Show HN: My first startup, Cubical Drift video game studio | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: My first startup, Cubical Drift video game studio

planets-cube.com

31 pointsNeomCD21 comments

Nice to see some frenchies doing something in that space. The site says that all the elements are here for a first PC release, do you plan to release an early demo? Or keep the game playable by contributors (release regular builds that add stuff)? Or go the traditional route and wait to have a complete product?

Indeed, the early "demo" (we call it alpha) will be playable by contributors few months after our crowd funding campaign. "Non Contributors" will have to wait for the final product.

Just curious, is this a rendered demo? If you started in October 2013 and actually wrote an engine that could do this in 4 months, its time for me to to leave software and go into lawn mowing. It looks great, and I like the concept, but devil is in the details of actually making it work.

You can see some texts like "concept art" or "actual game footage" in the trailer. The trailer is a mix of rendered images and in game captures.

We launched the studio in october but we are on the project since much longer.

Just to ease you, the engine is far form being finished! Don't leave software!

Whew, I have been working on a next gen voxel engine for over a year now. Its amazing what you can do with it, but due to the level of interaction, complexity keeps raising.

Being a RPG and a construction game at the same time, I hope players will have the possibility to interact with the dungeons' layouts to lay traps for the monsters to kill them smartly instead of simply shooting them. I love RPG but I always regretted the lack of interaction with the environment.

Looks really awesome. Since it looks like a fighting game, Something like this could be implemented for multiplayer: each face of a cube is owned by a faction in the beginning. Then the factions fight to gain the different sides.

Just a thought.

BTW awesome team portfolio. Good luck

Nice idea, but I am wondering: will too much fight impedes space development? Space discovery would really be what I'am looking for when playing such a game. Saying that, I might not be in the set of targeted customer for the game...

We see this game more like a rpg than a pvp game, the first gaming hours will be dedicated for discovery. When the storyline is finished then players will surely start "pvp".

Thanks, Multiplayer will depend on players in fact, if they want to "divide" the planets by face. We see pvp more like "each faction on each planets and be prepared for invasion!"

Extract from the website: "While on a planet’s surface, the view out into the rest of the universe is nearly endless! This means even from the surface of your own planet, you’ll be able to see moons and other planets in the distance. To ensure the game runs with a variety of graphics cards, we have implemented an algorithm of sub-resolution to be able to display a quantity of blocks a individual graphic cards can manage. " May you elaborate on that please?

Not every actual cards can display the billions of blocks we want to display. So we needed to create specific algorithms to reduce the number of blocks to display without "cutting" the viewing distance. This means that from every point in the system solar you will see every planets, allowing you to know where to go.

I'm actually really excited about this! Reminds me a bit of minecraft, but different theme and far more polished.

How much experience do you have in game designing and developing?

The dev team has 9 years of developing experience. One of us has 4 years of experience in gaming development.

Looks impressive, can't wait to play it !

Reminds me of Hexen and Heretic. Awesome!

Stunning graphics. Very cool!

This looks nice.

When will you release the game?

Cute!

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