I’m going to be at ConnectiCon this Friday and Saturday, in Hartford Connecticut! I’ll have some books and t-shirts, if you’re interested in things with pages or things that cover your nipples. I may also be looking to play some board games in the board game area. I’ll keep you posted. I’m doing a panel as well… Friday night, I think. So swing on by and say hello!

If you’re into Minecraft at all, chances are you’ve heard of Cube World, the voxel-based brainchild of a husband and wife development team. I’ve been excited about it because it does everything that Minecraft doesn’t: principally, has some sort of direction. There’s an actual game there.

I know Minecraft has the single-player “survival” mode, but I always felt like it was really under-utilized, under-developed, and generally overshadowed by the general lego “sandboxyness” of the creative side of things. Cube World, on the other hand, is actually aiming to be a giant, open-ended procedurally-generated RPG, complete with quests, dungeons, co-op, and and a pretty rad crafting/upgrade system. And the visual aesthetic is gorgeous.

The game feels like dropping down into a 3D version of any of the great RPGs I played on my SNES as a kid.

So as is the indie way these days, the developers got the game to alpha stage and then decided to put it up for sale for a discount. Pay a little less than retail, get to play the game during development. Not a bad idea, and it worked fantastically for games like Minecraft. Except that some lowlifes decided that these people shouldn’t be allowed to sell their game, and proceeded to DDoS the store/registration servers.

So now everything is on hold. A few lucky people nabbed a copy of the game before it was made unavailable, but everyone else now has to wait while they get the server issues sorted out. Kind of a bummer, because they’ve clearly put a lot of effort into this game, and the alpha is already incredibly fun and polished. These two people absolutely deserve to get paid for their efforts, and I hope Cube World is a monumental success for them.

I don’t want to put more strain on their servers than is necessary, so if you’re interested in checking out the game and finding out when it becomes available to purchase again, I’d recommend this website that somebody made. Just leave it open and check it from time to time.