Those of you interested in what goes on behind the scenes of the game development business might like to head over to IGN and read their article entitled From Cuball to Geon and beyond. The article focuses on the various business challenges that we faced in getting the game to market.

The article discusses how the game was originally conceived back in 2005 as Cuball (Cube All) and pitched internally using a pre-visualisation demo. All the games we develop here at Strawdog Studios start off with a video, which is used to get buy-in from the team and ensure that everyone understands what we are aiming for. The next stage was to produce a playable demo to pitch to a publisher but, as a small and relatively new development studio we didn’t have the necessary funds to pay for this.

The article highlights the amount of time that gets eaten up by business with months needed to raise investment, months needed to negotiate publishing deals, more months needed when publishers fail and you have to find a new publisher, as well as the time it takes to decide upon and register (trademark) a game name. As the article shows, Geon was in fact the third name for the game, with one name being dropped because it caused confusion (people thought that Cuball was a Pool game) and another, Ora, being dropped because it conflicted with an existing trademark. In short there is an incredible amount that goes on behind the scenes in a game development company that isn’t actually development (and eats into the time available for development).