design tools and this one looks really fun. I've worked with Game Maker and Unreal Ed. I got the link to Sandbox from Mechwarrior Living Legends hosted here as well. From the video this looks to be a really cool game creation tool. I will definitely check it out between classes!
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