"A pre-publish checklist for sbox.game"

You're about to hit Publish and don't want a buried listing, a broken player build, or a permanent bad ident.

sbox.game discovery actively demotes packages missing thumbnail, description, tags, categories, screenshots, or video. Editor-green ≠ player-green (broke-after-publish-whitelist). Naming and store fields are easy to half-fill once.

Org / ident

• Create an Organization (editor publish dialog → New Organisation, or sbox.game). Restart the editor if the org doesn't appear in the dropdown.
• Ident is org.package — exactly two lowercase dot-separated segments. Org name prefixes every package forever — pick carefully.
• Title/ident are changeable per getting-started docs, but mutability after first publish is (unverified) — treat first publish as permanent naming.
• Whether package names may contain _ is (unverified — check the dialog).

Publish flow

1. Project menu → Publish Project… (uploads game + assets).
2. Finish on the web: title, thumbnail, description, tags, categories, screenshots, video.
3. Default visibility is org-private. States: Private / Unlisted / Released. Nothing public until Released. Unlisted + link = playtest channel.
4. Updates = bump version + republish same ident. No platform changelog field — keep your own CHANGELOG.md. Rollback (unverified).

Store page (all launch-blocking)

• Thumbnail, description, tags, categories (distinct fields, both scored), screenshots, video.
• AI-generated thumbnails are demoted (policy since 2026-05-13) — cover art must read as human-made; editor warns.
• Video: mp4, webm, gif, animated webp. YouTube embed (unverified/unlikely).
• Thumbnail/banner pixel sizes: not documented — read the upload form validation and record it. Pre-redesign wiki said 1280×720 for banner (unverified for current site).
• Description/title/screenshot limits: (unverified — check the dialog).

Technical gate before announcing

• Loose resources listed under Project Settings → Other → Resource Files (no assets/ prefix) — loose-resource-files-publish
• Critical cloud assets verified after publish — cloud-assets-fail-under-load
• Whitelist-sensitive APIs swept — dotnet-build-vs-whitelist
• Join the published package as a player, not only in-editor
• Re-check after every engine update
• Never disable the whitelist casually (blocks platform publish; one-way toward standalone)

Optional polish

Wire Sandbox.Services. Understand Play Fund. Min-spec sanity: Vulkan 1.2, no DX11 fallback, Intel iGPU unsupported; floor roughly i5-7500 / 8GB / GTX 1050. Steam Deck effectively unsupported (unrated, poor perf, no default controller scheme).

The store ranks completeness; the published sandbox enforces whitelist + packaged resources. A checklist that covers listing, packaging, and player-join verification catches the three failure modes that "green editor play" never sees.