While there’s a lot to look forward to in 2020, we’re going to take a moment to celebrate the milestones we reached this past year.

 

1

New team member.

Brendan is a graphics developer from Australia and is joining Georg in making everything in the universe beautiful, awesome, and graphically performant. He’s already worked on improving random planet generation, fixing black hole issues on the Magic Leap, and is now creating visuals for our experimental liquid planets project, AKA smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH).

 

2

Number of full-time developers on a new platform.

Magic Leap 1! We started a new journey into augmented reality in 2019 and we’re really proud of the work we’ve done to bring the full power of Universe Sandbox to Magic Leap as an undiluted experience. Dave and Jacob focused most of the year on Magic Leap with support from the rest of the team.

Universe Sandbox creator & director, Dan Dixon, working on Magic Leap with developer Dave Nelson.

 

4

New human-sized objects.

  • banana
  • watermelon
  • sword
  • sledgehammer

Everything you need to make a very bad fruit salad.

 

7

Significant updates to Universe Sandbox.

  • Revamped Vapor & Engine Experiments | Update 22.2 | April 10, 2019
  • A Big Day for Physics | Update 22.3 | May 30, 2019
  • Beyond the Milky Way | Update 23 | June 25, 2019
  • Galactic Clean-Up | Update 23.1 | August 20, 2019
  • Saturn’s New Moons | Update 23.2 | November 01, 2019
  • Surface Grids & Lasers | Update 24 | November 22, 2019
  • The Color in Space | Update 24.1 | December 19, 2019

This year had a mix of improving existing content and rolling out new features. While there were fewer objects added, several key systems got revamped (see Surface Grids), setting the team up for exciting additions in the coming year.

Image provided by Discord user Mangolia.

 

28

# of languages we now support, up from 22 last year.

A big thanks to our community for helping with our crowdsourced translation efforts! Want to help translate Universe Sandbox into your native language? Learn more.

Bulgarian Chinese Simplified Chinese Traditional Czech Danish
Dutch  English  Filipino Finnish French
German Greek Hungarian Indonesian Italian
Japanese Korean Norwegian Polish Portuguese
Romanian Russian Spanish Swedish Thai
Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese

 

601

Highest number of concurrent users in Universe Sandbox in 2019.

This is higher than in 2018, and second only to our all-time high of 617 players in March of 2016, during our first big Steam sale. 

 

1,963

# of users in our Discord server.

Join us on Discord!

 

2,124

# of positive Steam reviews in 2019.

Seeing so much love for Universe Sandbox warms our hearts the way gravitational squishing heats Io.

Overwhelmingly Positive reviews. Wow!

 

2403

# of code commits (changes) made to the Universe Sandbox project in 2019.

A look at our GitHub commits activity since 2015. The gray section shows 2019.

 

14,893 

# of shared items in the Universe Sandbox Steam Workshop.

This is over six times as many as 2018! We can’t wait to see how this library of community creations grows in the coming year! To get through all of them in 2020, you’d have to check out slightly more than 40 per day. (Get cracking?)

 

103,541

# of messages sent on Slack (an instant messaging platform we use to communicate).

Giant Army is a completely remote team, with some dozen members on three continents. We also use Google Meet for our face to face video meetings but much of our work happens in text.

 

163,298 

# of units sold on Steam.

In 2018, we sold a copy just about every five minutes. In 2019, that interval narrowed to a little under 3 minutes and 15 seconds. 

 

474,811

Lasers equipped since our Surface Grids & Lasers release.

This is one of the stats we track using our built-in analytics.

 

The magic cold laser in action. Image provided by Discord user Anonymoose/BlueMarble.

 

8,093,789

# of views on most viewed Universe Sandbox video of the year.

We’ve been delighted to see GreyStillPlays make 26 videos featuring antics in Universe Sandbox.

 

10,485,760

# of individual data points we are simultaneously simulating on object surfaces.

This is our Surface Grid system, which is a foundation that we’ve been working on for years, and will enable us to skyrocket into the future with some pretty exciting features. More on that soon in the 2020 roadmap.

(with atlas resolution of 1024 × 2048 × 5 layers = 10,485,760  |  higher-end computers can simulate 2048× 4096 × 5 layers = 41,943,040 points).

Vapor content on the Moon as it is bombarded by icy asteroids

 

 

What’s next?

Improvements to heat and material simulation across object surfaces, new tools, life simulation, better performance, data analysis, Magic Leap, a completely revamped VR experience, SPH – it’s hard to list it all. The foundational work we did in 2019 sets us up to do amazing things in the coming year.

Stay tuned for a 2020 roadmap, which we’ll publish next.

Thank you to everyone, to both new players and those who have been playing Universe Sandbox for years. Whether you’re analyzing orbits, creating fictional worlds, learning about astronomical material properties, or just having fun throwing planets together, we truly couldn’t do this without your continued enthusiasm for our little astronomy simulation. And we’re just getting started.

 

The Universe Sandbox Team
Dan, Chris, Georg, Alexander, Jonathan, Dave, Rappo, Mat, Jacob, Erika, and Brendan