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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! The holidays are always unforgiving when you want to get things done but it's okay! Family and friends always come first right?! We love you guys, and thank you so much to everyone for supporting us so far in buying a copy of CubeZ! If you have bought it already we thank you very much!

I'm not sure everyone knows our story so I'll give you a semi-brief history of Imaekgames. You can skip the next block of text if you want, I won't be mad.

The team is composed of two individuals(Michael and Alan, Michael is writing this). The two of us met a few years ago through the Unity3D forums through a project that was later cancelled or in a form of cryostasis, we're not entirely sure anymore. That project was called Zday. It was actually a thing long before DayZ from what we were told.

After that team disintegrated slowly over the course of about 6 months, I made a little prototype using Unity, Playmaker, and the Ultimate FPS system. I started passing it around to my friends, I'm an artist, saying "Hey guys look what I made!", I was pretty hype since I have no programming knowledge.

This game was a very small zombie survival game prototype where you could shoot little cube headed guys with no legs and chip their body parts away and you would have to shoot their brain/spinal column to kill them. Okay this isn't as brief as I meant to make it but thanks for still reading! :D Alan was one of the people that I showed the prototype to, he showed a lot of interest and we decided to take it further, always focusing on the destroy the brain to kill mechanic and fully destructible characters.

We took the game to Alpha 3 in Unity, then did a full reboot into Unreal Engine 4 and then released Alpha 4, that was a huge undertaking but we pulled it off while keeping the original spirit of the game, but in the process the game became a third person shooter.

While doing all that we decided to take the Steam Greenlight route and after a lot of stress, let down and vigor; the game was Greenlit! Thank you if you voted for us btw!! Being Greenlit was only the first step in releasing the game on Steam though, it was far from being something we felt we could put a price on at that point. So we worked on the game for another 9 months with a lot of hardships peppered in there.

We were almost forced to cancel the project all together due to lack of income, we were both working full time jobs and then working on CubeZ full time as well. Then towards the end of the summer we caught wind of the Ohio Game Dev Expo in Columbus, Ohio, which really helped us kick things in to overdrive to get a playable with our newest rendition of the character.

The expo was a ton of awesomeness, our first one, and certainly not our last; highly recommend any devs to get a booth at an expo, it's a lot of fun to connect with players and non-players of your game's genre alike. While at the expo we met some guys from this place called Lumos Columbus, they liked what we were doing, and 2 months later we're now a start-up company within Lumos.

We love having our office in here, in the heart of Columbus, right on High St on the busiest sidewalk in the city. We've sort of settled in now and we're super focused on making CubeZ the best game it can be, following our passions of being game designers and makers, and seeing our game develop into something we had no idea that little prototype could become. We're not by any means a "SUPER SUCCESSFUL" game company, but we absolutely love what we're doing and we hope you end up loving our quirky third person shooter, CubeZ!

Now for the more relevant stuff.

This update is not out yet, but we'll be rolling it out very soon!
We've made a ton of changes to damage systems and the melee attack system, it's more stable, consistent, and satisfying than ever. Each piece of gear on the body now can be knocked off individually, for instance each shoulder pad individually.

The melee system redux introduces true damage strikes; before it would just damage anything in a sphere radius; now the damage calculates along the swing of your blade. Ragdoll physics are working properly now, so deaths are a lot more satisfying, they can also glitch out the physics on active players sometimes, but we'll fix that in time, it's a semi-rare occurrence.

We've also added animation customization(we love customization if you haven't noticed) so you will be able to customize your melee strikes based on your mouse movement; Up, Down, Left, Right, Stab. It's really cool, and we'll be tuning that along the way as well, and seeing where we can add in similar mechanics to other parts of the game.

We're also working on a single player and coop mode as well, this is not something we're sure if it'll make it into the next update, because we want the AI to behave zombie like and not be super smart like they currently are, but we'll keep you updated on that. We're also looking into how we can get them to act in a hive mind as well.

Our zombies are not traditional zombies, we have a whole parasite infection mechanic where the parasite actually grows outside of your head over time, but I don't to give away too much on that yet. We'll put out an initial version of that and let you play with it and we'll fix it and tune it based on your likes and dislikes. Sniper rifle, more melee weapons, and other gear items will make it into the update as well.

Thank you guys for all your support! We know the player count is low, but as more people are picking up the game, it'll be a lot easier to connect with people and play. January should be a good month to add a lot of new players into the pool :)

If you buy the game now, you're saying "hey, thanks for being real, and I support what you guys are doing, and I hope the game turns out to be sick nasty or cool or something" and that's pretty neat.

Message me if you have any questions of comments, discussion boards are there too in the community hub!

CubeZ

Nov 1, 2014

Community Update

Alpha 8 Release Notes