Lately we've been sketching out several games set in the Cubeast world at the same time, and I want to quietly show you one of them. It's a small desktop game that brings the whole Cubeast world to a corner of your taskbar, sitting quietly off to the side of your screen.
A long, narrow window floats just above the taskbar, and inside it a partner Cubeast wanders the world on its own. While I'm working — or goofing off — the game just keeps going by itself.
Why make something like this? Because the Cubeasts Yaquati has drawn over time have quietly grown past 90 by now. To meet each of these little guys one at a time, a small game you keep nearby and slowly collect from felt like a better fit than some grand production. We're a small team, so we're running a few different flavors of game at once, and this desktop friend is one of them.
So in the end this game is almost entirely about the joy of filling out a field guide. Most of the time it just runs along in the corner, and only now and then — when a rare Cubeast appears — does it briefly call for me. It's fine if you miss it; another chance will come around. I think the most important thing is not getting in the way of someone who's trying to work.
Let me leave a few notes from the building side too. It has to sit on the taskbar all day while barely sipping the battery, pop up tray notifications, and eventually be shippable on Steam... I dug through open-source engines for ages trying to find one that ticks all of those boxes. Crossing candidates off one by one, I finally settled on Godot. It turns out to have exactly what a resident, always-on game needs, with no extra fat.
Right now I'm mimicking the feel of this little window in the browser first. I'm checking whether there's really something to "catching a glimpse of something wriggling in the corner."
Cubeast: Defense, this desktop friend — we're building the games of the Cubeast world all at once. More than which one comes first, what we want to do is show you this world in a few different flavors.
The title is still a working name, so we'll figure that out as we go. I'll be back when there's more progress. 🧊