Small Fish 2024 Transparency Report

—Happy New Year, everyone!—

We wouldn’t be where we are without our community. In keeping with our commitment to transparency, we think it’s only right to set a good example and take a scrupulous look back at the year. (Not in chronological order)

Yes, the legends are true, we have our own line of merch which will never see the light of day: Small Fish branded socks.

Made with 100% organic cotton, knitted design, and biocompostable packaging, they were shipped exclusively to Small Fish members and close associates.

Sorry, we are not selling these socks, we consider them to be a test run, perhaps in the future.

Some believe we bribed Facepunch to win the second game jam by shipping them a box, but we reached out to garry about it after the results were already out, and if that was the intention it clearly didn’t work!

We first did our research on sock technology, locking in with half-terry cotton knitted socks, where they use tinted threads to weave the design itself.

We then reached out to companies for quotes, who then sent us the pattern files. We brainstormed a few designs and hired a couple of artists on Fiverr to turn them into reality, we really enjoyed the wave pattern Grodbert came up with, and after a few revisions we had our design.

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After sending the files over, it took just a few days to get them produced, and two weeks to arrive. We immediately started shipping to our members, unfortunately we had no way for the Russian members to receive them.

We bought 100 socks for around $8.40 each, or $840.00; we could’ve gotten a better price if we ordered more, but that didn’t sound like a good investment.

Shipping to our members depended on the location, but it hovered from $4.00 to $18.00, I’d say $80.00.

In total we spent about $1,040.00 on socks, and with “we” I mean me, ubre, I’d never let any member pay for expenses like these.

I’d say it was worth it, but it was scary at the time to do just for a meme! Plus I started including pvc stickers in the packages as an extra, I print them at home and cut them by hand!

• Opened a commit log for every major repository;
• Made the Discord server’s audit log public;
• Fish of the day role, which is able to view every developer channel and archive. This forces us to self-moderate and avoid circlejerk behaviour;
• Released many open source projects, such as our in-house player controller and the entirety of “My Summer Cottage”, amongst others.

I was elected the “Community President”, I brought a few users based on how many issues they opened and how active they were on the server, the first being DoctorGurke from Eagle One.

From there on we would hold votes to add other users, mainly looking for people that could represent their organization/community or had a set of skills that others didn’t.

The day I became president, I set up a public spreadsheet to keep track of issues based on how important and popular we felt they were. I bet it’s annoying for Facepunch developers to look at it every day, so we mostly just post the issues directly in the channel and the spreadsheet is there to let people know the developers are aware of the issues.

Sometimes Facepunch asks us opinions on upcoming changes or events, most recently with the Tech Jam, which we asked for more artist friendly categories.

I then set up a timer to exactly 6 months until the next presidential vote, in January 21st.

We’re planning on making a small game hosted on s&box where each user can vote for their president on the week of the elections, this would be hosted by Small Fish but I’ll try to make it as open and trasparent as possible.

The elections for a new community president is something I made up, I’m not even sure Facepunch will recognize a winner but I’m hoping they do, just as I hope every consecutive president will maintain this tradition.

Of course, I think I have good chances at winning, but if I don’t I’ll pass everything to the new president and enjoy my stress-free life with permanent secret service protection.

We revamped the subreddit, started actively posting anything s&box related, set up resources, and included a list to all known S&box discord servers to help them with visibility.

Truth be told, I also nabbed other abandoned s&box subreddits, all they’d have is people asking for keys and pushed outdated info on search engines, which I though was harming s&box’s reputation, so I closed them and redirected to the “official” one.

If anybody wants to become the new owner of these subreddits, I’ll gladly hand them over as long as they promise to build them up.

The second biggest s&box subreddit is owned by the r/gmod owners: r/playsandbox. It doesn’t see more than a couple of posts every year, so I assumed it was abandoned as well only to find out the moderators were still active, so at least I don’t hold a monopoly.

Here’s the subreddit stats, I’d like to say I made an impact but it’s clear the spikes happen whenever s&box has a big update or goes public.

In February, Facepunch announced their first official Game Jam with a prize pool of $25,000.

We knew we had to go all out, many of us needed the money, but we also knew that it would go down in history. Everyone will look up who won the 1st game jam, not the 7th or 12th!

We decided to submit My Summer Cottage, which a few of us have worked in the past but never amounted to anything more than a debug scene and a player controller. People accused us of cheating by submitting an older project, but literally everything we had was done or remade in the game jam with the exception of the playermodel.

Mungus wasn’t available so we had to commission the soundtrack, one piece from Zakkujo and one from Dawdle.

The amount of work we put into the game was insane, Grodbert and I personally took the last week off of work just so we could put in 14-16 hours a day each. I wouldn’t be surprised if we all clocked in over 2,000 collective development hours.

We received the funds from Facepunch after 2 weeks through wire transfer. Splitting the money with the team was a real challenge, and to make everyone happy I decided to give up my share and pay for all fees.

After taking out the $850 spent on music commissions, the artists received $6,985 and the programmers took home $4,195.

For most members I could send the money directly through wire transfer, which got my bank account locked a few times. Some members wanted the money through PayPal, and I had to upgrade my account to do so.

As for the Russian members, the only way I could send money was through an app called KoronaPay, which was the only one that allowed transfers to Russian bank accounts and had a terrible exchange rate.

I don’t know the exact number, but in the end I paid more than $100 in fees and exchange rates.

As for me, I got in contact with my financial advisor, and technically I ended up paying to partecipate in this jam, so I don’t have to declare anything, but just in case I have all the receipts.

If I were to make any money off of this, it would be filed under “Other Incomes” as Game Jams are not that recognized in Italy, and I would pay 23% in taxes on it.

After the jam ended, we took a break, and then poured a lot of work on My Summer Cottage to redo crappy systems and fix the perpetual bugs pushed by Facepunch, I actually pushed more commits after the jam!

We have many, many other projects going on, and unfortunately we had to put My Summer Cottage on hold. In that time Facepunch pushed more breaking changes so the game is in a constant state of being playable, broken, or hidden.

It’s good that Facepunch is making breaking changes now, we don’t want to end up like Unity, but some people seriously underestimate the amount of work we put in our games, how many features they have, and how experimental they are in the current state of the engine.

In the end, people want to create new amazing things, they don’t want to fix old gamejam code every day, so there’s only a couple of us willing to take on the cleanup duty.

We eventually plan on releasing it on Steam as a standalone, we already have a store page but Facepunch asked us not to make it public. Although, seeing as very similar games are releasing around the same time, we have pushed the date back indefinitely.

Discord’s default moderation is awful, so we had to create our own do-it-all bot Fishley, the friendly goldfish!

He runs on a Raspberry Pi 4 that sits on my desk and uses multiple OpenAI models, which is a disaster whenever that’s down.

Fishley is able to do the following:

• Responds to anything you ask him, knows a lot about s&box and its prominent orgs;
• Moderates every message with OpenAI’s moderation model, which is free! It’s able to pick up hints and works regardless if the user ҬЧPԐS LЇҚЭ ҬҤЇS to get around filters;
• Warns users if they break the rules and hands out time-outs after a few warnings. The more warns a user has, the more priviliges they lose;
• Posts news about S&box from all around the web! Twitch, YouTube, TikTok, and more;
• Other fun features like fishing, recapping, etc…

Fishley is the absolute authority in our server, even above Small Fish themselves as they would just unwarn themselves before.

There are currently multiple unofficial Fishley-s? We found it funny so we made a semi-serious, semi-joke announcement to watch out in case one of them ever reaches out to scam you.

And finally: here’s Fishley’s full prompt for everyone wondering why he acts the way he does.

The money was a very big draw since some of us really needed it at the moment, and while a few were on vacation, we gave it everything we had, even more than the previous contest.

We have an unconventional approach to game jams: massively overscope a game.

• Plan a timeline of what needs to be done and when, then we give it our best.
• If we’re behind schedule by week X, we reduce the scope of the game, then repeat.
• By the end of the contest, we are certified to have the best product possible.

While other teams had a game playable by the first week, our usually starts to come together in the last few days as we finish glueing everything.

We came up with Deathcard, our biggest project to date. I’m really surprised with the result and I’m not afraid to say it’s the most advanced game that’s ever existed on s&box so far.

Truly everything was made by us in the month we were given. From the huge animgraphs, to the extensive animations and models. From the voxel worlds, tools, and editor, to the giant dungeon generation, rooms, and custom 3D A* navigation. Music, sounds, NPCs, art, UI, shaders, I could go on and on…

I still remember having 20-30 users in the voice channel waiting for the results, and when that was revealed everyone went silent and someone played the sad trombone sound.

I won’t lie, we had a really bad week after that. The only feedback we received from Facepunch was that our game wasn’t as fun. At least we felt vindicated seeing our game’s metrics massively outperform all other entries’.

It seems immature on our part, but for a while we were pretty sour, especially because many of us put in even more work on it compared to My Summer Cottage. A few developers, me included, took almost the entire month off their job to work on the game 24/7.

To calculate the shares, I asked members to send me what they worked on, and then I looked at how many days in the jam they pushed commits. This went better than expected, and works regardless if it’s an artist pushing 3 massive commits a day or a programmer pushing 200 tiny ones.

I gave myself $1,550 to which I’ll have to pay $356 in taxes.

Artists received $6,250 and the remaining programmers made $4,150.

We kept the game updated and fixed every issue encountered in the jam.

There’s a lot being worked on in the background, the game won’t even play the same once we’re done with it!

Stay tuned for Death Card 2025.

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We managed to interview Kenney this year, a big figure in the indie gaming industry. He has given us permission to start porting his assets to sbox.game as well!

It usually takes 2 to 4 hours to port one of his model kits to s&box, depending on the size and complexity.

So far we released 4:

• Food Kit - 200 models;
• Hexagon Kit - 72 models;
• Tower Defense Kit - 160 models;
• Kenney Holiday Kit - 100 models;

And many more in the future! If you’d like to help or have ported one in the past already, we can invite you to the organization where they get posted.

We’re also working on a devlog for the Christmassy Game, made using Kenney’s assets on Christmas Day by ubre (me).

Something that came from Death Card was the game Shoot & Build, now called:

Death Card doesn’t really utilize the voxel mechanic to its full potential, so we upgraded the tools and capabilities and reused it to create Blocks & Bullets.

It’s heavily inspired by Ace of Spades, a game many of us have played years ago. Funny enough, Death Card was original meant to be what Blocks & Bullets is today, the name is even a reference to Ace of Spades but we pivoted during the jam.

Blocks & Bullets is a very fun project to playtest and work on, we have big plans for it in the future, such as dedicated servers and a battle royale mode.

Small Fish games already boast the most advanced NPCs in s&box, so we’re planning to make the best bots to play with andagainst in Blocks & Bullets, so you’re able to experience the game even by yourself or a group of friends.

I’m very excited for the future of this game, it truly is the best game s&box needs right now.

We slowed down with s&box drama lately, both because there isn’t much happening in the community and because we’re busy with other projects.

We’d like to remind everyone that S&box drama is for entertainment purposes, we have a strict etiquette and the last thing we want is to harm s&box’s reputation.

Every scoop was either a joke, overexaggerated, or completely fabricated by us.

Speaking of YouTube videos, in 2024 we published the 2nd iteration of Fish School, many Fish Bites, and began releasing the 3rd iteration of Fish School.

We have also started publishing high quality s&box gameplay videos, for anyone to use as footage or just to get the word out.

In general, we are pushing more content on all of our social medias. This includes opening accounts for TikTok, BlueSky, and Instagram.

We try post something at least once a week but it’s hard to keep track.

A goal of ours is to get monetized on YouTube which requires 4,000 watch hours in the last 365 days. We’re pushing as many videos as we can, but we’re really limited by how popular s&box is at the moment.

Here’s the channel stats, which kinda resembles the subreddit’s one, meaning that our channel is also directly correlated to how good s&box is doing.

We’re hoping that 2025 is going to be the year of Small Fish, and s&box by correlation.

These are our goals:

• In 2024 we “made” $25k, we hope to make $50k in 2025;
• In 2024 we released 2 huge games, we hope to release 3 in 2025;
• In 2024 we reached 1.5k subscribers on YouTube, we hope to reach 3k in 2025 and achieve 4,000 watch hours to get monetized;
• In 2024 we reached 750 members on Discord, we hope to reach 2,000 in 2025;
• In 2024 the subreddit reached 9k subs, we hope to reach 20k in 2025;

And lastly, release a game on Steam.

—Thank you everyone—

for being a part of Small Fish, or even s&box in general.

A special thanks to Facepunch’s s&box team and all the other orgs.

And don’t forget to vote ubre 2025 for community president!