Curiosity (What's Inside The Cube)

As a piece of conceptual and interactive art it's pretty extraordinary and that's really how I still view it.

This was an enormous subdivided cube that massive numbers of 'players' could simultaneously erode away at by tapping.

During the lifetime of the cube, people clicked 27,798,516,200 cubelets at an average rate of about 1593 cubelets/sec.

What were we thinking of ? Well...we were thinking of an interesting social experiment that would both help the newly formed team to gel and establish a name for the studio as a source of originality for mobile development. All in all it paid off.

MOVIE OF CURIOSITY 'IN ACTION'

Visually it was somewhat of a challenge but an interesting abstract one. The surfaces had a nice mosaic quality, with just enough irregularity to humanise the whole edifice. ended up creating and sourcing hundreds of original images for each face and layer of the cube. At times there were apparently themes and narratives but these were largely emergent and imagined rather than deliberate.

Another emergent aspect was that people used the surface as a drawing/communication tool and notepad. There were poems, doodles, obscenities, collaborative patterns, a marriage proposal and more 'cock and ball' images than anyone could count. Some of the fun was spoiled by hackers who devised ways of clearing vast numbers of cubelets automatically; annoying but somewhat flattering that they went to the trouble simply out of curiosity.

I really wish we hadn't attempted to introduced some of the conventional game-play mechanics and monitisation into the experience. I feel it diminished it a bit, but still, we did get to eat.

22cans

In May 2012 I left Lionhead to became the Art Dictator for 22cans

WOW 2012: that’s insane!

         I don’t know where the time went but this happened...

• We grew a team from 5 to (about) 22 people.

• Released a crazy App/Social Experiment/Game called ‘Curiosity, What’s inside the Cube? Around that time NASA was releasing the Curiosity Rover on Mars, hence the explicit title. Who knew?

• Prototyped a game called ‘All Of Us’. It was looking cool but being an ambitious, unique and unfunded title meant it never left the drawing board. Much of the good bits have resurrected in other projects since though.

• Ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to get ‘Godus’ Off The Ground. Opinion is divided but very successful on Mobile and I’m quite proud of it.

• Developed ‘The Trail’ for Mobile and ultimately, Desktop. I love it.

• Prototyped another scarily ambitious title called Legacy which is currently in pre-production

People have come and gone on the team but I can honestly say that I’m now working with some of the nicest, most talented people I’ve known.

All Of Us

Quite an exciting 'create a world' concept that never came to fruition in its own right. That said, The Trail's visual style was obviously developed from the work  pioneered here and some of the game-play ambition is finding its way into other titles.

I was, and still am, very enthusiastic about melding traditional illustration styles of the likes of Tadahiro Uesugi and Pascal Campion with interactive media. Watch this space, it will happen...