Main features
- Villages
- Storylines
- Character stats
- Animations
- NPC AI
Read the full announcement on our website.
Cube Universe
Quest Update Preview Released!
Read the full announcement on our website.
Devlog #13: Villages & more
You can find our newest Devlog here: Devlog #13: Villages & more
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Roadmap for 2019
January 4th: Cube Universe will leave Steam (see Devlog #11 for more details), but development will continue. We are working on a big update that will add a lot of features and we need to make sure everything works correctly, therefore we won't release any live updates until then. We plan to release updates on the public test version as kind of previews, so you can try them out and give us some feedback if you like to.
February June: Our new website will launch, including a news feed, forum, support tickets, and more.
March August: Release of update Alpha 0.3.0, adding villages, more quests, scenarios (e.g. a village being attacked) (moved to Alpha 0.5.0 update), and space shuttles (moved to Alpha 0.3.1 update). With the launch of that update, we will also launch our store where you can buy the game (and later merchandise like t-shirts, mouse pads etc.). We plan to accept PayPal, credit cards, and later Paysafecard and SEPA Direct Debit (Europe only) as payment methods.
Summer Winter: Another big update, adding dungeons and more content in general (villages, creatures, etc.).
Autumn December: More dungeons, community features like friend lists, server browser, character transfer between servers, ...
Winter Spring 2020: PvP update, official servers.
This is currently our roadmap for 2019, but it may change over time due to some unpredictable factors.
Edit: It did take a little longer than expected, especially the villages and quests were far more complicated than anticipated, but we also added more content than we originally planned.
We wish all of you a Happy New Year!
Devlog #12: Looking back and ahead
I thought the end of the year would be a good time to think about what happened in 2018 and to give you some info on what we plan to do with Cube Universe in 2019.
Cube Universe is my first game, so I didn't have much experience back when I released it on Steam. In retrospect, I think it was a mistake to release it this early, but I don't regret it because I've learned a lot (especially in terms of marketing) that will be very helpful in the future. And your feedback helped a lot to improve the game.
Thank you very much for trusting us and buying a game that is in Early Access. We appreciate your support and will use your money to improve Cube Universe.
In 2019, Cube Universe will leave Steam for several reasons. See Devlog #11 for more info on this. You will get all updates through our launcher, the only thing that changes is that you will not be able to buy it on Steam anymore.
We are working hard on adding features like flying with your space shuttle and villages with quests, so you will have a lot more to do in Cube Universe besides exploring, killing enemies, crafting, buildings, and doing the few quests that already exist. It will probably take at least 2 months to add those features.
We are also working on improving our website because this is crucial for successful marketing. The trailer will be re-made entirely, showing the villages and quests. We plan on making a gameplay trailer for the entire game and a cinematic trailer for the quest update as this feature will be probably the main selling point.
As soon as this is done, we can reach out to youtubers/streamers. There is a lot of technical achievement in the game, namely the smaller blocks, the high viewing distance, high mountains, a procedural universe, and the procedural quests. A lot of people think it is worth supporting it just because of that, but the game needs more (especially visuals) before we can do effective marketing, which is the reason why we have not reached out to youtubers/streamers yet.
We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
Devlog #11: Time to say goodbye
We want to give you the opportunity to play on servers hosted by us in the future, both official servers (no mods) and your own servers that can have mods. To make this possible, we need money, in other words, a monthly subscription or hosting fee, whatever you like to call it. You will still be able to host your own game server on your PC or a third-party server as well as play in singleplayer.
Although it will take some time until we have set up everything to support official servers and server hosting, we need to consider the costs for that already. Unfortunately, this means we can't sell the game on Steam anymore because Valve would get a significant revenue share when you subscribe to our service. We have to set up our own infrastructure, which is a huge investment, so it is not affordable for us to pay a large chunk of our income to Valve because we want to offer this service as inexpensive as possible (for significantly less than most paid MMOs).
We think that this step will be beneficial for the game because we can spend more money on the development by not paying xx% to Valve. While we get traffic on Steam that apparently should make the cut worth it, it's actually not that much and we will have to do a lot of marketing anyway.
There are more reasons why we will leave Steam, but I don't want to talk about them here.
If you have purchased the game on Steam, you will keep it and still get all updates via our launcher.
If you want to purchase our game after its removal from Steam, it will be available on our website next year (2019), as soon as the next big update is out.
Update: We have requested Valve to remove it after the Winter sale.
Alpha 0.2.2.1 - Performance improvements
Graphics
- Added shadow distance option that can increase performance (FPS) by up to 100% when shadows are enabled. Shadows fade out with distance, but it is not very noticeable.
- Shadows for spotlights (e.g. flashlight) and pointlights (e.g. campfire) are now disabled when shadow quality is set to "off".
- Fixed texture of snow-covered blue dirt
Alpha 0.2.2 - Mushrooms!
Gameplay
- Luminous planets now available
- Added mushroom creatures
- Added and changed recipes related to the Luminous planets, including mushroom soup
User interface
- Added markers: You can now right-click the map to add a marker that will be shown on the map and on your radar. Right-click the marker on the map to rename or delete it.
Technical
- Some improvements to character model and structure editor
Alpha 0.2.1.13 - Pathfinding update
Gameplay
- NPCs now use pathfinding to walk towards the player and to evade, so they should not get stuck behind trees anymore
- You now get 5 bowls of pumpkin soup when you create a character, giving you some time to craft food
User interface
- Added window bar and close button to UI windows like the crafting window
- Added several icons
- Improved /who search, you can now type something like "/who Krainos 1-10" to find all Krainos that are between level 1 and 10
Technical
- Potentially fixed bug that sometimes prevented the player from flying with the spaceship until relog
- More small technical improvements and bugfixes
Alpha 0.2.1.12
Graphics & Sound
- Added an animation and sound for warp flight
- Added space background noise
User interface
- Added automatic port forwarding option to server creation screen
Technical
- Fixed placing models not working in some rare cases
- Fixed possible item duplication when removing a model
- Fixed spaceship being at the destination planet when logging out and back in during the flight to another planet
Devlog #10: Warp Animation & Sound Preview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g_koWJmD5Y
For those who understand German, I've also made a Let's Play that you can check out if you want to see me playing my own game and finding a lot of bugs (that have already been fixed or will be fixed in the next update). I'll upload some English Let's Plays when I feel confident enough to do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GETOL3-g10&list=PLAo9Pclq9lC5xnjAoxuT946-0MCt2OHbI&index=3