Interview with Cubical Drift Developers of Planets 3

For information about Plants 3 hit up our news page here

Well to get started, please introduce yourself?

We are a small team. The co-founders of the company are 3 old friends that meet themselves in their engineer school 13 years ago.
We surrounded ourselves with competent and truly motivated people from different horizons (creative artists, graphics and musician) to develop the game of our dreams.

My name is Michel Thomazeau, and I am the project director of Planets³ and the CEO of the Cubical Drift Company. I am 32 years old, and have a 9 years background in CAD software development at Realviz first and then at Autodesk.

What made you want to get into the gaming industry? Is it always something you’ve wanted to do because of a game you played growing up, or do you just like working with computers?

We are gamers ourselves (even if we play much less since we start this adventure!), working in video game was always what we wanted to do.
CodingMarmots, C34 and Martino had the chance to start their working life in video games!

Now tell us a little bit about Cubical Drift for our viewers who may not know who you are, what was the motivation behind setting up the company, what sort of games do you focus on making.

We founded Cubical Drift in October. I am a prudent person and did not want to create the company before managing to implement the “infinite view distance engine” as it was the main technical challenge.

The company is here to affirm our position and the viability of the project. The company is supported by the Paca Est Incubator (a regional incubator) and the Creacannes business incubator (city of Cannes). And we have an agreement with a public research laboratory, a long term agreement to create new “reality capture” algorithms to allow us bringing some nice features in our games in 4-6 years.
And also, with the company we can hire new people to help us making the game.

So the company was something obvious and absolutely necessary for us.

Planets³ will bring us to 2019; we have so many ideas for this game. But it’s not impossible that we decide to work on a second game in 2016, in parallels of Planets³, but no more information about this second game for the moment.

We want to focus on Planets³, this game is one big game and we want to have it on multiple platforms.

So what’s a typical day in the office like when working for Cubical Drift?

For now some of our members work on the project on their free time and other one are working full time but from home. The Kickstarter campaign will allow them to quit their jobs and go full time for Planets³ in our premises in Cannes.

So there is no real typical day for the moment, every day is different and it’s not so easy to manage such a team!

For now we are 100% of our available time on the Kickstarter campaign.

Tell us a little bit about the game, are you finding any difficulties during game development and what’s different about this game compared to similar titles?

The first difficulty was the infinite view distance engine, but we surpass it!
The second difficulty will be the vehicle physics system, but we will surpass it too!

You surely are talking about other voxel game.
First its art, the multiple block shapes allow real diversity of creation. As you can see in the concept art, it is really something else.
Second, our game is a RPG, you will have a complete story from the start of the game to the end of the story. There will be NPCs, with their own stories, which will follow you during all your adventure, helping you to progress. There will be a simple but deep craft system. Construction will even take part in the story.
And third: space!

So in one sentence sum up why the visitors on our site should go out and buy and support Plants3 on kickstarter?

Because it will be such a great game if we get to achieve what we want.

What are the biggest achievements and challenges you’ve had to face as an Indie Game Studio?

Biggest achievements: to be able to present such a page on Kickstarter. Perhaps the page doesn’t seem to be very complicated, but it’s represent so much work, really! The trailer itself was an incredible achievement. Do not forget that we are only 8 (me, 2 dev, 2 creative, 2 graphics, 1 musician) and 5 members of the team has a full time job! And we made this far in less than 6 months (the development part start long before that, but we find the artists around September).

The biggest challenge is the reason of our presence on Kickstarter: the money. This adventure will cost us a lot of money, and obviously we don’t have it. Classic ways of investment do not work well in video game industry, we failed to raise funds in may last year for our project. So the last chance for us is this Kickstarter campaign!

So what will be next for Cubical Drift Are you looking to start work on anything else or will you be taking a break for a while after the game is launched?

As I said before we have a 5 year dev planning with Planets³, so not we will not taking a break.

The more funds we will get, the more ideas we have we will realize, even other games. So I think we will talk again about Cubical Drift event after Planets³.

Now as Invision Game Community is powered by students and as they’re our target audience, what advice would you give to budding young students wanting to get into the industry?