A SandBox to Sandbox: A Tangible Terrain Generator for Prototyping Game Worlds

Designing the game world is foundational for creating games. However, existing software solutions for creating game worlds such as terrain generators often require a significant amount of time and experience to be mastered. Particularly for beginners, this poses a challenge and slows down the progress in development. To address this issue, we propose a tangible terrain generator named SandBox composed of a small sandbox enabling users to create a terrain landscape using sand. Leveraging the engaging and familiar activity of playing in a sandbox and creating simple models, we hypothesize that SandBox offers easy-to-learn and intuitive landscape creation for games. We evaluated SandBox in a study with eight participants and compared it to a common terrain builder using the 3D-modeling software Blender. Qualitative insights indicate that SandBox was well-received. Neither usability nor task completion time was significantly different. We discuss the use of our tangible terrain generator and propose further features for future work.