Congo Cube is a great little arcade puzzle game for the PC and several other platforms. This was Monkeystone's second large project and it immediately followed the development of Hyperspace Delivery Boy. In the timeline of Monkeystone game development (a lot was always going on at once), we finished the Pocket PC version of HDB in December of 2001. Then we did the PC version of HDB, started the GameBoy Advance game Cartoon Network Block Party, then Congo Cube PC development started officially on July 24, 2002.

What's It All About?

In Congo Cube, you play as Bongo the simian archaeologist. You're on a mission to find the Sceptre of Bongohotep, your ancient ancestor, hidden somewhere in the Congo. You search through 10 different sites, digging with your shovel and finding different idols worth money (to further fund your expedition) among the leaves, coconuts, oranges and bananas.

Digging is rough work and there are many hazards in the Congo. If you're not careful, a heavy cement Baboon Block could fall and crush the precious idols you're collecting. And further through the Congo you'll find infestations of Fruit Flies and Pesky Parrots to hinder your progress.

Before each level (site), you get a short piece of the story of Bongo and his progress. There are 10 sites in each expedition and there are 10 expeditions total, so you'll get to read a lot of text.....written by the hilarious Tom Hall!

We didn't rush the development of Congo Cube because we wanted to make a game that had a lot of time put into it in terms of gameplay testing and revision - we really wanted this game to rock.

The reason why we decided to make this game is because we saw the Casual Gaming market becoming a huge chunk of the gaming industry that 90% of the gaming industry was ignoring.

Just try finding a game developer that knows anything about the Casual Games segment and they'll say something like, "Uh, you mean, like, Bejeweled-type games? Right. I make REAL games." Little do they know, Casual Gaming is a massive market because it services everyone except the hardcore gamers, like your mom and grandmother.

So, we wanted to explore this segment ourselves so we did a little research on the type of game we needed to make, but with a Monkeystone twist on it!

The Game Idea

The "Match 3" style games really needed freshening up. We thought that if we combined the manic pace of Tetris Attack (SNES) with some rule changes and a Monkeystone-style theme, we could have a winner. So Tom Hall spent some time getting a design together and we were off writing code and drawing graphics! The effort would take one year before we shipped the game but the majority of the work was done in 7 months during the last half of 2002.

There's a lot of crazy fun in this game contributed mostly by myself and Tom...lots of hidden little stuff too. You'll have to look for it. We even got the Dopefish in there as is customary for my games.

Congo Ports

Just after developing the bulk of development of the PC version, I started working on Red Faction heavily while Tom Hall starting doing the BREW port himself (yes, Tom is also a coder among many other things!)

He did a great job getting Congo ported to over 30 different cell phones! Just after this effort, we handed off the PC code to our J2ME expert Charlie Wallace to handle the port to Java-based phones - this port was really the toughest because all the graphics and code had to fit in 64K (insane in today's world). But Charlie did it and Congo eventually made it onto 50 different cell phones configurations.

I knew that out of all the possible platforms that Congo could play on ...the PocketPC would really be the one that made this game shine because of the direct stylus input paradigm of the PocketPC. So I worked on the PocketPC version and when it was done it turned out to be the best PocketPC game I've seen. And as of this writing it has not been released! (I'm working on it.)

During development, we showed several of the biggest Casual Gaming portals our new game and they went nuts over it. A rep from Pogo.com flew out and gave us some great feedback. PopCap was very interested and gave us a ton more excellent feedback while Real.com went totally freaknuts and offered us a lot of money to grab up the rights and put it on their site. We decided to go with Real.com and diligently worked on completing the game after the cascade of feedback we had gotten.

Congo Cube was released to the world on June 12, 2003. Within a few months it had disappeared from the popular pages on RealArcade.com and sales dropped like a rock. Hello, welcome to the saturated world of casual gaming. There are just too many games released of very high quality nowadays to keep your game on top unless you're constantly pumping out casual games at a breakneck pace. We learned our lesson, but hey, it was a blast.

We're still not done porting Congo Cube to other platforms. We have a Mac version ready to begin development and it won't take long to get done because the person doing the port is none other than Becky Heineman, coder extraordinaire!

There's even a product page about the OS-X port!

Reviews

Overall, the reviews for Congo Cube have been excellent - lots of people really liked the game. Out of all the versions of the game the J2ME version really is the worst because of the limitations of the platform - oh well. At least it got 70%.

On RealArcade, if you're running the standalone client, you can read a bunch of feedback from players - they love it.

All in all, creating this game was such a great experience and tons of fun. I loved working on it with Eric Seiler, the main artist.

Development Details

I wrote Congo Cube in C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET. The game was written using the current incarnation of my Keystone Tech which is Monkeystone's Cross-Platform code that handles the graphics, sound, input, file system and other stuff on several platforms. During Congo Cube, I upgraded some of the code in Keystone.

I like my games' file counts to be as small as possible and in this case there's basically 2 main files: the game code CONGOCUBE.EXE and the data file CONGO.MPC. All the game's graphics, sound, text, etc. are contained in the one file. At the start of the game I open the MPC file and leave it open while I grab data out of it as I need it. When the game starts, though, I load the majority of everything I'll be needing for gameplay.

The sound system in Congo Cube is called FMOD and it's simply an awesome sound library. It's cross-platform so it works on the Pocket PC, Mac, etc. with almost no code changes. The only thing I changed for the Pocket PC version was to make the music MP2s instead of MP3s because MP3s require floating point calculations (which the Pocket PC's ARM chip doesn't have) and the MP2 format is integer-based.

I wrote Congo's input system to handle multiple types of input: keyboard, joystick/thumbpad, stylus, mouse, etc. There's almost no extra code written specifically for any particular input type! One of the innovations in Congo Cube is the ability to DRAG your blocks around on the screen - no other casual game had done this before Congo Cube. It was one of the major hooks of the game, the ease with which you can play. And the speed.

We wrote up a PS2 proposal but no one was interested enough to offer a contract. Smackdown 2003 for us!

Congo Tunes

The wonderful music in Congo Cube was created by the enigmatic Otto A. Totland, a resident of Norway. Otto did all the music in Congo at his home over the duration of the game, revising and tweaking until we got what you hear now.

Originally, Lucas Davis wrote several songs in XM and MIDI format because we were aiming for a very small download size. We decided to go for higher quality music when we saw that the game was turning out to be such quality that XM or MIDI music would have seemed out of place. It was during that magic time that Otto got in touch with me and the rest is history!

Otto wrote some higher definition and longer versions of the music that you hear in the PC release - I have always been planning on releasing that music as a free download and anyone who bought the game would find that Congo Cube would recognize and play the new music automagically.

Here's some old songs or versions of songs that we didn't use:

Archives

Did you know that Congo Cube was originally titled Bongo Blocks? Yeah, that's right. Only I thought that the word BLOCKS sounded cheesy in the name.

So we sat around and thought about it for a while, threw around several funny names, and during the brainstorm I posted on the forums that we were looking for a new name for the game and asked our community to come up with a good one.

Well, a while later we came up with the name Congo Cube - only to find out that one of the first suggestions in the forum was for "Congo Cubes"!

Bongo Blocks
First Draft

Bongo Blocks
2nd Draft

Congo Cube Final
(WARNING: SPOILERS!!)

Design Documents

Here's a chance for you to see the evolution of a design doc. Tom started formulating the ideas for Congo Cube back in March 2002 while I was busy porting Hyperspace Delivery Boy to the PC from the Pocket PC.

His next step was to fill out the design a lot more and get better graphics in there as well as a real logo. Successive revisions added more polish and information - if you know Congo Cube fairly well you'll see some things we didn't have time to put in the game. That's for Congo Cube 2!

Oh, don't worry - I'll be in there!