Tech Over Tea - A Puzzle Game Where You're A CUBE | The RnD Department

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Today we have one of the developers of the upcoming CUBE based puzzle game now going by the name TOYA, as you will quickly see this game is very inspired by titles like Bloxorz but there's a lot more to it than just that.Check it out on Itch: https://the-rnd-department.itch.io/toya==========Support The Channel==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson==========Guest Links==========Itch: https://the-rnd-department.itch.io/toyaLinktree: https://linktr.ee/thernddep==========Support The Show==========► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson=========Video Platforms==========🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg=========Audio Release=========🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea==========Social Media==========🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345==========Credits==========🎨 Channel Art:All my art has was created by Supercozmanhttps://twitter.com/Supercozmanhttps://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm as who was your host, Brodie Robertson. And today, I think this is number, I want to say four of the post-Avcon interviews. So today, we have the game director. Is that what you call yourself? Technical director. Okay. Okay.

Everyone I talked to has some like various different iteration of the name. So I was like to confirm specifically which one they use. Yes, that's fair For a game Or from a studio called the R&D department And a game currently Working title named Cube So

Whilst I play the video here Introduce yourself and what the game is Sure So as Brody very sweetly said My name is Rue I am the technical director And co-founder of the R&D department and we are making a minimalist puzzle game called Cube

that's always bigger than you think it is. It started off as a little student project that myself and the other co-founder Dan Rupert and Dan the R&D department. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's a bit of a pun. We like to think of it, like, sort of aperture-science-like, where we're sort of backyard science, but also it's ruined in.

It started off as a student project when we were working together at AIE. And originally it was just a thing. All of this has been very lucky from the outset in that we both rocked up late on the day that we, that teams were assigned. And my beautiful instructor, Orion, just said, all right, you guys just go on this, like leftover team, that's fine. And we made a game called Cube Daddy, which was the very bare bones kind of version of what ended up becoming Cube.

And on that assessment, we deliberately made a game that would be like polished and like ready enough to take that that could be selected to go to PACs with AIE because AIE have a booth at PACs and we really wanted to do that. So we made Cube Daddy small enough and tied enough and polished enough to be that. And luckily it was. And then on the Friday morning of Pax Day 1, 2024, about two hours in, we looked at each other after the booth had been packed nonstop from minute 1. And we were like, do we kind of have something here that kind of goaded with the source?

Is it like, it was, it's always been something that like kind of just tickled up. us and so we wanted it to exist and so now it exists but especially early on we didn't really stop and think about who would enjoy it and we would like baffled to find that kids love it um it's very due to one of the constraints that was upon us in the original assignment it was uh it needed to be uh it's like you needed to make a game to fit a brief and The brief that we chose was the abstract brief, and part of that was no UI, and that the game needed to, like, you needed to find and figure out what you're supposed to do by playing it. And a lot of, a lot of Cube is that. So, yeah.

So for anyone just listening, what is the gameplay of this? Anyone, I've got the video playing here. So for anyone seeing this on YouTube, they'll see it. But I do a bunch of Spotify listeners as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no stress. So the gameplay of cube is you are a cube, and you roll around in abstract worlds, um, solving puzzles and I don't want to, I don't want to say too much. I don't want to say too much. It's always, it's, it's, uh, I'll just say that the game is always

bigger than you think it is. Hmm. Well, that would lead into something I want to talk about a bit later, unless we want to get into it now. Um, no, we can. I don't mind. So, the game itself is very, very, like, it's very simple from the outset. You'll pick it up pretty easily. As long as you understand how to move in a video game, everything else from there, I feel, comes quite naturally. So, pretty much. Basically, right, go on? I was going to say, we actually, at Avcon, we had a dear grandma come who was supervising her kids, who didn't know how to play games.

and she finished the demo, which was very fun, just like we had to teach her what a thumbstick does, and she was able to beat it, which I found to be like a huge win. Yeah, I'm just got to like four minutes in. I just got to the bit in the video where you are with another cube and you can like flip which ones on top and the bottom. That's, at least from the demo that was at AvCon,

the only other kind of interaction you need to know. Correct. I don't know if that's going to expand later on. judging what you said, there's probably going to be more that happens. There is, there is. We're going to, because we want to end up on mobile eventually as well, we want to keep the controls to movement and an interact. So what that interact does will vary.

But, yes, that's the first example of something that you can press the button to do. Yes, so for anyone who didn't see that, basically what you do is you find another cube that's sitting around and you can use this cube as sort of like a, I guess a step to get to a higher position. Yeah. Yeah, we call them carryables. Okay. And so it's a block that you can use to traverse too high, like a wall that is two blocks

high or we have plans in the future to, of course, use it as like a weighted thing to weigh down stuff. We've got lots of really excited things in mud. I should say though, that the... to make this a better auditory experience, is that the unique mechanic is what we call cubing up, where throughout the world there are incomplete cubes that have an eighth of the cube missing on one of the corners. And if you roll into that spot, you become that bigger cube. And the level around you becomes suddenly more accessible because of your larger scale.

Yeah, I found that to be like a really, it's like a simple. mechanic, because it's also a very neat mechanic. Like, it's, it's a way to expand upon the world in a way that's quite subtle, but intuitively makes sense once you've done it that first time. Like, it's pretty, like, the first time it's introduced, it's pretty straightforward that that's the thing you need to do. And then once you've got that idea in your head, it's, then that's like an idea that you carry forward. Like, okay, if I see something like this and they are, are they color coded? I, they are at the moment? We're thinking of, keeping them that way. Something that I want to do for the full release is a sort of like Eldon Ring side of grace, sort of like golden particle trail effect to make it even more clear. Right, right. But at the moment, yeah, it's all through colour design. So is that, you mentioned earlier the idea of like not having your way. Is that like something you want to continue down that path? Yeah. Yeah. We, um, something that we've been using internally is that we're trying to make

Monument Valley for kids and so the UI free design is absolutely has quickly become like a core part of it and we want to make it sort of like a minimalist experience. Right, right.

I think at least with what exists so far in the game granted I'm someone who's played games my entire life so I'm maybe am not the best person to get like feedback on this side of it. Yeah, no please. But everything kind of just made sense from what it, from what currently exists.

I know looking at the itch comments, at least when that comment was made, there were soft locks that did exist in the game. There are obviously bugs. I didn't run into any soft locks for me. Yes. But. That's because I fixed them instantly because I felt horrible. Understandable.

We, um, quite often what we did at packs that was really successful that we replicated at Avcon is that we had two PCs. set up um and what we like to do is use events like that as sort of a play test which is what they should be used for i think it's like like get people to play the game but also just like let's test out the thing and iterate on it as fast as possible and that is the point of the second pc yeah it's free q8 and we can use that second pc to make changes on the fly and test them in real time which i'd love doing it's kind of one of the best bits okay um and so there was a section the the second puzzle, the second carryable puzzle, there was quite a lot of friction in a bad way.

Friction, I like friction, but it was people were putting the controller down and walking away, which is too much, too much friction. So I just like on the fly on day one, I think I added some crystals in a pressure plate to make it a bit clearer what we want you to do and where you want the player to go. Just that little change immediately helped people just, like, know what to do next. So you're going to use them as, I guess, a bunch of breadcrumbs, right? Like, it's a trailer breadcrumbs. Yeah, they're absolutely breadcrumbs.

Yeah. Right. Okay. So, I think the first thing that's, like, very striking about the game, even before you do any of the gameplay itself, it's the art design. and like the music and the world design. Like I'm assuming either you or the other person is like very focused on the art side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the wonderful Dan, he is a genius.

I think, it's a shame he's not here today, but he's a very busy guy. The, I strongly believe that Daniel DeCrews is a name that we will know about in game development within the next 10 years. very unbiased source very unbiased very unbiased but Dan is like if we talk about roles within the team I make the cube role so I'm in charge of

mechanics and systems design and implementation and then Dan does technical art so he does all the shaders particularly the water the water's been a big hit people have been loving how the water looks as well as the level design

he is a genius genius when it comes to that it's just the cube wouldn't exist without Dan the like going back quickly to that student project one more time it originally when we were pitching ideas to each other Dan already had a prototype of Cube Daddy which was very very stripped down in fact you I forget even if the incomplete cubes had a chunk taken out of them, they must have. But the movement was just like sliding around. Right.

And you could like jump. There was a jump, which we've removed. And you could jump into these incomplete cubes and then you became bigger. And I loved it. And I said, Dan, that's great. But what if the cube rolled? But that was my main addition to Cube Daddy. No, it's a great addition.

Like, it's, I would assume that's probably gone through a bunch of iterations on the speed of it and how exactly it feels. Yes. Well, we've kind of made this game twice now in that we made that original game in four weeks. And I smashed out the mechanics in two weeks, so that Dan had something to make levels for. And two weeks is not enough time to make some good systems. So the original is complete spaghetti code garbage. And, oh, it's just horrendous. It's like an easy 10,000 line script that handled most of it.

And it's just insane. But it was really good because it taught me all the things not to do for round two. And now it's beautiful. I'm so proud of the way that the cube rolls. It doesn't look like much, but there's actually like heaps going on behind the scenes to make the cube role. Right. But yes, sorry, that's a massive sidetrack from the art and visual style. It's very much, it's sort of within that sort of same vein, though.

The game wouldn't fit together without the animations, without the feel of the cube. Yeah, exactly. We're big believers in, like, the thing that you do over and over again should feel as good as possible. Right. And so we've put a lot of effort into those sorts. sorts of player feedback things. So yes, Dan's the visual man. He wears

many hats as we all do in game development, but technical artist, level design. He's like, if I'm technical director, Dan's creative director officially at the company. Is how we distinguish our roles. Although there's a lot of crossover. A great example of that is the water.

Dan did 90% of the work on the shader But a bug that emerged That I did a little deep dive into on the devlog If you want to draw the Discord cheeky plug I'll leave a link to in the description Is it on the link tree Yeah it's all in the link tree Okay it'll be in the description then yeah

Yeah Is that the water shader The way it works is it uses the camera's position Because okay Taking a step back Reflections are hard Feel free to get as technical with this as you want to. Reflections are hard and expensive computationally.

So Dan in his Infinite Genius had a way of doing this, which is he has a second camera, which uses the camera's position but looks up instead of looking down. So it gets that angle from below looking up at the environment. And then what he does is he takes that camera view. He turns it into a texture, and then maps that onto the water. So it's doing reflections without any of the crazy, like, ray tracing, bouncing.

It's just got another camera looking up. The problem with that, that's brilliant. But the problem is that that camera sees stuff that's underwater. So if there's a block that's chilling underwater and the camera can see it, what it's going to do is project that visual of the block on top of, of the water, even though it's underneath. So, I wrote some code that uses some crazy math to ignore stuff below a certain Y level.

And so it essentially means that the camera can't see stuff below that. So that's a very classic example of Dan making something really cool and Rood just editing it in a tiny bit. I do think the reflections are really cool, though. It's so beautiful He's done so many There's so many little things In the way that there's little things in the cube rolling

There's so many little details to The water in that There's so much stuff The You'll notice when a block is just sitting in the water There's a big decal projector That does like

I forget what he calls it But the little wet layer Just sitting above The water line There's like a dark Yeah Yeah, yeah, okay.

Like, it's that attention to detail that just blows me away every time. Yeah, you wouldn't even notice it without me telling you. But it looks, yeah, and it moves with the water. And it's just... Yeah, okay. Like, I think... It's nuts. It's at the point where it's a lot of very, very, very subtle things, which...

Yeah. If you list them out on paper, none of them really sound that important. but with everything brought together it creates a really good looking experience like we'll get to the more on the gameplay afterwards but visually this looks really good just like the again going back to going back to the role

like there's something is that like a is it a static speed the entire time or does it speed up the street? Yeah I thought that was something about that It's, it's, so originally in the first version, the way that I did it, which was cooked, is that the acceleration, I have a, I have a cube on me, because of course I do, I have a cube on my keys. The, the acceleration was linear, so it got faster as it rolled. Yep, yeah. So it was, originally was a bit of a thun, thun, thunk, thunk, sort of thing.

And it felt quite heavy. The way that I've done it now is instead of having control over the acceleration of the cube and now just have control over the speed, which is obviously much more tighter control over how the cube moves. And so what it is, is just a classic ease in, ease out, S sort of curve. And then the way I do it, not to peel back the curtain too far, But the way that I do it is I, if the player makes an input, they say I want to go forwards, the system then calculates through a series of raycasts what is around them. So it figures out if there's blocks to the side, below, in front, up and down, and then uses all that logic to pick the best move. And that is generally, like, is there a block in front?

Okay, well, obviously, I can't roll forwards. stuff like that and then once we found our move it then there's an empty game object that I've called the pivot that I put

at the place where the cube's going to pivot and then I parent the cube to the pivot and then I just rotate the pivot and that rotation is controlled by a curve that is just a classic

easy and easy out S and it's one of our core pillars is that we want it to look satisfying and edible as much as possible so those like everything is a nice easy and ease out do you say edible or did I miss you edible we want people to want to eat the cube more on that please it's just like well You know those, like, ASMR, Instagram, endless, like, soap-cutting videos? That's sort of what we're trying to tap into. That part of your lizard brain,

we want it to be appeased by our humble cube. Uh-huh. Okay. I see what you're saying. Yeah. I've never heard anyone try to describe their game like that. Yeah, well, it's, those things get crazy numbers, and it's not something that we, again, initially planned, but as sort of come about because of, like, it's funny. When we took it to Pax, what we thought people would get out of it was, like, the puzzles and the growing in size, that's what we thought people would.

would find interesting. But one of the things that people found the most enjoyable was just crushing blocks. And we were like, oh, that was just like a design fix because we like didn't know what to do with the smaller cubes once you got bigger. And so we're like, hey, you just delete them. That's easy. And so like, we want a diagetic reason for what happens when you delete them. So we just added a little particle effect. And that was it. I do like that the cube particles do interact with the terrain. There is, that is nice.

Yeah. Unity's got a lovely little system that just handles that for us. But there were people that would not move on until they'd crushed every single cube possible. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. It just, like, completely blew us away.

And so that sort of lesson really pushed us into the sort of satisfying ASMR angle that we've pushed with the second generation of Q. And that it's, we want to make it as like ASMR satisfying as possible. Right. Okay.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That actually makes a lot of sense. I didn't thought of it like that. But hearing you say that, I can definitely see what you're going for here. And another little thing I think of It was like when you fall down a ledge that's more than one block, there's like the little bit of a squish.

I'm so glad you brought that up. That's one of my touches. Let's see. Oh, here we go. Okay. Yeah, there we go. That is the system that I've called dynamic splatting. So in the original version, what we did is we just played an animation and we like scaled it based on how big the drop was.

we had a small, medium and large splat based on how many blocks you felt. Easy. The problem with that, that I always hated was that if you, obviously, if you fall off a ledge, generally there's going to be blocks on that side that you've fallen down on. And so what would happen is you would slap into that wall a little bit. Oh, okay. So what happens now is we have found this amazing unity package called Lathus. that allows you to

yeah L-A-T-I-C-S I-E just lattice I forget what it's called no not what it's called who it's by but it's like 25 American Harry Heath is that the one yeah Harry Heath lattice yeah

could not recommend it enough it's super handy Harry Heath if you are listening I love you you've saved us so much time and headache what it does is it allows you to define a bounding box using this like you can just be like a handle on each vertice of a square or you can have lots of handles so you can make like a

complicated shape and what you can do then is put a mesh in that and then by moving the lattice you deform the shape within it okay and so what we're doing there is when you fall similar to when we do a move I check the content of the cube to see which sides are constrained and then based on that I try and conserve mass and like splat out in the directions that are unconstrained so it doesn't go into the wall at all yeah and it does the same thing when you pick up a carryable when you pick up a carryable you don't splat into like if you pick up a carryable next to a wall you don't goop into the wall you don't goop into the wall at all you only goop into unconstrained side. Okay. Yeah.

So that's another little touch that you probably won't have noticed, but like, it always drove me crazy. Oh, wow. Okay, yeah. No, that... Yeah. Yeah, so it's like,

you're... I guess it's kind of like you're always... You don't want the cube to clip into the wall. Like, that's the simplest thing. No, yeah, exactly. And we... You want to feel like it's like an object in this world. is not just the player character.

Yeah, exactly. We want it to sort of conserve mass. So we want, like, obviously that's just the first pass out that we want to do more than, like make it a bit more alive than that. But I was very, very happy with that. There's a thing I work in a co-working space

called Game Plus here in Adelaide, and we do, theoretically, we do fortnightly, like, meetings to show what we've been working on, and it just so happened that I had just finished that system when one of those happened and I was like, guys, check this out. I'm so proud of this. No, you definitely should be like, this is really, really cool.

And again, it's one of those subtle things where it doesn't need to... Like, it would look good if it just did it, and it slightly... And people love the animation. Yeah, but that's... Yeah. It drove me crazy. Again, it's one of those... Like, I think back on a game,

Like, one of the, one of the most polished indie games I've ever played was Celeste. Oh, dude. Dude. Celeste and Holbeyeat in my number one and two all time. Yep, yep. But Celeste has so many very little things about how it feels, how, when you dash, like, it feels like, it feels like a game where they put so much effort into how the player character. feels and it shows by the fact that there is like some just psycho speed running community that makes custom maps that aren't human playable that you need to like they can only be

done with a tas because they're so insanely difficult but everything in the game is so precise and so perfectly polished that it all just works yeah Celeste is uh it's it's a masterpiece I I um was looking I was doing the classic like doom scroll through the Steam Library the other day and I was like oh it's been a while since I played Celeste let's let's boot that up and just the first like world is it's just so good um it we wanted to you've mentioned earlier the music the um the um uh the music comes from a beautiful uh composer called chris norton who's uh an adelaide guy as well um um I'll send you a link to that you can put in the description.

He's an American dude who makes music. He's a jazz musician as well as a game composer. And he's a close personal friend of Dan and mine through the Adelaide scene. We've done some, I say we, Dan's done some work with them on their game called Beach Bums. Oh! Okay, yeah, that was at Avcon last year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Beach Bump guys. Chris and his lovely way.

jazz work on that um so gosh a while ago now chris out of the blue sends us a demo of sound effects and music for an older version for the original version of cube and we were like chris that's amazing when we have money we'll pay you to do this properly um and so what you've uh what we ended up doing pre avcon is we've we've been doing some client work so we've got a little bit of money and so we said to Chris look Chris we don't have enough money to pay you to make the whole sound effect yet in fact the game's not ready for you to do the whole music and sound effects yet but we want to get the ball rolling how about you implement what you've already done into this build so that we have something to give a vibe of what we want

it to be like eventually um and so the all the music and sound effects at the moment are from Chris they are like the music in particular i adore um we want to do this is what let me do this point we want to do like dynamic layering to the music um in the way that celeste does and lots of games do um so that that builds as and grows as you do right so like at the start it's going to be like really quiet and sparse and then when you cube up for the first time like like another instrument joins in. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And it's like a continuing song

that builds and builds and builds for each world. If anyone wants a really good example of this, I believe it's... Is it Pokemon black and white? I don't... It might be black and white, where when you run, there's like the basic music,

and then when you run, the drum track joins in. The drum kicks in. Yeah, that's insane. It's really cool. Again, it's one of the subtle things you don't notice until you notice it's like, now I can't unhear it. Absolutely. And like that stuff from an implementation level is super easy to do.

You just start everything at the same time and then have the volume zero on other tracks and then you just bring it up. But yeah, I'm super excited to do dynamic music layering. Yeah, I'm really, what you've, today what I've been working on is a pitch to Screen Australia. I'm sure you're aware, there's their game production fund where they give up to $100,000 for game projects. So we're currently putting together an application for this current round of funding. And I've completely forgotten where I'm going with this. Talk about music, funding. Yeah, that's another one of the reasons why we wanted Chris to do this,

is we wanted Screen Australia to get a sense of what it would look like. and music with music and sound effects. Right, right, right. Um, but yes. Now, yeah, and like, if and when we get money, I'm so excited to build the levels properly and then get Chris to score and make some new, because like the current sound effect don't quite feel right to us internally. Like, because they were made for a previous version of cube,

they're a bit too, the cube feels very wooden, which is what it looked like in that first version, whereas now it's very jelly-like. So we want to completely redo all the sound effects. Yeah. Yeah, the... I'm getting away all the layers now. You're not going to be able to play it. The sound of breaking the cubes doesn't feel off, but definitely...

It's okay, yeah. But the movement, yeah. It feels like... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's... I've talked to a number of other people about this. That's one of the things that's really hard to get any feedback on Atikon.

like music and sound effects. Yeah, terrible. Yeah, totally. Unless you give people like noise cancelling headphones and even there, they've got to be some pretty wild headphones to block stuff out. Exactly.

Yeah, yeah. That's why we didn't have sound in the original version because we were building it for packs. Why bother? Sure. We're in a super loud and noisy environment. No one's going to hear it anyway.

Let's spend the time making the game good. And actually, that's what we did for Sage as well. Oh, you're going to Sage as well. Okay. Yeah, yeah, we were. We won a little award. That's cool. Yeah, we won the Elevator Award for Creativity and Innovation. So we'll, yeah.

Awesome. It's very nice. It's hopefully going to add some credibility to our application. Hopefully, yeah. The promise was real. Knowing this, like, because Sage is, I think Sage is, supported by screened Australia as well? Maybe.

It's definitely South Australian Film Corp. Yeah, yeah. But it may have... Either way, it's got, like, government backing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a government body, which is, it's nice to hear that it's... It's very nice to have gotten some recognition for it at all. South Australian stream.

Yeah, and Sage was huge for us as well, because... It's like, we started the ground-up rebuild kind of day after graduation in December. Oh, no, no, Australia is on here as well. Okay. Oh, okay, great. Because we started the ground-up rebuild, not the day after because I was hungover, but the day after that. And we, Sage is in February, so we also were like, we wanted to show it at Sage. And the original plan was to show the new version.

sage but there just wasn't time so we just like polished up the packs build a bit um and yeah it's it's it's it's crazy because uh yeah that's what i was saying um it was like super early it's february and we were like we're we're pretty excited about it but we were like not a hundred percent committed to it just yet because we were still like dan and i were both looking for jobs in game dev in at large um and then we got the same award and we were like okay let's commit this is clearly a thing yeah yeah it's I'm sure it's a nice feeling to get some level of recognition for what the project is it was insane how long to be in a project for at this point um so when people

ask that I like to say six months for six month hindsight uh-huh um because of that original student project phase and then we started it properly December last year oh okay Wait, this is like really new then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been working on it six months. This project. Okay. Yeah.

Okay, that actually makes sense why the demo is so short, but it's... Oh, yeah, it's tiny. So the focus initially wasn't on building out the game. It was getting something that works and something that is good and then expand from there. Pretty much. And then there's also a system that's been eating up a lot of my time that I've made called Blockout, which is a custom level development pipeline because originally the level design pipeline was horrendous

what we had to do is like click an asset duplicate it make sure the snapping scale was correct move it to position horrendous what I've done is I've created a custom unity window that allows us to like turn on block out I want it that like have random rotation random mesh random material and then you just click where you want it to be and it's there.

And so that sped up our level design pipeline on like 10X at least. So that's one of the things that I was working on in these past six months. I started that very quickly after because I knew just like we couldn't make a full game with the current

pipeline. It's just impossible. So you'd be spending like three years just building levels. Oh god. Horrendous. Yeah. So yeah. I'm very, very, very happy with block out. And you can, like, there's, like, a deletion mode where I can, like, click on blocks to delete them.

And then there's also a parenting mode where, like, if you click on a block, it, like, sets that to be the default parent. And then any other blocks that you place get parented to that cube. So you can, like, make groups of cubes really easily. And so now whenever I had, like, a new mechanic, I just add that to block out as well. So Dan can just instantly place stuff in the level and not, have to worry about whether it's on grid or not it just if it's used if it's placed during

using blockout it's always on grid that makes things much much easier I'm sure so much easier yeah well that that's something I should have mentioned um with the last one is that even when we did all that rigmarole of duplicate object set snapping scale move it to position are we happy that wouldn't guarantee that it's like on grid it could still like if everything before that was off-grid, all that work is not usable. So what I've done is kind of arbitrarily define what on-grid is and isn't through a series of master positions of each gale cube, and then everything in the world is placed relative to those master cubes.

Right. So, yeah, having this clear grid system, it's... Yes. You really do need to make sure things align out. I'm sure initially you're probably dealing with bugs because things were like, you know, a pixel off where they should have been and you were clipping into a wall. You're probably aware that there's a thing in computer science

called a floating point error where computers just like, they just don't do decimal points properly. And just like things would be like 0.001 and like, no, just be where I want you to be. Please, it matters for this game. things need to be exact and like yeah that was one of the flaws in the initial

movement system is that it wasn't exactly perfect whereas now it is exact yeah even though I'm doing this I actually do have a I have a software engineering degree I did four years at uni SA

yeah sweet very much using my degree it's very very productive in industry yeah for sure in industry I know how to get on stack over flow or chat chivitina yeah luckily I finished a bit before then I graduated like the year after COVID so I managed to skip all the AI stuff which is oh you lucky thing Dan and I both

teach at AI now and these poor kids they're just I'm not gonna swear but they're not they're not it's they're in a difficult spot learning wise because like I I recommend that they use generative AI models, but I recommend that they use them properly, which is to teach you rather than just like, here's my problem, fix it. It's, they've each got like what could be an even smarter me in their computer that they can just ask questions to. It's, I don't know, a lot of them use it wrong and it pisses me off because they just ask it to give them the answer and they don't learn kids these days.

I do have some friends at AI I've never bothered to ask them Oh yeah Does AI have like a policy around AI use It's evolving as a lot of education people are at the moment It probably depends what course you're in If you're in the Bachelor They're probably much more strict with it

I'm lucky to not teach the Bachelor I just do a certificate course So things are pretty chill Generally For like written work where it's your like we need to show your writing ability it matters please don't use AI for stuff like that yeah yeah yeah yeah but for code it's it's a tool like if i asked you to do a series of maths problems i wouldn't expect you not to use a calculator sure it's it's it's just about being

able to use a calculator is the metaphor that i've been using to try and explain it like when when the calculator came out and everyone's started getting a calculator, maths got harder. Like, the bar lifted for what people can do. And I think generative AI will do that again for education across the board. It's just a question of keeping those fundamental skill sets without losing them. Because it's really so easy. Like, even myself, like, whenever I have to write anything these days, I'm like, oh, really?

Do I have to? Yeah, I've, um, I recently. I think I might have uploaded a day actually There was a With the Curl project Like tool Been around since the 90s Downloading web stuff

I'm sure you've used it before What was the name, sorry? Curl Ah, I don't think I know that one Okay Either way, very, very important tool for doing For downloading web stuff It's like a lot of applications are like

Rappers around Curl It's often used as a dependency Yeah But the developer of that, he has a bug bounty open for, like, you know, security issues with it. And he's, he decided to make a policy where if you use generative AI for making your security report, he's just going to publish it in the cases where it is not a real issue. And there's a lot of cases where, well, there was one of the ones I saw where someone said, oh if your log gets too long

it can cause a DDoS because the system runs out of storage like oh no that's you're not look you're not technically wrong that it breaks the application but at the same time any application that writes data if it fills up your drive it's going to stop working or it also is the ability to like save

web content to a file and someone report an issue there's like oh this can arbitrarily overwrite files like yes but also so can any software that writes to your file system yeah and it's a crazy new world

we're living in yeah yeah I do think you're right there that it absolutely can be used as a tool but a lot of people are using it as a replacement to think yeah yeah yeah

which is yeah not the way to do it's it's such it's so valuable when you use it properly though because then you if you understand the system architecture you can like you know where to go next whereas if you use it to build those walls

you have no idea what to do next is the problem that I run into with my students a lot they'll get it to build like a prototype of the game they want to make and then they have no idea how to improve it or fix it because they didn't write it or understand right right

yeah I think I think back on these kind of popular Reddit threads that pop up where someone's like, oh, I vibe coded this web application payment processor, user, whatever. And then, like, the next day, it's like, how much does it cost to hire an engineer?

It's a pipeline, man. Yeah, yeah. Gosh. But yes. Cube. We're very excited about it. um the we have lots lots in store lots planned um how much do i want to give away we're we're very keen on doing like classic squeaker game not squeaky game um that's the

wrong game entirely um soko ban the other japanese like soko ban stuff so like pushable blocks um that's that's one of the next major mechanics we're going to work on um and And then another little teaser, we're very keen on doing, like, different surface types. So at the current, at the moment, everything's made out of the standard surface. But we want to do, like, slippery surfaces, fragile surfaces and sticky surfaces. So, like, both environment and player. So, like, what happens when the player is slippery, like, like an ice cube? and they can like

slide off the level and stuff like that. I'm very excited for that stuff. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You mentioned a while back, like, jumping and how that used to be a thing. I could also,

I don't know if you'd want to explore this, but you could also do the opposite of the sticky surface and have a bouncy surface. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing that we've thought of for jumping is like a little, like a pressure, plate that yeats you when you step on it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like a little bounce pad. Yeah. But yeah. The lack of... It's very funny watching people play it for the first time and they... A lot of people, particularly gamers, like,

hit some buttons expecting a jump. Oh, there's no jump. Right, it's one of those things which kind of is just there in a lot of games, but in all the cases, it doesn't serve a, like a functional purpose. Correct. and I guess the idea here is you want to well it's already very clear from what you already have

where you want everything to be very intentional you want everything there to you want it to be very simple but everything there to have a reason yes exactly it's very so far the game is very structured and linear and like purposeful a mate of mine was playing it and there's a section, it's like the second, it's a section with the different colored crystals.

So there's like a little section of three green crystals and then red crystals. It'll be like three minutes in-ish, I reckon? Oh, yep, yep, yep. You like have to fall down to get the red crystals. And he was like, if this was any other game, I'd assume that was a mistake. But I know because of the trust he'd built up that that is. the intended route. Right.

Yeah, there is... Which I found fascinating. There's a couple of sections like that where it looks like, like around, um... Yeah, around five minutes and 50 seconds in, where you have the, you have the cubes where you can swap who's on the top and bottom. Yeah, the carryball. Yeah. And then you fall off this ledge where it looks like you're going to be stuck there. And then a bridge opens up as you go across that.

Yeah, exactly. that's that section that had lots of friction on day one of Avcon because it didn't have those crystals there initially it just had it just had and so players thought when they dropped down there they'd be stuck and so they were afraid to go down there but because there was a crystal down there on the second day they felt safe enough to do that it's fascinating that is a good point like I I'm the kind of person where

and I'm sure you've run to people like this where I want to do everything in a section before I move on to it and I'm sure you have people that are like I want to break all of the things before I go on Yeah I'm very similar when I play games I don't want to have to go back

I try to clear everything out and then move forward Which creates problems for me in RPGs where I'm like I'm going to do every side because I can possibly do with the story I was talking with, I don't know if you talked, I think you've done an interview with Ewan with the Hellbite guys. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They're great mates of mine and he's playing Skyrim at the moment

and he was raving to me the other day about how Skyrim's design is so brilliant in that like you know where the main way is always and where the like extra side thing is just intuitively. It's, I can't attest that to myself that he was going nuts about it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, it does that with, like, having a... It has a UI, has a marker on there, so it's always... Yeah, it's always clear, too. Yeah.

Yeah, you're so right. He hadn't mentioned that. That is kind of important. Yeah, it's a little bit important. Well, I think when you look at a game like, a game like Eldon Ring, it does it in a fairly good way, where you come out of the first area, and the place you're looking at is, like, a very clear landmark, or you want to talk about, like, Breath the Wild. Like, there's a very clear landmark that is grabbing your attention.

So even if you go do something else, you know, eventually that's the place I need to get to. Yeah. Something that we haven't done that I really want to do is, like, data of player behavior. So, like, tracking how long players end in sections, how they move. And a really cool way to do that, which is something the Breath of the Wild did, which is they did heat maps for player locations. So what they did is they had a massive playtest early on where they tracked the first two or three hours of player behavior

and it's just amazing watching like everyone's going nuts and the Great Plateau and then the like the disbursement of where people go and it's like veins going away from a heart and they're like very clearly like get people onto these like defined routes where there's like things to see and it's just genius. Like, it helps having, like, roads and stuff, but still, it's, it's amazing that it isn't just complete chaos in where they go. It's very defined rivers that they follow.

Right. Like, you, you're going to put those things into the game, and then you assume probably people are going to follow them. But without having actual data on there, you don't really know what is and is not a landmark people are actually going to pay attention to. Exactly. Yeah, I'm very excited to do some sort of player data. there's so many things the next big thing for me I'm going to Gamescom next month but once I get back from that

is saving saving's the next big challenge because the game's short right now but eventually you know that's probably going to be a bit long yeah yeah and like for us it's at the moment there's a little like game what's it called debug mode where if you press e you go to like the next available like progression collider so you can just like skip through the level quickly but even that is

a bit slow and tedious if we want to test a section like halfway through the level you have to play through the game to get there something that we like like i was saying is the next important thing is being able to just like load into any section right and if you have that then I guess if you wanted to later on you could implement some sort of like chapter select at some point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. That comes at the end once we've got a game. But yeah.

We're thinking of doing it very Celeste-like actually in having like, because I believe in Celeste you can load in at various like bits, I think. That sounds right. It's like, yeah, because there's like worlds. And then within those, there's bits that you can load into. It's not like every,

spot but there's lots of them so we're going to do something very similar and I'd love to do like a different art style for the like level select in the way that Celeste does as well that's so brilliant I was gonna say with the opening of the game I would have to assume it wouldn't just be here's like a list right like that doesn't align with anything else

it's been done here yeah yeah it's been fun as well hearing all the games that people think it's like. Sure. Like, the one we get most frequently is, oh, this reminds me of that old cool maths game game, blockses. Yes.

No one says the name of the game, which I find hilarious. It's all like, oh, that cool maths game where you roll around. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, it's funny. I know that I've brought that up. I'm going to segue from it. There's a content creator called, called Puppa Pup,

that you probably have seen but not noticed, or not noticed, but not remember the name. He does like Cube puzzle games. That's his niche. So he's got some clips of him playing blocks so that have done big numbers. And the other day I went into his Discord and just said hi.

And the other day he posted, he's posted two clips on his Instagram now of him playing cube, which is nuts. So that's been It's been a big moment for us Like And so the two on Two on Instagram

And then one on TikTok I think That has 270K views Holy fuck Ooh It's a bit nuts So yeah This is this is

Dynamite's first game So this is all Like The marketing stuff is A whole new world to us, we're very much just like, we just want to make the game. And occasionally I post, I like to, I make an effort to post on the Discord, but it's, it's, it's hard. Obviously, marketing is hard, but I think having something, like, when you have something that is, that really does stand out and doesn't just, it's not just another indie game that exists.

I think there is, there is sort of a, like, people will naturally spread. that, right? Like, it's not going to be everything. There are some games that are amazing that nobody knows about, but games that are truly, like, really, really good, word of mouth, we'll eventually get to them. I think so. It's, it's been one of the benefits of Cube is its uniqueness, and it's not like, hi, we're making this RPG with narrative, narrative and combat stuff and right there's a million of those and like there's lots of puzzle games as well don't get me wrong

but um yeah we're very happy with the game as a whole and it's it's we just hope we get money to make the rest of it right well our current strategy is it's coming out no matter what quarter four next year

the size of that game will depend on how much money we get to like it pretty much. Due to it's the like structure of it, it's very easy to add stuff on and take stuff away. And say we don't get funding, we'll just do early access. But if we do screen Australia and stuff like that, we'll do like full release. And then depending on how that goes, then we'll do more on it. Because there's like, it's something that I tell my students a lot and that is to like make a small good game instead of a big bad game. Right, right.

And we've been in the planning stage this last week to get ready for Screen Oz and it's so easy to be like, oh, but this would be so good. I want to do all this cool stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What if I build this big world and those these cool, like, enemies

and all this stuff? And then it's like, the movement doesn't feel good, the combat doesn't feel good. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We want it to be, like, really polished because, like... we're competing with Balotro man like every game now competes with Balotro and it needs to

like if you're building a if you're building a road like game you're competing with like dead cells and Hades it's like yeah how do you stand out in that market exactly it has to be in some way better than those games which is such a hard thing to do and the way to do it is you go smaller and more niche and like a specific thing that you can do really well. It's not really the right word because it's usually used in like a different context, but it's basically like your, what you've built is, it's basically a vertical slice, right? It's, it is the opening of the game, but it's like, yeah, that's how we talk about.

I only say like, I already avoid using that term because, you know, you do have vertical slice used in a way where it can be like, we're creating a thing that's like misrepresentative of the game. Like there's so many cases of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's that same sort of idea. It's that polish of, here is just a small section of the game. This is what we want to do.

And we'll build out from there. That's exactly it. That's, that's, the milestone that we just hit at Avcon was we wanted a, like, we didn't have an exact number of minutes of gameplay, but we want something that represents what we want to make as a whole. And due to the nature of the game, it, there's, like, combat. RPG stuff, you can plonk them into the middle of the game. And that's why, like, vertical slice, I think, partially comes from, like, it's not just, like, the start, but it's generally, like, the middle bit. Yeah, yeah.

Like a section from the middle, but due to the nature of Cube, we've decided to make the start. And, yeah, we just, I'm so excited to make the rest of it. So, you talked about different people having different ideas with the inspiration. is, from your perspective, what actually is the inspiration that, I'm sure, I'm sure Dan had different things that would be an inspiration as well, but for you, like, what are you having the inspiration to be? That's a great question.

You can even be, like, when I ever ask this, I like to hear the ones that are like obvious inspirations, but usually people have some, like, off the wall thing where it's like, here's this random niche little thing that's part of it, which is also the inspiration. for me it is a lot the cool maths game blocksers I am a big cool maths game kid I love cool maths games it's the rolling is largely

inspired by blockses something that I've noticed more recently is that the structure is very Celeste like it's it's kind of a linear experience that it's sort of a one like some people will only play it once

but we're going to do stuff that encourages a second play-through. Okay. The other... Dan's big inspiration is Fez. He really likes Fez. Uh-huh. I can definitely see that from the camera movements.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Fez and Tunic are other big inspirations. Thankfully, because I'm technical director, I live a very privileged life in that Dan says, wouldn't this be cool? And I say, cool, I'll go make that.

So, luckily, I don't have to think as big picture as Dan does. But, yeah, Catamari Damasee is another one we get a lot. I recently played, this is not at all in answer to your question, but I played cocoon for the first time the other day. And holy moly, there's a lot of what we're doing in Cube that is also happening in Cacoon that we didn't realize at all. Like, I don't know if you play Cacoon.

It's so good. It won, I'm pretty sure it won indie game of the year, not last year, but the year before. I think. It's so good. I feel like someone sent me a link to this and was like, hey, play this on stream, but I don't think I've played it. It's, it's, I could not recommend it enough.

There's a section in that where you can carry, the thing that makes a previously invisible path visible and that's we've had that planned that's one of the things that's in the original cube that we want to do

like a so like we want to do you know those carryable blue blocks we swap positions we want to do versions of those that do stuff as well as being picked up so like one that's a light that allows you to see in the dark

or one that has like a, what Dan calls a lens of truth that allows you to see invisible blocks. So it'd be very difficult to navigate a path without it, but you could, but like you use it to do that. Or, I don't know, there's like heaps of stuff that we want to do with those. But yeah, for me, yeah, the main inspo's been blocks. Oh, actually, there's another one.

This is the niche answer. So when I was a kid I, me and my mate Henry really like this game called an untitled story Now it turns out that an untitled story is one of Maddie Celeste Maddie's first games

who was they had a different name at the time but Maddie made an untitled story years and years ago and in an untitled story there are these cool Sokaban puzzles

we have to move blocks around to get to cover X spots it's a fantastic little metrovania that I highly recommend but it was just such a crazy moment for me after I'd played Celeste and was just completely wowed by it

I went and had look at their other stuff and like could not believe it that an untitled story was sitting there this game that I'd played as a kid and just loved and then I'd come back all these years later to find out they'd made like it because an untitored story is very similar to Celeste, it's slide on screen base

to be type of one line and I can it looks like Celeste as a flash game Yeah, that's pretty much what it is. It's so weird. You start off as an egg, and then you hatch, and it's... But it's got narrative stuff like Celeste does. It's got these weird characters that exist, and it's just... I have such fun memories that game.

But yes, the niche answer is the Socorban games in an untitory. Wait, I just got to one of the shots And I think this is literally a shot That was remade in Celeste Oh yeah Um At Let me see

Current video time 1638 in that video 1638 It should be the actual It should be the timestamp Already worked Oh yep I'm pretty sure this is literally in Celeste

Yeah probably Yeah yeah like in summit there's some bits of summit yeah yeah and you got like jump under there to get to the thing yep yeah yeah and I'm pretty sure she made like the screens in paint and just like exported them out and then gave them collision and that's just it and that's all you need it's brilliant

I'd love to talk to Maddie that's one of my big goals is to somehow get in a room with them Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yes. Celeste's goaded. Celeste is very goaded. I do love Celeste. And it is sad here of what happened with the next road show is going to happen.

Don't get me started. Yeah, yeah. It's so sad. I, ugh. Like, shit happens. Like, it's, it's, it's, people, like, that's, that's one of the issues with games taking too long is that you're different people you're a different person to when the game started

and like it's just it's so sad to hear that that project has died yeah yeah you have different creative directions you want to take it and yeah it's it's I'm sure though I'm sure that look the people involved in Celeste are not going to stop making games there's going to be more games inspired by that direction so I completely agree um yes i was very much looking forward to that it's very sad that that has died um i'm very interested to see the game i forget their name but the guy that's split away from the original three he's got a game that he's working on i'm pretty sure there's like a 2d horror thing okay they look sick um but yes tragedy

So you've talked It looks so rad Sorry, yes No, no, it's still good, so good So you've talked a number of times About like ideas that you have for like Hey, here's like different mechanics we introduce All of this stuff

Yes What I don't know It's sort of dependent on like funding right Like what do you want to make the scope for Like how big do you want to make the game Assuming let's just assume you get no funding And you've got to go like early access

and, you know, go down that route. What is the, like, minimum... What is the MVP for the game? The MVP is... We haven't fully scoped out a non-funding MVP. The version that we scoped out was assuming we get Screen Australia money. But just off the cuff...

I mean, because I don't know how much I want to say. But the idea is that... The game is always bigger than you think it is. Sure. And so we want to do a few times where you become the landmass that you're on. So if you played the original demo, the demo ends with you becoming the planet. And what we were going to do that we ran out of time in those tiny four weeks is that you then roll around in space. and then get sucked

by a black hole so what we want to do is you know how the vertical slice takes place on like a water plane we want it to be so that you like do some sort of

a puzzle that will hopefully best case scenario is a like what I'm calling non-cube puzzle, which is where you become like a rectangular prism and you roll around like that. The puzzle related to that, which allows you to complete the landmass that you're on. And then what I want to do is a big pull out and a fade to white. And then we fade back in and the water cube that previously has been enormous

shrinks down and down and down back to the sky size of an original scale one. And so we do like a scale reset and realize this thing that you thought was massive is actually tiny and then now the plane that you're walking around on is like made out of sand for example um so it's always bigger than you think it is and so we want to do that a few times and that that'll be our like level our world breakup so there'll be like a water world a sand world a goop world and a fog world those are the current ideas um and then best case scenario We get money. We want, after the fog world, we want to have a, like, mountain world where you, there's, like, it's very journey.

If you play Journey, where there's, like, a big mountain off in the distance with a bright light at the top. And you want to get to the bright light. And the way that you do that is you scale this mountain, again, Lex Celeste. where you need to shed your layers to get up to the top. So we'll have pressure plates that, like, decube you or cube down. I think cube down is the nomenclature we use. And so we get to the top. You've gotten smaller and smaller and smaller.

And at the top, there's just like the lights coming out of this little, like, one-by-one hole that you fall in. And then you complete, you fall down, you fall into the heart of the mountain. And there's a little hole in there that you, fill and then you become the whole planet. It's always big than you think it is. And then you roll around in space and you notice that the star,

like the sun in that galaxy, has like a chunk eighth missing from it and you complete the star and then you become the star and you can roll around as the star and then we go into the black hole which I think I want the black hole to be a cube. A cube black hole

I think would be very funny. Sure, sure. Um, and then there's a few ways that we can go from there. Um, something that I've been playing around with is like, you like hold the interact button or, um, mash the interact button to like absorb the universe. So you like get bigger and bigger and bigger and like absorb everything. And then we'd like zoom out from that and we go into this like subatomic world where everything is white and rainbow and like weird

and we want to do some like temporal cube mechanics in there um and yeah that's a little I won't go too much more but there's we want it to be like it's always bigger than you think

it's something that we we want to explore as much as possible this is all really cool that's just it's all I can do this is all really really cool and it's we have some big ideas it's it's very clear that like yeah as you say you've got some big idea it's very clear that you're very passionate about this game

this is something where I can tell just from what exists so far that this is something that you really care about this is something that you really really believe in it's it's been I I completely agree it's I care about Cube

kind of secondary to my new partnership with Dan it's been he's I cannot stress how genius he is and he's also just the nicest guy which is so annoying he's just it's so annoying

because he's got so much going on in his life he's got two kids and he's just always busy but he's just the sweetest man and it's so annoying we've got this great relationship that started at AIE

because we both did the design course together and pretty early on we like kind of real recognises real there's someone else in this class that challenges me sort of thing and our instructor who's a dear friend Reese noticed that I

like am very competitive and he did this thing where at the end of each module he would rank the best project which just drove me nuts because every single project was Dan Rue Dan Rue

So it pushed me really hard to try and beat him So we had this really fun rivalry going And And then we got into second year And the first couple modules are a bit dull But eventually we got into production for clients And we're like, all right Finally we get to work together

And then Cube happened so it's it's there's a tendency for indie games to get stuck on game one and we're really excited about Cube don't get me wrong but we are we want to stick around right you don't this want this to be like a you know

five year project that never gets released look yeah absolutely not like I said it's coming out quarter four next year come hello high water I would love to work on it more than just next year. Like, if it sells well, then we'll do

Hollow Night best release stuff. Sure. But, yeah. Yeah. It's a joy working with him. So... Particularly because he has so good ideas and I can just go make them. That always does help.

It really helps when, like, it really... Just knowing what you want to do with it, right? It's not just, hey, we have a game. Are we... What do you want to make? I want to make a puzzle game. It's like, okay, what do you want to do with it? It's like, yeah, that's fraud.

You've probably got a bunch of ideas that like, okay, yes, we could do this, but also, I just said, you want to release the game. So it's a matter of how much do we want to put in the game, where do we want to stop, what do we want to do in a further game or further content or something like that. Yeah, exactly. And like, we've joked around with the idea of like, we'll do a sequel called Cubed, which is like local co-op, which I would love today. to do that so bad i think that'd be really fun um but like yeah dan dan loves card games as well

so we we might do like a card game for game two we'll see um but yeah our our uh eyesight is to the horizon not just a cube but like yeah we're super keen to make cube so you've talked about how the oh sorry were you going to say something there no no no that's it go okay uh You've talked about how the... Like, you've always had a lot of people at the demo when you go to cons, whether it'd be have cons, say... Yes. Yes.

You haven't been there yet, but I assume for the next con, it's going to be... It's going to be... There's going to be people there as well. If every other con you've been to, there's been a big crowd of people there. Assuming they're not, like, everyone there suddenly has a whole different taste in video games.

I assume the same thing is going to happen there as well. That would be so terrible if it's just suddenly a bomb at cons. Ah. But no, no, hopefully it does well. So, what has the feedback been like? Like, how, what have people said about the game that you expected them to say? What were the things that you heard that just sort of threw you for a loop? Like, why, I didn't even realize people cared about this part.

The thing, as a game developer, something that I, one of my core kind of beliefs is, the most important feedback is very rarely verbal. in that something that I care way more about is how they play the game and what they find fun

what they don't find fun like the crushing cubes we had no idea that people would get such a kick out of that but in terms of feedback that

because often they'll just say like oh what if it was like online multiplayer and I was like cool do you want to make that because I don't I don't have the time, bud. It's a cool idea, but... A lot of people ask for a jump.

A lot of people say, why can't I jump? And I think when people say that, you've probably seen that picture. I would be very surprised if you weren't shown it of what the client says they want versus what the client actually wants versus how the engineer implements it and yeah oh yeah when you have a lot of people saying the same thing there is something there

but yes to sort of work out what is it that what is it they're actually asking for and not necessarily them wanting a jump button you're exactly right um it's it's in the world of short form content we are constantly competing with instagram reels and ticot and youtube shorts we want you to play our game rather than just sit there on your phone and something that I think may be a product of that although it may just be me reading into it is that people expect it to be fun

like very fun instantly and Cube at least at the start is a little bit of a slow burn it's like oh there's more we try to like very gradually kind of pull you in because of the like calm ASMR vibe we're going for

like you can't really smack them in the face with it right right so I think exactly in the way that you're talking about and that like you need to get to like what they mean rather than what they want a lot of those sorts of like have you thought about adding X from a place of either it's just a cool idea that they've thought of based on

the current systems or they want a bit more a bit sooner, which is very understandable. There's not been very many it shows that like there's not been that much verbal feedback that I've really

taken on board that much. It's been I've really the things that I take away from cons the most are like who enjoys it, which is thankfully most people that play it um it's very very interesting where people stop of course there are other factors like oh my family's been waiting a while and i like my brother's eating someone we should move on um but yeah it's it's fascinating to me when someone on their own just like randomly puts down the controller and i'm like no you're the one that was very fascinating

they didn't be is people there's there's one spot near the end um just before you get the last set of crystals to open the last pressure plate a bunch of people stopped like before you do that set of crystals and i was like you are like 20 seconds away from finishing it just do it um yeah yeah it's something that i do in my teaching a lot is um Actual proper playtesting is really hard. And by proper playtesting, I mean shutting up. And watching someone play the game without giving them direction. Yeah, that is something I do, I did find quite a bit.

And I get why people have done it if they haven't built a tutorial yet. Yeah. And that's the thing. But if you have and people are not understanding the game, like that is a problem with the tutorial system you've built. And you're not going to be there to handhold them. when they're playing in the game themselves. Exactly.

So the way that I phrase it to my students is play it how it's going to be, which is if the thing that really annoys me with my students is when they play it, when they do playtesting in the Unity editor rather than making a build. Because what they'll do is they'll play it in the Unity editor, and then they'll make changes. So they'll move the player around to reset stuff. And they'll like do so. No, you won't be there to do that when.

they buy it on Steam theoretically so like do a build and then like stand behind them and watch them without saying anything right so yeah and that's that's one of the great benefits

of Cube is that it's because of its intuitiveness we can like save our voices a lot like I rarely tell people what the game is so people that that's actually that's a good point people ask me what's the point like so like

or like how do I play or like what do I do and I just say cube and give them a controller and it's like I don't know find out that's the whole point which is something I don't know it's just maybe it's the setting

like it's a con like maybe I'm probably supposed to be like selling it to them but I've just found that fascinating just like people expect to be told how to have fun with the thing sometimes no that's definitely a good point

a lot of people don't really know how to how to give themselves to a game right like you a game people will talk about oh this game isn't engaging this game isn't fun but then you look at the way

they're playing the game and they've got like a twist stream open on the side and they've listened to music my house oh my god my hell he's probably going to hear this I've told him about it

so many times. So when I watch him, I'll occasionally walk by, he's playing, I don't know, I wouldn't ring or something. He's got, I don't know how he does this. It would drive me insane. He's got one Twitch stream open on one monitor, another Twitch stream open on the same monitor. Two Twitch streams. Yes. And then sometimes music playing as well. I don't know how he doesn't go insane hearing this. That's nuts. That would drive me insane. I can't handle like two voices talking to me at a time, much less two Twitch streams. Two, two like different music, like songs at the same time drives me nuts yeah that's uh yeah so that's that's you're exactly right you're speaking to the context of the current like home playspace and it tends to be a crowded space

like you're competing with everyone everyone has a phone 90% of people have a short form content app on their phone that's pretty stiff competition um and so like something that we are constantly keeping in mind is when we structure the levels keeping what I like to call the serrated edge of engagement which is you want it to be like easy, hard and then

like a sort of like jagged edge that goes towards like more exciting and engaging but like isn't just like you want to constantly be doing things that they don't expect and then being like expected unexpected expected unexpected I played the new donkey

Kongwood apparently they do that a lot in there that sort of thing so you sort of want to when you introduce a new mechanic correct me from wrong here but you would introduce new mechanic and then you want the player to get used to that and then use that in some new way maybe exactly so it's it's giving them something new just as they settle into what they've already learned so something that Dan did which I thought was really clever which is the like like the second carryable puzzle is there's like as soon as you've

as soon as you're confident with one he gives you another one and you have to like use both to beat that puzzle it's something that he does really well that I am nowhere near good enough to do but it it's it's very tricky Yeah, I can definitely imagine so. Puzzle design seems like one of those things where it's, I don't know, a challenge, maybe is maybe not the right word to say, definitely. It's hard. I assume, I would assume, you said Dan's the one doing level design, yeah?

Dan's the one, but like I, if he's the writer, I'm the editor. Right. So it's... So do you both have quite a big experience with puzzle games then? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're both big puzzle fans. And it's... The way that we approach it is, like, what are we trying to teach?

So, like, with that first carryable puzzle, we're teaching you that you can use it to traverse two high walls. And then that is the same puzzle kind of again in the second one. but we're teaching you that you can make it so that you can build paths with carryables. And it's, it's a very easy way to do puzzles when you're just like, okay, this is the thing that you can do with this mechanic. How do I teach them that they can do that? Right. Yeah.

Now, I would assume that later on you would want to use multiple of these mechanics in the same puzzle. But, you know, the demo is quite sure right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the secret source that we haven't added just yet, which is, like, mechanic A in isolation, mechanic B in isolation, A, B. Right, so each of these mechanic introductions are kind of like the mechanic tutorial, and then you want to integrate that with the knowledge you already have and expand upon that.

Exactly. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's... Uh, it's... something that I'm really looking forward to doing once we've like filled out the mechanic library a bit more is like pulling things together and seeing how those things interact and like building a matrix of like what works with what in which way right and that sort of thing right I could very easily imagine

some of the mechanics would be weird and confusing if they were motor exactly yeah yeah we we've got most of the stuff down but like there's because we haven't made it yet the like exact specifics some of those specifics are yet to be ironed out and we're very keen to do that do you have like even if they're just like paper demos of how so you want some of these mechanics to work sort of not so much paper demos we just kind of talk them out and and like the way that because we're both designers were very much like documentation focused and so I feel like if you can explain it that's 90% of the work

sometimes just like figuring out specifically how a thing should work once you've done that they become quite easy to program a lot of the time but yeah so you did bring this up before we got started I kind of do want to talk about it the name the name is

the name honestly while we're at it R&D department is another name right I know it's funny, but, like, I look at R&D department, it's a nightmare to find. Well, thankfully, we have a little bit of SEO there in that it's called, um, it's spelled with an N

instead of an amp-sand. Sure, but people, too, yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. Um, uh, look, I do need to get my charging cable, because my laptop's going to die. But when I get back,

yeah, easy, easy. Um, we will talk cube names. because it's stupid I'm going to say one to leave you with Grom is a serious name that we've talked about right

it's very official and professional here at the R&D department you are the second person I've had it in a week who just decided to not plug their laptop in was it Jacob I bet Jacob was the other guy

I saw I'm getting his thing the other day I don't know um that's fine um so the name grom was one of them it's grum is one of them it's grum is on the list it's it's not seriously on the list but it's on the list that's right okay so cube is has terrible SEO terrible terrible when you google as i said there's literally another game called cube yes yeah exactly there's there is the cube and there is the cube which is coming out soon yeah and And on crazy games, Cube's 2048. It's a bit different, but still, you'd probably SEO that as well.

And there's also a thing called a Rubik's Cube, which is a problem. Yeah, yeah, there is. I could probably get your two cents on some of these ideas, actually, because we're still very much open-minded to ideas and stuff. The first one I have on my list is because it's like a GUI cube, so it's Guib. cube cube I don't like

yube it's terrible yeah it feels a bit weird the our current leading favorite actually at the moment is toya toya toya what's the deal with that one

it's just it's got good mouth feel basically it's just like we've been like I made a little chat GPT agent to just like spit out four letter

new word combinations So would that be, I assume, T-O-Y-A? Correct, which is a great sign, because you've spelt it correctly. And so if I told you the game was called Toya, you would Google it correctly. The other ones, like, it's, it doesn't really have meaning. In Japanese, it means some things, like, like Valley Art, after a mountain and one other thing. Like, there's a bunch of Japanese fictional characters, Japanese fictional. characters named Toya.

Like, I think there's a My Hero Academia character called Toya. Some other names that we've thrown around are like Tubey with a Y, which I don't hate. It feels like one of those, it feels like the Cube needs eyes and like... That is what everybody says. It needs eyes and it needs to go, oh, when you fall on a face. So it's a different game. That's the problem that we've run in. to a lot with these, like, trying to find another name is just the names that we've come up with

are a different game. Cubiquitous. Cubicitous. It's not a real one. Some of these are very silly. I quite like cubed up. Cubed up, I think it's quite fun. Okay, I could see that.

Or cubing up. It's kind of only upish. Maybe my brain is just Maybe my brain is just too cooked When I hear cubed up I think bricked up Yeah I don't know if that's the

Sort of feel you want to go over No well maybe It's like This is the problem But when we play around with this too much We're at risk of going back to cube daddy Which is We're not going to cube daddy

If you avoid that one Yeah Yeah Cublet I don't mind cubelet Cubell I can see Yeah Yeah

Because it implies like it's small It's a smaller part of a hole um i had written off cube a little bit i might add that back up there um a humble cube it feels like you need a story mode like a yep yep it feels it that's you're on it man it's that's exactly what dan said he said it felt like a like a children's bedtime story like a fictional sorry um simply cuby again that sort of falls in to that like mascot trap

um yeah those are those are the kind of front runners I think I might add kublet back to the list I like kublet a lot yeah that or that or toy I do think I think you're onto something with that it's like not I know it right like immediately reminds me

you know as I said one of the inspirations fez things like that where it's it's just a very simple name where fez does actually mean something if people want to go find it out they can but yes to most people it doesn't and it's just it's just a thing that points directly to that and you there's something i don't know there's something about toya which gives like a it's like what is this it's like a wonder sort of like yeah yeah yeah the the unknownness is sort of a part of it because we want people to try and figure out it.

Someone, there was another meaning of Toya that I liked that I've just forgotten. Yeah, door into the valley in Japanese, which I quite like. Yeah. So that's our current problem. That's kind of the only thing stopping us from getting the Steam page up.

Right. Yeah, because you have the itch page right now. We do have an itch page, which we've been using to, like, distribute. But, like, yes. I was speaking with a mate of mine the other day that was, like, challenging me on why we were going to change the name. And I was like, oh, because it's got terrible SEO. and it does. But the marketplaces in which we're competing on,

there's not that many cube games. Like, itch.io is fantastic. It's a fantastic thing, and I'm glad it exists. But that's not where we're looking to make the majority of our sales. Sure, sure. Like, on Steam, for example, I'm fairly confident we could cut through that market. I think there's like five or six cube games,

none of which have our visual style yeah we have one called cube another one called cube all capitalized then there's cube with the capital C but lowercase the rest of it correct there's also every possible variation with different letters that you can think of

of like Q capital like the letter Q and then B which has a logo that is very like the game cube logo I'm sure that's not skirting too close to what you know yeah yeah A bunch of games have cube in their name, but not necessarily just being cube.

Yes. There are. Oh, my God, yeah. We do want to do something like a joke about the 64, not seeing the GameCube intro. Doodle do do do dole do do do. And do a cube up there. I think that'll be fun. Even if something you put like,

it's like one of those things that could be missed it's like a little Easter egg if you do a thing down a certain path yeah the way that we or I had planned to do it is that like it plays a note when you do it in the correct way

and then like if it doesn't do it it like resets and so like people who don't know about it could still figure it out so make it like an intentional part of the level oh okay yeah Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm just going to try cublet, because I haven't, yeah, cublets not taken in either kind of spelling that we've thought of.

I might do a couplet. But on this friend who was sort of questioning you on changing the name, what was their argument for not changing it? The argument that he had for not changing it was, it suits the game. So just be the best cube game. That's fair It's fair

Which I think is not ridiculous It's just I don't know It's something that we're going to debate For a little bit longer Before we have to make a decision Right There is literally one called cheese cube

Sometimes Because like from that vertical slice There are sections of the level where Dan didn't have the random rotation ticked, so you get the same cube with the chunks taken out of it over and over, and it looks a bit like cheese, particularly if they're yellow. Yeah, I'm just going to grab my water bottle.

But yes, we're actively thinking about the name. Yeah, I do... I do understand why you'd want to change it. Like that... I see what your friend was saying about not changing it. Yes, I'm, I'm 50-50. I think at the moment it's like cube, all caps with a full stop, Toya or Kublet. I think those are...

Yeah. At the same time, it's like, yes, you could try to win that battle, but is that worth trying to deal with? Totally, it's fighting upstream. Yeah, it's like... Like, it... Yes, you can... Look, from what I can see, I've not looked at all of them, but yeah, you've got like a very polished cube game here.

Like, I could very well see that being something that is done. But at the same time, it's just, it creates unnecessary tension to get eyes onto the project. And even when, let's just say it does become the best Q game, it's always going to be a problem. There's always going to be like, oh, wait, I tried to find it. It was this other game. landed on or yeah you know somebody else has talked about a cube game in the past or anything else like that and it's just yeah yeah where we're constantly would be constantly fighting that yeah hmm I'm I'm I'm I'm getting quite

warm on Kubelet frankly okay I'm gonna message down later and be like should we reconsider kublet you might you might have played an integral role you never know I like both Toya and kublet are both really, really good options. I, if I saw either name, it wouldn't bother me. It's not what, yeah. And like, that's the thing. That's really the bar we're aiming for.

Right. It's just like not bad. Yeah. And also, you kind of have to decide on something, right? Like, at the end of the day, it is just the name. And yes, that's, that is important. It is certainly the identity of the game. But it's also not the only thing.

thing that you need a thing about. Like, what, what, the one that just popped into my head is tunic. Like, yes, it's like very iconic, but tunic, I'm sure is one of many names for that game. Like, it's not called a game where you can't read the manual. Right. It's, it's just, it's just a word. And it's a great game. And people know about it because it's a great game.

Right. And hey, look, you could go, you could go the complete. the other direction with it and give it like an anime title a game where you roll around the world as a cube and pick up other cubes you could

you could another one that was quite funny that I didn't mention was cubes all the way down which I think is quite good I think that's there's also not just another cube game which I think is too cute it's a bit it's a bit shitty

Yeah, it's, I That feels like It feels like a joke that's been kind of overdone It does, it does, it does, exactly It feels, yeah Cubious I'm back on the silly ones Cubious

Cubious is quite fun It's like Curious and Cube But yeah Yeah Cubius Cubius Cubing up into the Cubaverse there's another one I like

Cube gets bigger I think Cube gets bigger is quite cute okay but yes those are our current other than Screen Oz and like some client work

that's my current dragon it's this damn name I keep I should really memorize who said this quote but he said that there are two hard things in life. Rocket science and naming things. And rocket science isn't that hard. It's something like

that. Yeah, and this is why whenever I go look at some project I look at the name, like, ah, the software engineer named this, because it'd be like, oh, it's the software update it and the name is like SWP-U-P or something. It's like, ah, yeah, okay,

yeah. Yep. Yep. And it works, right? Yeah, it does work. It does work. And at the end of the day, there's always cube daddy. Yeah. It all goes to shit. Maybe.

No, I think, I think anything you could go with is probably going to be better than Cube Daddy. Probably, particularly because we want kids to buy it. How did, how did that name happen? Was it just a name that existed? I've probed down on this a few times. I think it's, because like, it's sort of like a funny game dev. term because it's like it's parenting the cube's getting parented to the bigger cube so it's cube daddy okay okay that's stupid but I see the logic now yes it is it is stupid

um we we've got a little nudge to that nod to that even in the discord in that my title is like cube uncle because I'm an uncle and dad's the dad Dan's cube dad but yeah it's very silly yeah no but I no it is silly

but I think there's some of that does sort of come across in in the game itself like the just like you know going back to what we'll talk about earlier with like the cube squishing and it's just like little

little things like it being a gelatinous cube right Like, yeah, the game would work just as well if it was a solid cube, like gameplay-wise, mechanic-wise, but there's something about it being this, like, this gelatinous cube that makes it feel a bit more appealing. It does, it does later play around with, like, how, how it looks a bit more, like, as you interact with things. Absolutely. And the, originally it was just a cube. And Dan changed it to the, like, rounded beveled cube a couple months ago, several months ago now.

And originally I didn't like it. Because in my, like, the thing that affected my work was that when the cube rolled up a step, there'd be a little bit where you could see that the cube wasn't exactly touching the ledge because of the beveled corner but but now that it's been that way for a while I can't go back

I love the little beveled guy and it works so much better with like the yeah like you said like the gelatinousness and the splat than the yeah we'll go with that

yes yes yes yes yes yes so what what have we not talked about we're coming up to the end like 10 or so minutes but Um, well, is there something that you've, that we haven't really touched on that you think is kind of important? Well, I was going to bring up price point, actually.

Okay. That was, that's, that's my next thing. Lawyer thinking five bucks on Steam. That was my, was going to be my price point. Um, it's been something that I've been, like, a mentor of mine got me to just, like, say a price. Because I'd been uming and aering about it forever. And I threw out like, 30 bucks. And he was like, wrong.

And I was like, yeah, you're right. and since then I've been thinking about it a lot and something that I absolute best case scenario is we get on screen funding as well as a publisher and the publisher can handle getting it onto like mobile and switch for us if we were to do that I would love to launch in quarter four on Android iOS switch and PC five bucks Aussie simultaneously.

That's my best case scenario. I kind of want to lowball it and go quite cheap because I've been talking with lots of people we've noticed something in that there's sort of like a bit of a Bermuda triangle

between 10 and 30 bucks. It's like a little bit particularly at the moment where everyone's a bit it's just strapped for cash. Like, yes, people are buying expensive games because they're expecting super high quality, like Mario Kart and Donkey Kong have both sold like crazy. But in that weird, like, not a lot, not heaps range,

it's easy to get lost. So I'm quite keen to go, like, sub 10 and probably sub 5, like around 5. Right, because when you're in that, like, $10 to $30 space, you're also competing with like older games that go on sale yep

yeah you're also competing with Holo Night and Celeste and Ballotro and just like what is Holo Night going for I actually don't know this let's find out I think full price it's like 25

Ozzy but it's like always on sale for like 1510 2195 right now yeah which is insane there's so much content in that game for 20 bucks and like obviously partially

some of that's due to post-release stuff but like I would feel horrendous asking for more money than holiday night yeah and Celeste right now is 2950 yeah I was another one you give an example of um

balatro balatro okay yes and that is 1975 oh sorry it's on sale uh it's 2199 25 at full price. Yep, yep. So, like,

those are outstanding games. Right. That, and this is another one of the reasons why we want to publish it is because they know way more about it than I do. And I've got some contact that we would, if we didn't get a publisher,

I would consult endlessly about this before we put it up. But just my initial thought is five bucks. Right. I've got vampire survivors open right now. that is 749 right now. Yeah, exactly.

And Vampire Survivors is an insanely good game for that price point as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That came in when, when it first released in 2022? Yeah, it's an old game. I remember seeing that for the first time being like, what is this? And it's just, it's such a gym. I made, it's a, a little project called Chess Survivor.

That's new players like a pawn. and you like take pieces and you move around on a grid and like the enemies move in between your turns and you can like unlock moves and then upgrade those moves with like additional abilities i want to go back to just survivor man it's a great game i that doesn't like really cool concept actually but yeah it's a bit of fun i could definitely see something like that like that's a that's a cool concept and it thanks man it's clear that everything from you said about Dan

I haven't met him yet so I can't really say it but like I'm assuming everything like both of you clearly seem to have a lot of ideas for game development and game design it's yeah yeah

like I'll like not to not to like trash anyone in particular but like I've spoken to people in the past where they have an idea for the game but they're not really sure about the idea

they don't really know how to how to sort of talk about the game and it feels like they're not really confident in the idea they have oh yeah that's never a good sign yeah um hmm

it's it's an interesting thing we're both like deliberately enrolled in like the design course at AIE and like when people ask me do you regret doing design I say no because I'm at damn

but like the smarter choice for me would have been to do programming because programming is 90% of what I do these days but I quite like being a designer who programs out of necessity and in the way

that Dan is a designer that is a technical artist out of necessity and like make shaders and stuff. It's very, very nice that it's where designers kind of first and foremost and then we do other stuff so that the games exist. Right.

So we're not just talking about a thing. Right. Like going back to what was said about Celeste before, like Celeste is very obviously a game where it's made by artists, it's made by people who have animated. backgrounds and the coding is kind of just there to pull it all together. I think another great example is Toby Fox.

I knew you were going to say that. Under Taylor's Garbage is a horrendously... Everyone goes back to that dialogue. One of the worst programmed games you will ever see. Ever. It is... It's why the game's a nightmare port. Yeah, I bet. But it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Not one bit. And it's just, it's, it all comes back to... the game like with this screen os stuff there's a part of me that just like stuff this

just make the game i'm i'm wasting so much time doing all these documents and stuff i had so much i would so much rather just be making the game um but that's that's that's that's what game Yeah. Yeah. And we're very lucky to be, to have these roles at AIE now so that we can like semi support ourselves and like plus the client work that we do. We are able to like sort of be game devs, which is crazy in this current age. It's like it's been such a like insane turnaround for me because I was I was working in hospitality

in 2022. I just moved back to Adelaide from Melbourne after. flunking out of a computer science degree at Unimau. And yeah, it's been an insane journey. Do you have plans to show off the game? I know you already said the con coming up,

but do you have plans to do Sage next year and Avcon next year? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll do, we've currently, we've got the full, like, crazy lineup happening in that I'm taking it to Gamescom in August, which is crazy.

SAFC, South Australian Film Corp are doing some, like, sponsored tickets. I was very lucky to, I probably shouldn't talk about this, but I'm very lucky to get one of those. If you need me to cut this, I'm happy to cut it. That might be good, actually, because the announcement hasn't come out yet. But we are also doing packs in South by Southwest this year, which is fantastic, very much looking forward to those. And then, yes, we'll definitely take it to Sage next year. We want to be on the main floor this time instead of the elevate section. I've got that way we're a real boy now.

I didn't go this year. I really should have. It's a great gig, I love it. I was going to go the year prior, and then the same problem happened, where I forgot it was happening, and then the day or the week after, I was like, oh, yeah, that's a thing. Oh, yeah, that's fun. SAFC are great in lots of ways.

They, I dislike how little press they do within even the Adelaide scene. Like, it should be massive. And, like, it's getting bigger and bigger in it. Like, the more it becomes a thing, the more people will know about it. But, like, I don't know. I'm always wanting it to be more selfishly. Well, I'm sure we could just keep going and going, but I... We could.

We probably should end this off. This has been a lot of fun. I really did... I'm so glad. I really do enjoy talking to people who are, like, very passionate about what they're doing and clearly have a vision for what they want it to be. And I, uh, I, uh, wish the best for you and then and hopefully the uh the project goes well and hopefully you can

decide on a um on a name on a name i'll let you know when we when we get a name and hopefully we can find a time to get dan on um but like yeah yeah it's uh thank you yeah we've got a lot of work ahead of us but we're really excited to do it so since the there's no steam page just yet if anyone wants to keep an eye on the game um yeah each of i is the best place um also on the link tree there's a mailing list that currently has two people signed up to it, myself, and one guy that we got at Avcom. Okay. But, like, following the Itch page is probably the best place to go. If you have an Itch.io account, also please join the Discord if you want to see my insane ramblings on the devlog channel.

It's mostly just me tearing my hair out and then being like, never mind, I'm goaded. Perfect. But that's programming, baby. Yeah. Yeah We've also got all the other socials as well But like, yeah Okay

Nothing else You want to mention That's pretty much everything No, no, that's it Okay, cool My main channel is Brodie Robleson I do Linux videos there Six-ish days a week

I sometimes streamed there as well So check that out if you want to see rambling I've got the game channel That is Broody on games I stream twice a week Right now I'll be playing through Kazan the first Zerker and

probably maybe finish split fiction by now I don't know we'll see both good games I've heard very much so

and after I finish split fiction I'll probably be playing at Metal Gear Solid because I've never played Metal Gear Solid I don't know why what of my students

keeps going on about Delta and says I should play some stuff to get ready for Delta cool you got a game to work on

yeah I do I do and for anyone wants to hear the audio version of this. It is available on every podcast platform. There is an RSS feed. It's on Spotify.

Spotify has video, which is neat. If you don't want to do Spotify video, there is YouTube. That is Tech over T. And, yeah. So, I'll give you the final word. What do you want to say? Cube.

Perfect.