New Disney Infinity 3.0 Toy Box Features Revealed

At the Disney Infinity 3.0 Toy Box Summit in Disneyland, Bob Lowe (Senior Game Director, Disney Infinity), Troy Johnson (Game Designer, Disney Infinity), and Patrick Efird (Associate Level Designer, Community, Disney Infinity) revealed new details about the Toy Box itself, the game and community creation tool portion of the franchise that the summit celebrates.

The new Toy Box Hub will feature buildings like Flynn's Arcade and El Capitan Theatre. These will be used to help bring fan creations more easily to the players. El Capitan will also feature the weekly Infinity streams, exclusive previews and reveals, while the Arcade will factor into the weekly Toy Box challenges.

In rapid-fire format, new toys were introduced for amateur creators. The Path Creator lets you develop a path for townspeople, for patrolling enemies, for vehicles, or even make your own on-rails game. "You can use anything for a race, not just the race track now, by putting these splines down." You can even attach things like cameras to these to have sweeping pans integrated into your game, or make your own cutscenes!

The metronome toy and music note creator "allows you to make music far more easily," said Johnson. It's not just for music, though; you can also use the metronome to time how anything comes in and out of your levels. You can add things like fireworks shows timed however you like, including with the new fireworks cannon. There are shapes like Mickey ears, Jack Skellington's head, and more, that come out of the new cannon.

Calendar Configurator lets you change your world based on the hour, day, week, or month of the year. One toy box can automatically change themes for seasons, day/night cycles, and more. Think about how Disneyland changes throughout the year for Halloween, Christmas, etc; that can all be pre-programmed into one toy box.

Theme Transformer lets you change any of the base toys into pretty much any design you like.

Context Button Assigner lets you "take over a button prompt and assign it to any situation in the toy box." If you walk into a room, you can have a context button for a light switch that says "turn on the lights." You can use it for mission assignments, sound effects, or pretty much anything else you can think of, to create more of a complete story in your personal game.

The Radar Marker adds the beacon functionality into Toy Boxes from the play set modes. Another great way to add in more story-based experiences.

Dynamic Trigger leaves an area that can be attached to moving objects like Townspeople, physics balls, and trigger a reaction based on interacting with them. The "Distance Checker is the big brother of the Dynamic Trigger," so you can see how far away you are from an object or character you're interacting with.

Boss Battle, Vehicle Trick Tracker, Logic And, Player Counter, and many more new creativitoys are being added here, as well. The Boss Battle lets you spawn the boss of your choice into your Toy Box - yes, that means you can set up a story where Mickey and Hulkbuster Iron Man fight General Grievous. That is a thing you can now do.

Sidekick Manager lets you add sidekicks into your experience in Toy Box. Power Spheres, Radio Disney Player (streaming the real Radio Disney live over the internet), Gate Wall, Cage, and Key all make the move into the Toy Box; many of those come from the Toy Box Games that launched with 2.0.

There are, of course, also new toys from the Play Sets, like themed objects from Inside Out's many lands, Star Wars, and more. There are also upgrades to current toys including the Collectible Tracker, weapons, Sound Effects, Effects Generator, and Action Enforcer for "new and exciting story telling." Yes, the Wilhelm Scream has been added as a Sound Effect.

The Text Creator got a massive upgrade, including full conversations and the ability to add text to virtually any object thanks to the proximity tools.

Cameras, Challenge Maker (now with vehicle/mount types), Friend Generator (with preset townspeople behaviors), Vehicle Summoner (which works with hexagonal power discs), Sky Changer, and Boom Box (pick your tracks with easy interface) all got new improvements for 3.0.

Finally, there are general editing improvements, visual connections for logic connections to help you keep things straight, and many other changes they didn't have time to talk about here. Suffice to say, there are more ways than ever to create "more compelling storytelling experiences," Lowe said, which ultimately is the main goal behind Disney Infinity as a whole.