Logs / Route 001
A driving game on a volcano
What Sandbox Drive is, what already works, what very much doesn't yet, and why the map is a real island 290 km south of Tokyo.
Sandbox Drive is a vehicle sandbox built in Godot over the last nine months. It’s set on Hachijō-jima, a volcanic island in the Pacific about 290 km south of Tokyo, rebuilt at full scale from the Japanese government’s elevation survey and OpenStreetMap. The island can be driven, flown over and sailed around. Eventually it will also be a place to make a living, hauling fish, timber and fuel between its harbours, farms and quarries.
There’s no story and no finish line. It’s a place to mess about with machines that behave like machines.
This blog follows the project. Some posts are updates, some go deep on one system, and some are about things that broke in ways that are still slightly embarrassing.
Why this island
The brief was a map small enough to learn by heart and varied enough that it never gets dull. Hachijō has a coast road with the sea on one side and cliffs on the other, switchbacks up to a crater, an airport, a harbour, farms, forest, and two volcanoes that could hardly be more different. Hachijō-Fuji in the north-west is young and almost perfectly conical, 854 m tall. Mihara in the south-east is old, worn down and cut by deep gullies. There’s even a small sister island off the west coast that nobody has lived on since 1969.
It wasn’t the first island, either. Five others came before it, which is a story for another log.
What’s in it today
There are 48 vehicles: 34 cars, 3 trucks, 3 helicopters, 6 planes and 2 boats. The cars run from small hatchbacks to electric cars to off-roaders that are only really happy in mud. The helicopters simulate each rotor blade along its length. One of the boats is a sailing sloop trimmed against the actual wind, which is either delightful or maddening depending on how much you know about sailing.
Most of the work goes into the physics. The tyres flex and heat up. Clutches slip. Gearboxes behave like the thing they’re modelled on, whether that’s a manual with a pedal, a dual-clutch or an old torque-converter automatic. Take the wrong car onto wet mud and you’ll be digging rather than driving. How all of that fits together is in Simulate the parts.
Around the driving there’s weather that rolls in and stays (wet roads stay wet), a day and night cycle, an ocean with proper wakes, and a lava lake in the crater of Hachijō-Fuji, which the real one doesn’t have. There’s also a dealership, a garage for tuning and paint, fuel stations, a car wash, a photo mode, and a bank that gets quite upset about missed loan payments.
What doesn’t work yet
Two big things, and they’re worth saying up front.
The economy runs on Hachijō. Facilities make things, use things and run out of things, and jobs appear on their own when something is short. But there are no trailers to buy yet, and tankers, tippers and flatbeds can’t hold their cargo, so 11 of the island’s 24 goods can’t be hauled at all. That’s the next milestone. The rest of how it works is in Nobody writes the jobs.
Multiplayer works too: hosting, joining, dedicated servers, voice chat, handing a car from one driver to another. But it’s switched off on Hachijō for now. While half the island is being rebuilt every day, a single-player boot is much faster to test with. It comes back when there’s somewhere worth sharing.
What to expect here
An update roughly once a month, plus deep dives when something is interesting enough to explain properly. There’s an RSS feed for every post, and a timeline showing how many times each part of the game has been rebuilt. It’s a lot of times.
Filed under announcement, overview, hachijo-jima