Skyler Martin

What it was

One of the many design assignments I had during my analysis course, a proposal for a game I designed using the now defunct Sifteo cube scheme. Taking note of the cubes’ technical advantages and limitations, I designed a game inspired by other pixel-art farming simulators.

Sifteo Cubes

These cubes can support up to 11 total connections with one another, with each screen having a 128×128 full-color LCD. Furthermore, with only a 32-bit ARM processor and 8MB Flash, it is quite limited on what it can do. That being said, the cubes have a few interesting features that I took advantage of: proximity detection, tap detection, shake detection, and tilt detection.

General Design

At the time of this assignment, I had been following a charming game called Rusty’s Retirement (3rd image), and thought a farming game would be perfect for the scheme. Originally I intended to have the different cubes act as different tools, with one being for crops. As I thought about it more though, I realized the ratio of tools to crops would be too much, so I dialed it back to three distinct types: the FarmCube for crop management, the MultiCube for tool management, and the SeedCube for seed management. This meant that the player could have up to a 3×3 of farmland – one crop per cube – while also having only two cubes to manage.