Sqube
Sqube was an 8-person team's pitch for Dare to be Digital 2016, a puzzle game whose mechanics I prototyped and tested using a physical Rubik's Cube before we ever touched an engine.
The Team
Programmers
- Anthony Isherwood
- Daniel Huddleston
- Jordan Thorpe
- Robert Wade
Design & Art
- Riley Clarke · Artist / Designer
- Harry Barnes · Artist
- James Harrop · Designer
- Tom Fry · Artist
With four programmers and one designer on the team going in, I leaned into an artist role: painting the title image in Photoshop and building 3D renders in Blender to demonstrate the game's mechanics for the pitch. When two more artists joined about a week before the pitch deadline, I shifted into design instead, which suited me fine; I've always preferred being useful wherever the team actually needed the help.
Prototyping With a Physical Rubik's Cube
Once I moved into the design role, I used an actual Rubik's Cube to design and test several of the game's levels by hand before any of it existed in an engine, a cheap, fast way to iterate on cube-based puzzle logic without waiting on tooling or a programmer's time.
The Pitch
The initial pitch succeeded and earned us an interview slot, but the format changed from in-person to video shortly before it happened, which cost us the chance to demo the prototype directly, something I think would have carried the pitch much further in person. Between that format change and a fair amount of interview nerves, the pitch ultimately didn't land, and the project wrapped there.
Post-Project Reflection
Dare to be Digital was a genuinely big opportunity, and in hindsight I'm not sure the team, or I personally, was fully ready for a project at that scale at the time. Even without the outcome we wanted, working with a team that size on something with real stakes was a big jump in motivation for me to keep improving.
The pitch video is up on YouTube for anyone curious how the pitch itself came together.