April 2025 Developer Update

We are growing!

It’s an exciting time to be in Ape Tavern! As s&box grows, so does our team. If you’ve been paying attention to s&box, you might notice two things:

1. You can make money in s&box now.
2. RP is already very popular.

Logically, we gathered these two facts and made a decision: we should make an RP game in s&box! But it’s not so easy to just make a game. We already have lots of active unfinished projects, and we do not want to give up on them so quickly.

In comes Northbound, a duo working on RP in s&box. I reached out to two passionate developers trying to create their own dream RP game in s&box, and invited them to join our team. Welcome to Maverick and Jackbob! They are leading the project, and some of the rest of Ape Tavern will join the project once we’ve cleared through some active projects.

Northbound

Northbound (temporary name) will be a semi-serious RP game, aiming to pull players from RP styles like DarkRP, GTA RP, and various Roblox roleplay games. While we aren’t ready to share anything yet, the development process is already going great, and we aim to have a first playtest in the coming months. Stay tuned for more info!

Flood

Before deciding to work on RP, we decided to bring the Garry’s Mod classic gamemode Flood to s&box! We are trying to stay somewhat true to the original, but add more fun and innovative ways to play. One key feature of our Flood game will be more unique and crazy weapons.

We plan to have a playtest for Flood soon! There is still lots to do, but after some internal playtests, we have realized the game is quite fun already, despite being very unfinished.

Micro Mayhem Rewrite

Micro Mayhem is our game which won the second Facepunch game contest. Sometimes, when you make a game very quickly, it accumulates some tech debt. If you don’t address it within a reasonable timeframe, it starts piling up, and fixing one bug will cause others to pop up, like a game of Whack-A-Mole.

Sadly, this has happened to Micro Mayhem. Between our own lack of maintenance, and regressions in the s&box engine (mostly networking related), the game is playable but buggy. Instead of just applying some naive patches, I decided to rewrite the game, mostly from scratch. I am happy to say it’s almost done!

The main benefit of this rewrite is that it will be much faster to fix bugs in the future, since the codebase doesn’t make you want to vomit. Another benefit is that we can iterate and add other gamemodes! We want to add a Time Trials mode where you can build your own course, upload it to the cloud, and then people will play it and compete for the fastest time to the finish line.

Dungeon Raid (on hold)

I had this idea a month ago about a “dungeon crawler” except you build the dungeon, enemies crawl through it, and try to reach the center and steal some of your loot. The enemies would come in waves, and you could place certain tiles or NPCs to defend the dungeon.

After some time, I realized this game loop is quite similar to tower defense. So, we started on a “tower defense” with some roguelite mechanics. We had some very nice art done for it, but I had to put it on hold - I only started working on it while some s&box bugs preventing me from continuing on the Micro Mayhem rewrite.

In the meantime, enjoy some screenshots of the art. We’ll pick this back up in the future!

That’s all!

You should be seeing more playtests, releases, and more from us soon! We are so excited for the upcoming release of s&box later this year, and want to be at the forefront of the the platform experience with high quality games that people want to keep coming back to.

In the meantime, join our Discord and follow us on our socials to keep up to date.