Game: Congo Cube

Inspired by Tetris and Bejeweled, this is a match 3 style puzzle game. At the beginning of each site idols are filled from the bottom in rows, and it is the player's job to align the idols, thereby selling and removing them from play, before any idol can reach the top of the screen. Each site is more difficult than the last as idols appear progressively faster and Bongo Blocks, stone blocks added by the devious Bad Baboon, are also added to the mix that are heavy enough to crush idols thwarting attempts to chain combinations -- the quickest way to rack up a lot of cash.

My Contributions

I received my first gaming credits on Congo Cube as an artist. In that this was a tiny team, I worked on everything from illustration (both for the game and for marketing purposes), concept drawings, to pixel editing. It is fair to say that I created a little over half of the artwork in the game. ?Below are samples of my work from Congo Cube.

The World’s Smallest Post-Mortem

What went right

  • Small, tight-knit, team allowed for easy communication and a great deal of productivity
  • Scope of the game was manageable which helped focus people on what could be done as opposed to striving for what couldn’t be
  • No one ever took things too seriously and failures, when they happened, were handled in stride
  • Personally, I got to learn a lot of great techniques from working with a more experienced artist, Eric Nava
  • Oh yeah, and first game credit – Woohoo!

What went wrong

  • Personally, not having enough 2d experience resulted in lackluster quality and productivity early in the project
  • Invisi-block! This particularly nasty bug, where an invisible idol or block would be generated, persisted through even the release build on the PC. ?I think John eventually tracked it down and killed it … or it is still hiding out there… somewhere…waiting.
  • Congo Cube probably shouldn’t have been ported to some slower phones as most games lose?the fun when too sluggish

Upon Further Review…

Congo cube was received well by those that played it, but due to being a casual game and only lightly marketed on the PC-side, garnering attention was tricky. ?I believe that this game turned out to be a lot of fun, and while visually competitive, didn’t blow anyone away.

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from this project, but two in particular stand out in my mind — even small games require a lot of hard work and talent to shine, and the casual games market (even then) was a bloody red ocean where even good games die in relative obscurity.

Additional References

For more information on Congo Cubes, please check out the following links: