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Interview

Interview with the Akos Makovics Team, the creators of Bouncy Cubes

This is an interview we want to read… What!? We have to share it with everyone else as well? All right…😉

The Akos Makovics Team is a very interesting team of developers. Somehow or other they (from the very beginning) have managed to crank out some of the “highest quality” games we’ve ever seen as reviewers.

Read our full review of Bouncy Cubes here.

Whether you like their style of game or hate it, it is impossible to deny that the quality level of the games produced by this team is immensely high, …And today, we may just be lucky enough to uncover “how!”

Before we start, we’d like to thank Akos from the Akos Makovics Team for participating in our interview, and for spending some of his valuable time answering our questions. Thanks Akos.

Now without further ado our interview begins…

 

Ok first up, why did you decide to make Bouncy Cubes?

For Bouncy Cubes the inspiration came from numerous games we played by other developers out there. We are huge mobile gamers ourselves, so we can’t deny the influences. In some games we liked the level design but hated the controls, in some we were thrilled by the graphics, but they lacked the exciting levels, so we thought, we can create a game that has it all combined. After Casual Cube we were a bit burned out and wanted to tackle a smaller scale project, easy to pick up and play.

It turned out that level based games are not the easiest thing on a developer’s plate, but that came much later 😉

 

Cool, so what programming language and/or software did you use when making Bouncy Cubes?

We used the latest version of Unity for our games. We have used it for all our projects so far (games and toolkits) and are very happy customers so far. We slightly looked into using buildbox since it felt predestined for the kind of gameplay we were after, but we felt that we had just created a great framework with a lot of underlying neat little tricks and systems custom tailored for us and using buildbox would require a bit of time to adapt.

For the artwork we just used standard photoshop to create pretty much all the graphics.

 

This may be asking you a trade secret so if you can’t answer don’t worry. Our question is, “How do you manage to create such high quality games in such a short time?”

Actually we would like to speed up the process for our games, but we are only 2 people, me and an artist, so naturally we can’t keep up with the likes of Ketchapp, Boombit or Appsolute Games, which we all admire in their focused gamedev pipeline. So we are constantly looking for ways to take shortcuts or recycle certain not so important elements, so we can really focus on the gameplay and level creation in the future – instead of working out ways of dealing with UI, achievements, leaderboards. I think we are improving on our teamwork constantly and find out which strengths we have, since there are more disciplines to tackle than just programming the game and providing nice graphics for it. And the more games we create, the better our view of the bigger picture gets. It’s just a lot of fun to us, really 😃

 

Ok, here is a difficult question. What was the hardest problem you needed to overcome when developing Bouncy Cubes?

Actually the level design proved to be one of our biggest bottlenecks. Fabian, the artist has developed a style that featured a dropping shadow effect for all level pieces which combined with us being new to level based games created a certain performance issue from time to time. We tested it greatly in the beginning but it was just at the last third of our development, when all the levels fell into place that we noticed the overhead in performance. Since we said we don’t want to put 1/2 a year in each of our games, we just did what we had to do, we took out a good handful of levels. Obviously this could have been easily prevented if we had created more core art assets in the beginning.

Well, and the level creation was a bit exhausting as well. Since I was basically doing them all by myself, Fabian tried his best to come up with level designs himself, which resulted in me building them, uploading a new build, and him making all kinds of notes over screenshots of the new levels. It would have been much, much easier, if both us could have been working on levels at the same time. We are actually trying to find way to do that in the future.

 

Last question. Where do you get your inspiration or ideas from?

We just play and play and play and study other games. Sometimes an actual game sparks a new idea, sometimes an illustration. We have a big folder with mockups that Fabian created that don’t have a certain gameplay attached to it, yet. We talk a lot about our ideas, toss it back and forth and when we both feel strongly about a certain game idea, we just go for it. Sometimes the prototype proves to be fun and then we take this idea further.

 

A few words to Bouncy Cubes fans on Edamame Reviews.

We are working on 2 new titles for our lineup at the moment, very early in production, so it’s mostly Fabian coming up with the core visual game setup and doing lots of color variations so we have a good base to choose from. I’m currently working on an update to Bouncy Cubes that features a good handful of new characters and fixing some bugs here and there, especially the biggest one (well not actually a bug, but an oversight on our behalf) which you noticed as well in your review. We can proudly announce that it will no longer be able to float at the bottom of the screen in the next update 😉

Thanks guys! Fixing that little issue will make Bouncy Cubes even better!

 

Lastly a few words on how you feel about Edamame Reviews and our service.

We think you do a really good job with the reviews on your site. They are honest and you actually get down to the core of each game, even though you have a very high output. Giving developers a chance for an interview is also something we really enjoy in your setup. We hop on your website at least once a day to check out games we might have missed and use it as another source of inspiration.

So we would like to thank you for this opportunity to be featured on your website and please continue to do such a wonderful job for us, both as players and developers.

Thank you for following Edamame Reviews!
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