One year and six months ago, a few individuals from around the globe came together to start the grueling yet rewarding endeavor of creating video games. Starting out as a small group of friends with various skills including programming, composing and sprite art, the small team eventually formed their own indie game company named “Cubeify”.

Dylan Alzate, a third-year mass communications major, is one of the members to spearhead this small company’s expeditions into the public eye. Alzate works as second in command under the company’s owner, Jaquil Gary.

Alzate’s role at Cubeify includes web design and assisting in the guidance of all members toward the final product. Cubeify’s first project was a game called “Magestar”.

“The game was similar to the Nintendo series ‘Pikmin’,” Alzate described. “But then we scrapped that… because we just have one programmer we focused on ‘Pocket Gacthi’ which was a much simpler care for your pet simulator.”

Cubeify’s next game was a resource management game called “Pond Tale”. Much like “Magestar”, this game includes many characteristics of “Pikmin” including the navigation of much smaller creatures who work to either build or defend the colony.

“Jaquil really enjoys strategy and ‘Pikmin’, so a lot of our games based themselves around that kinda genre,” Alzate shared.

“Pond Tale” was a larger challenge for the small company. Rather than focusing on the game alone all members had to focus on work, school and other personal projects. This would provide a challenge to the members of Cubeify.

“Because we’ve been busy with our own separate lives…we decided to…make a much easier game…We decided to join an RPG horror game jam,” Alzate said.

Cubeify will create a horror game for this competition set at the end of October. Though the game is incomplete, it focuses around a young victim of child abuse who escapes into the woods and is hunted by the Fresno Nightcrawler. With this competition the members of Cubeify have the time and motivation to create.

“When people see us succeed it makes me feel better…sometimes we struggle to get things done…I see us growing,” Alzate said.

This sentiment towards a brighter future for Cubeify is shared by his colleagues. Scott Bowman, head music producer at Cubeify, shared how the goal of the company is to create games for people to enjoy.

“A game is an experience. One you can immerse yourself in and escape the real world,” Bowman said.

The love for games is very evident among the members of Cubeify. Though they have humble beginnings and a long road ahead, they have already amassed a small selection of games and have made themselves open for audience input.

These games can be accessed by their website cubeifygame.com where anyone can leave a message for words of encouragement, complaints of a glitch or whatever else their audience would like to share with them. Within the website is a link to the Cubeify discord server so fans and game design enthusiasts alike can watch in wonder and engagement as this small team of game enthusiasts make their mark in the world of game design.