"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; treat first publish as permanent naming anyway.

Publish flow

1. Project menu → Publish Project… (uploads game + assets).
2. Finish on the web: title, thumbnail, description, tags, categories, screenshots, video.
3. Publish states are Hidden | Released (no Private/Unlisted on the current site). Nothing public until Released. Hidden + a direct link = playtest channel: hidden packages still resolve by ident, they're only hidden from search.
4. Updates = bump version + republish same ident. No platform changelog field: keep your own CHANGELOG.md.

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. Native file playback from disk or URL.
• Thumbnail/banner pixel sizes and description/title/screenshot limits: not documented anywhere official. Read the upload form's own validation text when publishing.

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.