Building an RPG 3 MB at a Time

Okay, so our little dungeon crawler experiment has come a long way.

What started as a project of boredom because I had nothing else to do turned into an Android RPG. Then I got bored with that, picked up a WoWCube, and thought... why not? The WoWCube version required a complete rewrite and rethink. The cube has extremely limited memory and file sizes compared to what I'm used to. I've gone from packaging a 90 MB game without thinking twice about it to doing everything I can to cram the entire game into under 3 MB.

Animations? They worked... until they took up too much space.

Audio? Worked too... and took up too much space.

So we adapted.

The player still gets a simple two-frame walking animation. For monsters, we're going old-school: a single image that rushes toward the player during an attack, then slowly returns to position. Simple, cheap, and surprisingly effective.

For audio, I managed to squeeze in a title track, dungeon exploration music, and combat music. They're only about 20-second loops, but they actually sound pretty good. And I'm not going to pretend I didn't use AI for the music — I did.

I still need to dig through my sound libraries for effects and find out whether the cube can play sound effects over music, but that's another day's problem.

As for the actual game, we're still sticking with our six classes... maybe. I'm still considering cutting that down to three.

The current plan supports roughly 250 feasible character levels, around 50 custom abilities, and then mastery progression beyond that. It'll take quite a while for anyone to reach that point anyway. The dungeon itself is basically infinite floors mapped across the cube. Each corner gives us a 3×3 area, giving us 36 dungeon cells per cube face — plenty of room for some decent maps. I've also built web-based tools that export the dungeon data as JSON straight into the game engine.

At this point we can:

• Walk around actual dungeon levels
• Pick up treasure and equipment
• Find keys and unlock chests and gates
• Trigger switches that reveal hidden doors
• Explore maps spread across the cube
• Enter combat and beat things to death... as long as you only care about melee right now

Magic, abilities, and the rest of the combat system are coming. Ranged combat really doesn't make much sense with the way this game and the cube work, so I'm not trying to force it in just for the sake of having it.

Developing this thing on the cube is simultaneously a pain in the ass and a lot of fun. I think that's actually part of what I've been enjoying about it. It's a completely different challenge from building another game where you can just throw essentially unlimited assets at an engine and worry about where to use them later.

Here, everything has to have a purpose.

Every image matters. Every animation costs something. Every audio file has to justify the space it occupies. You constantly have to decide whether something is worth the memory it consumes or whether there's a cheaper way to fake it.

And weirdly... that's fun.

It's definitely coming along nicely, and at the rate it's moving, I should have a full game here in the next couple of weeks.

One last little experiment: because the music loops are so short, I was worried they'd become annoying almost immediately. So I just left the cube sitting beside me playing the dungeon music.

About ten minutes later... I'm still not annoyed by it. That's a win. I also noticed that after sitting untouched for a while, the cube eventually stops playing the music. As soon as I picked it up and it registered movement, the music started again. So apparently even the cube knows when I've stopped paying attention to it. And yes, I've already started coming up with ideas for other projects I could build for the cube. Because of course I have. The trick is going to be forcing myself to finish this one before I start another one.

Will it make money? Maybe. Money is nice.

But, as usual, that's really not why I'm doing it. I'm building it because it's fun, because the hardware presents a weird new challenge, and because I want to see how far I can push this little cube. If it makes some money along the way, great. If not, I still got to build a dungeon crawler on a Rubik's Cube.

That's pretty damn cool.