There’s something really magical about roaming the floor of a games exhibition and being immediately drawn to a booth. Maybe it’s the colours, the music, the vibe of the developers – whatever the lure, you know immediately you’re going to play the absolute hell out of that game. For many people at SAGE: South Australian Game Exhibition 2025 – myself included – that game was CUBE.
A gloriously colourful and kinetic puzzle platformer, CUBE has you play as (you guessed it) a small cube that rolls along an abstract map, consuming other cubes and growing in size to explore greater areas in the environment. As you continue to grow, the comparatively shrinking remains of your previous path stay in your wake – at least, unless you crash your cube onto them and crumble them down in a deeply satisfying spray of colour. It’s brain-tinglingly satisfying and remarkable in its mapping.
Developed by The RnD Department – comprised of Daniel D’Cruz and Rupert (Ru) McPharlin – CUBE is deeply intuitive and visually satisfying, with minimal instruction and a really lovely simplicity to its gameplay. Only one line of instructional text appears in the entire demo about halfway through, and yet with little-to-no guidance, players as young as four years old were able to pick up the controller and know exactly what to do.
It was also deeply meditative, and I personally found myself falling into the same kind of fugue state that I enjoy while playing games like Katamari Damacy and Monument Valley. Indeed, the visual bliss of the rolling cube and crushed environments would fit right in to one of those sensory TikTok videos where you listen to Reddit posts while someone bounces around in Minecraft on the bottom half of the screen.
Read: SAGE: South Australian Game Exhibition 2025 was exactly what the community needed
Bringing CUBE to life
For D’Cruz and McPharlin, seeing such a positive response to the game was deeply validating. The pair had been working on the game intermittently since mid-2024, originally in response to a module they were both completing while studying an Advanced Diploma in Game Design and Production at AIE.
“The origins of CUBE are quite serendipitous – halfway through our second year I was late for class, rolling in at around 9:30am after sleeping in,” said McPharlin. “My lovely teacher Orian had spent the morning dividing the class into teams for the module they were about to begin … Fifteen minutes later Daniel walked in after a train delay, Orian said ‘do you wanna join Ru?’ and that was that.”
The module in question required each group to choose from a selection of briefs, and make a game accordingly. After careful consideration, the team decided to attempt ‘Abstract’ brief, which had constraints like no on-screen text, and no direct player instruction.
“When we were deliberating what game to make for this module, Dan showed the group a prototype he had been working on called Cube Daddy, in which you slide around as a cube, solve puzzles, and grow in scale,” said McPharlin. “The bones of CUBE were already there.”
Reworking the foundations of Cube Daddy to fit the criteria and incorporate new ideas was a sizeable undertaking, especially when working within the module’s constraints meant each element had to maintain a core of simplicity and fluidity. By necessity, everything had to be as elegantly straightforward to play as possible – and thus, CUBE was born.
“We didn’t know it at the time but this was like striking gold,” said McPharlin. “Because there’s no reading or difficult/complex mechanics, children can pick up this game and complete it with little-to-no effort – something that we would come to discover when we took the game to PAX.”
Indeed, several months after they had finished the module, The RnD Department was selected to join the AIE Showcase at PAX 2024, bringing CUBE to a bigger audience than it had ever seen before. The game had an enormously positive response, especially among younger players who could indeed pick up the game intuitively. According to McPharlin, it only took about half a day for the pair to decide they would make a full release of CUBE down the track.
“When we got back to Adelaide from MIGW [Melbourne International Games Week] we were immediately thrown back into the capstone project of the advanced diploma and didn’t really have a chase to work on CUBE until 2025,” he said. “Since the beginning of this year we have been working part-time in setting up our company, polishing the PAX build for SAGE, and working on a ground-up rebuild that fixed a horrendous ‘spaghetti bolognese’ code movement system.”
Thankfully, all that hard work seems to have paid off in spades, because not only was CUBE a fan-favourite at SAGE 2025, but it was also the winner of the 2025 Elevate Award – scoring the team $1,000 in legal services from Cam Rogers Legal. The award recognises innovation, originality, excellence and creativity in the Elevate Showcase, which this year was comprised of eight indie games in various early stages of development.
“It has been very humbling, and I keep pinching myself,” said McPharlin. “Hopefully we can leverage the prestige of this award to accelerate and energise CUBE’s development going forward.”
For now, McPharlin confirmed that The RnD Department are focusing on refining the current build; experimenting with tools, shaders and mechanics systems; and taking on the feedback and learnings they discovered over the showcase.
Having thoroughly enjoyed every moment of our hands-on with CUBE on the show floor, it’s safe to say the GamesHub team will be keeping a very close eye on this one as The RnD Department gets closer to a full release.
