We wanted to share some of the exciting plans we have for upcoming features including terrain manipulation, an expanded materials system, and more, that we have for the rest of the year (and a bit beyond). While we still do not have a release date or official price for mobile, we currently plan on it being a one-time paid app with no ads or in-app purchases.Last year we worked hard to make Universe Sandbox even better, and we’ve continued that work into this year with two updates already. There are occasional bugs to fix in the mobile version, such as this one showing patchy trails on an iOS phone at high simulation speeds.

We’re also currently hiring a cross-platform engineer to help bring Universe Sandbox to mobile and beyond. We have been working on numerous updated user interface designs that improve functionality and clarity no matter what device you are on, and implementing those is one of our major next steps. Lower amounts of memory on mobile phones, as well as hardware limitations leading to poor performance, are two of the challenges we are still working on to get Universe Sandbox to run smoothly on mobile devices. How do we make the user interface work in both portrait and landscape orientations?.Working around the limitations of minimum button sizes required for a touchscreens.What’s the best way to manage all of the different panels on a small screen (our guide system creates particular challenges)?.However, we are still working on solving a few design challenges including (but not limited to): For example, our bottom bar redesigns both create a sleeker, more adaptable desktop experience while also making everything more accessible on mobile. You may have seen some of the improvements we’ve made to our user interface in recent updates. The interface filling up the entire screen on a mobile phone shows how challenging it can be to fit all of the windows on a smaller display. If you do try this, you’ll notice it presents quite a design challenge, not only for existing features but also for any features we add.

You can check out how we are building this flexible user interface right now by making the window in the desktop version small. In Update 26, we unified the user interface across desktop and VR, and we’re continuing to develop this unified interface with physically smaller (that is, mobile) screens in mind. For the last few months, we’ve been focusing on making sure the mobile version is just as fun to play as the desktop version.

Universe sandbox 2 demo