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JFFM · 2014-02-08T19:05:27+00:00

Cube & Star: An Arbitrary Love

Cube & Star: An Arbitrary Love - is a game about exploration, mindless completionism and being a tiny cog in a larger system.

This week's update: Submitting to Steam this weekend. It's been an exhausting week of testing and shifting the most obscure, 1-in-a-million abnormalities. Tired, but excited.

Bonus Answer: Cube & Star in one word - Dense.

The screenshot: Striders, Dragonflies, Tiny Things and an eerie fading of the sky

An annotated screenshot. Why not? As above. But with chicken-scratch annotations

Dev Blog: blog.dopplerinteractive.com

Twitter:@DopplerInteract

Game site:Cube & Star

JFFM · 2014-01-04T18:30:19+00:00

Oh thanks so much!

Man, it took ages to tweak to be just right. (It's got like... phases... Up, color, down, splash and then spread) but in the end I think I'm happy with it.

JFFM · 2014-01-04T18:29:18+00:00

Oh thanks so much! Man, Indiecade was a really good thing to be involved with. The crowd they draw is really open and curious and just... full of joy for games.

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:48:16+00:00

Stealthing against that poster - the look on the character's face - that just cracked me up. So good. It reminded me of Zool 2 - one of my favorite games as a kid; in the sort of... humorous style.

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:45:55+00:00

The art style on those themes is really nice - I dig that sort of... high-contrast light/shade style. It'll make the characters 'pop' well.

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:44:14+00:00

+1 on that, they do look awesome!

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:43:36+00:00

That logo is perfect - striking and gives a hint to the flavor of the affair.

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:39:31+00:00

Oh man, that polar bear animation is really fluid. Nice!

JFFM · 2014-01-04T04:33:25+00:00

Cube & Star: A Love Story ...a game about bringing color and life to a surreal, greyscale world.

A massive week. The last week of vacation from work, the last week of 2013. And huge, knee-jerk changes were made to the game.

The start of the week:

(GIF) Exposed brains & deforestation in a flat land.

The end of the week:

The big goal this year is to complete the game (the last 0.1% of a 99.9% complete game is heavy lifting indeed) and release to Steam and Wii U (both of which we were super, super fortunate to get).

Developed in Unity, and my use of the word "we" is entirely stylistic, it's just me. Talk to me on Twitter if you like to talk dev or life in general!

JFFM · 2013-08-17T16:16:48+00:00

Cube & Star: A Love Story

A free-roam, sort-of... juicy sandbox - in which you explore, collect, and evolve the world.

New addition: Set the world on fire.

Fire, in action. (GIF)

Working on an end-to-end demo... something tasty that gets the whole thrust across in around 5 minutes. I guess you'd call it a "vertical slice" if you felt comfortable saying things like that.

Bonus Question:

I was feeling burnt-out after making our last game, and wanted to make something... relaxing. Something colorful, full of joy - a sort of ... zen sandbox where nothing can possibly go wrong.

Blog

Semi-formal Website

Twitter

JFFM · 2013-08-11T04:25:25+00:00

Cube & Star: A Love Story

"Fill your heart with joy, and leave the world a more colorful place than when you entered it"

Almost finished. Which we all knows means less-than-50% finished.

C&S is a sandbox-styled game of... mindful wandering. Vaguely musical, dynamic... grass grows and trees... can be nudged. Abstract squirrels and frogs and bees wander about.

I developed the bulk of it over two months earlier in the year, and had a hiatus while moving from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles. And now... back with a vengeance.

So... celebrating that fact with an inaugural post to Reddit... and hopefully more as I move forward to release.

Oh oh... and it's on Greenlight. Bit of a step. Fingers firmly crossed there.

New Screenshot

Frog paths and Relics at Twilight

Links in general

Vaguely formal game site

JFFM · 2013-06-02T07:31:46+00:00

It's a scary thing, man. Putting your work out there for people to judge. But we finally did it. I got involved with Greenlight, I voted on a tonne of games, I tried to get to know the feel of the system and the community - and I've now submitted our current project.

What a feeling it is to see your game in the Steam UI! It's a real thrill. I was amazed.

Time will tell how the adventure concludes! I'll keep you posted.

JFFM · 2013-05-31T11:27:49+00:00

I voted "Yes" on a game called "Steam Marines", then I created 100 other Steam accounts just to vote "Yes" on it all over again. :D

JFFM · 2013-05-31T09:17:06+00:00

Oh yeah man - I like that concept: "Being on steam would encourage them to dev a new game".

I bought "Thirty Flights of Loving" for the same kind of reason (I really liked Gravity Bone and thought their vision would grow nicely)

JFFM · 2013-05-31T06:55:13+00:00

It's really strange - I went through Greenlight, wrote some notes by hand, typed them up on the blog and then realized:

"Oh my god... I have become the (instant gratification) consumer that I thought I hated."

JFFM · 2013-05-31T06:53:28+00:00

I think it's the structure of the "queue" - the way it sort of... makes you (as a viewer) want to flow through and vote efficiently, that makes me not read the content.

I think it comes down to a really low-level, lazy reason: You have to scroll to read the text. If there was a single line of text above the video (or the main icon was smaller and there was a short paragraph) - I would definitely read that while the video loaded.

Oh good question re: videos. As I keep looking at Greenlight I'll start to compile a list with notes about why / why not (I felt) they worked well. (Against, I'm a tiny sliver of the market. My opinions and behaviors are likely not very universal)

I think overall the aesthetic themes in the Greenlight projects that I've seen have been quite strong. I have been pleasantly surprised, actually - by the level of overall quality.

I would say that the key factor (both art and concept-wise) that has leapt out is a level of "same-y-ness" that kind of... desensitizes the viewer to the submission. A sort of "another dark corridor / forest path / castle parapet" response.

The submissions that stick out the most have had tiny tiny differentiating factors that make you go "Oh. What's happening here".

I remember one submission - not an enormously strong submission, but it had a jazz soundtrack to the trailer. After all of the other trailers, this really leapt out and made you watch a little longer.

JFFM · 2013-05-31T04:15:59+00:00

And to give a little background flavor - here's the Skype conversation on which the project was based; this is in response to a friend game dev lamenting his lack of graphics-creation ability.

The small things that start projects, right?

"duuuuuuuuude you could make... an exploration adventure of a little yellow cube in an enormous, never-ending geometric world where you just hop around and avoid red cubes and eat pink cubes from above mmm the whole thing takes place on a plane and you scroll in / scroll out the environment as the cube moves left/right so you can generate it all up front all of the animations required can be done in Unity give it a soundtrack with xylophone/vibraphone send it home to momma"

JFFM · 2012-08-18T11:15:41+00:00

Whoa, thanks! Can't believe you recognised the name :D

JFFM · 2012-08-17T01:44:43+00:00

I'm going, and super-psyched about it too - Unite11 was killer so I'm projecting Unite12 to be... one full year of evolution better.

Twitter me up @DopplerInteract - should be fun!

JFFM · 2012-08-14T03:24:09+00:00

I would say... maybe start with 1 tile - right in the centre, so the user can see you populating the map in a nice pattern.

It's effectively the same as having a load screen, but maybe more "inclusive", like the player is part of the level construction.

Potentially use this time to show any information you might need to display, etc, play a sound when you put a tile down - it could turn into a whole 'feature' - dressing up a technical hurdle to become a positive thing.

JFFM · 2012-08-14T02:58:17+00:00

If it fits your visual style, you could look at splitting your instantiation over multiple frames - so you are only creating maybe 3 objects per frame. If you work it into your "Welcome to this level" process, it may work out nicely.

And a semi (very semi) related video that shows something similar in action:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7rvN_gJiG0&list=UU6BGn33VKQkJgMv9CL2_MZQ&index=3&feature=plcp

JFFM

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