It’s a well known fact that lots of great game ideas are born from Ludum Dare contest entries and Qb Qb Qb (pronounced ‘cube cube cube’) is no exception. The first version was conceived and created over a caffeine fuelled 48-hour stretch during LD26 and at the end of it, after lots of positive feedback and comments it was obvious a great concept had been hit upon. Over the following weeks it was nurtured and grew into the final release available today.
Qb Qb Qb is a match-3 style game but played around a planet that you can rotate. The pieces fall from outer space, sucked down to the planets surface and if you can stack 3 of the same colour they explode in a pretty chain of particles and butterflies. As you can imagine things start to get hectic. Bricks pile up and fall faster. And it only takes misjudging one rotation of the planet before your carefully orchestrated brick laying falls apart. But that’s the whole appeal of it.
What sets this apart from other similar games are the variety of planets you can unlock. Later planets see curved bricks, much smaller bricks, multiple bricks falling at once and all of this is perfectly synced to a lovely ever evolving soundtrack. Each planet has a different audio style and the hook between the game play and music is very much in the style of the Bit.Trip Saga of games.
Obviously we wouldn’t be featuring this game on CreativeJS if it wasn’t for the fact it’s 100% JavaScript, Web Audio and Canvas powered. The desktop version is playable across Windows, OS X and Linux thanks to being bundled with node-webkit, making for a seamless desktop experience like any other commercial game. Gamepads are fully supported too, and frankly make for a much better gaming experience. iOS and Android versions are planned for release, packaged into native apps by CocoonJS once Ludei fix some outstanding bugs in their wrapper.
So enjoy the playable demo, enjoy the music and if you feel inspired pay the small amount the developer is asking for the full version and enjoy it in all its glory. Here’s hoping he follows-up with his promised ‘making of’ tutorial soon.