Facepunch Interview — Rust, s&box & Garry’s Mod

Inside Facepunch: Garry’s Mod, Rust, and s&box — floor interview

Fix Gaming Channel sat down with Grant Smith (Chief Business Officer) and Ash Cook (Marketing Manager) of Facepunch Studios at
Gamescom Asia × Thailand Game Show (QSNCC, Bangkok) to talk about Rust’s monthly updates, the evolving roadmap for s&box, and why Garry’s Mod still grows nearly two decades on.

I had the pleasure of talking with Grant Smith and Ash Cook from Facepunch Studios.

Ash Cook (Marketing, Facepunch):
Ash Cook, Marketing Manager at Facepunch, working on Garry’s Mod, Rust, and Sandbox.

Grant Smith (Chief Business Officer):
Grant Smith, Chief Business Officer, same games.

What are your top priorities for Rust this year?

Ash Cook:
Me, personally, on a personal level, trying to break that CCU. Every month, first Thursday of the month, we release a free update for the game. And it’s, you know, meta changes, new content, plus obviously skins if people want to purchase them. It’s a good way to get people in and trying new features that we’ve added, and getting them playing the game differently and bringing their friends in. So that’s our monthly opportunity to reach new people and break new player counts.

How do you choose which community ideas to add?

Ash Cook:
So, it’s a fairly democratic process. We pay attention to our subreddits, comments on social media, and, you know, some people in the business will look at these comments and think that could be a good idea to implement. And, you know, that goes into a public channel, sorry, well, public internally Rust channel, and then people debate it on how it could affect players, how it affects how staff already play.

And then, you know, we look at kind of trying to work out what the positives and negatives could be of this change if we take it on to the community. But everything that we, all the changes that we make to the game are committed publicly. So ahead of a patch, we have a feed that is constantly updated with all the changes that developers are working on for the next month’s update.

Often, some of these changes are then screenshot and put onto social media and can be controversial if some players don’t like the changes that we’re looking at making. And that also helps us make those decisions by, you know, discussing, by looking at their feedback and their comments and seeing who’s for it and against it and what the pros and cons are. But yeah, it’s quite democratic.

What’s next for s&box?

Ash Cook:
Good question. Potentially a launch next year. There’s still some legal things to tidy up.

But recently, Sandbox has moved to more regular updates. So instead of monthly updates, you know, where developers or players will go in and try their hand at building a game, you know, the next time an update rolls out, it could change elements of their game. And it’s been, you know, because obviously a month passes, it could potentially be a huge change. And then, you know, that developer has to go in and adjust their game based on the changes that we’ve made to the engine.

But moving to more regular updates, I think we’re about weekly updates now, is definitely helping developers who are in the platform already stay on top of changes that they might need to make to their games. And it means that we’re implementing community feedback a lot faster and therefore getting that feedback faster as well. So in terms of what’s next, still not 100% sure, but we’re getting closer to release.

Grant Smith:
We launched the player fund. So creators are now getting, depending on how many people are playing the game, they can get a share of the play fund. So that’s kind of giving them back for their contribution to the game as well.

What’s one thing players don’t see about your day-to-day dev work?

Ash Cook:
I would probably argue in relation to changes to Rust, especially. You know, like I said previously, all the commits that we make are public. And there has been extensive research into a change that we might make. We’ll look at game player data, all sorts of things to effectively make sure that we’re making an informed decision before applying that change.

But obviously a lot of people just see the commit go out in public and then they might take issue with the commit, with the upcoming change that we might make to the game. And I think players don’t realise how much effort and time and information we have and research into changes that we make. I think sometimes they might think it’s quite sporadic or just not as well thought out. But actually there is a significant process in a lot of the changes that we make, game player changes especially.

For readers new to Garry’s Mod, what is it?

Ash Cook:
Yeah, sure. Garry’s Mod is whatever you want it to be really. It’s a physics sandbox. We give people the tools to make whatever they want and people are making crazy memes and game modes and machinimas. It’s crazy that it’s still going almost 20 years on. It’s still selling lots of copies now. People are still discovering it. There’s a whole generation of people that never got into prop hunt and game modes like that. Now they can. It’s so accessible and it’s probably a good gateway into development.

Grant Smith:
Getting to book a record.

Ash Cook:
Last year it also won a Guinness World Record for the highest selling PC exclusive.

Related: Innovation & Expansion — Tomas Sala on Bulwark’s update and design philosophy

Closing Notes

Thanks to Ash Cook and Grant Smith for making time on a busy floor.

More from Gamescom Asia × Thailand Game Show is coming to Fix Gaming Channel — quick-hit indie spotlights, hands-on notes, and a few short follow-ups we lined up on the floor.