Cubic Currency
Cubic Currency is a 2D strategy rogue-lite set in a dystopian future. DiceCorp controls all forms of transaction and they have granted you a station at one of the dice trading posts. Each week, they require higher and higher rent payments if you wish to keep the job. There are three characters to choose from, each with a unique play style and set of abilities.
Manipulate and control your pool of dice as you trade with customers and merchants. Gain powerful items that enhance the trading power you retain. Live the life of a dice trader in the harsh reality of DiceCorp's world.
This game was originally developed for the Ludum Dare 46 game jam with the theme "Keep it Alive". It was then developed over four months into a full title distributed on the Steam store for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Ludum Dare 46
The game was originally made with two programmers, an artist, and a designer. Myself and the other programmer enjoyed the challenge of using Unity with git and creating two halves of a game in a very short time span. The biggest challenge was communication as we had different amounts of time to dedicate over the weekend and slept on different schedules.
In the final moments before submission we were still fixing game breaking bugs and trying to add menus and music. Thankfully the jam allows for a one hour grace period after the working time for submission. We ended up finishing our working product about 20 minutes into this grace period.
This game jam occurs twice a year and allows teams 72 hours to compete. While there are teams that create custom engines from scratch, our team used Unity and used audio created outside the game jam. The Ludum Dare site can be difficult to navigate, but the game jam version can be played here.
Retail Release
The team shifted to two artists, the designer, and myself. We had decided to take the game further and create a really polished project over the duration of the Summer. I was left as the sole programmer so I was coerced into learning an immense amount of Unity. I had the opportunity to interact with the engine systems rather than just scripting as I had done in past projects. This was a great challenge for me as I was very uncomfortable with systems such as the animator, canvasses, and shaders. The necessity to use these systems however, furthered my understanding of Unity and game development in general by a large degree.
I also interacted with the SteamWorks API a bit, and familiarized with the process of updating steam builds and customizing the store-facing side of the game.
The game can be found on the Steam Store here.