Founded by third-year CTIS student Ertan Ünver, SquareCube is an indie game development team devoted to creating puzzle games for mobile devices.
Recently, Ertan and his teammates developed LVL, a new minimalistic puzzle that blends 3D and 2D “with a twist.” The game was featured on the App Store (at the same time as Nintendo’s new Super Mario game) by Apple’s editors in over one hundred countries, including Turkey, the USA and Canada, the UK and other European countries, Korea, China and Arab countries.
LVL forces players to think in 3D while solving puzzles in 2D. The game is based on the six faces of a cube, with each face having a number of puzzle pieces on it. The main objective of the game is to complete squares by using pieces on opposite faces. Each puzzle starts on one face of a cube; the pieces on that face can be dragged and dropped into new positions.
If there is no way to complete the square, players must use pieces on the opposite face. To reach the opposite face, the cube must be rotated. Players can shift the view aspect from 2D to 3D, in which the cube can be rotated freely to reach any face.
The main objective of the game is to complete three squares by using the six faces of the cube. Most LVL puzzles cannot be solved by moving pieces on a single face. Players have to come up with possible solutions that involve replacing pieces on both the current face and the one opposite.
“LVL is built on a minimalistic design philosophy,” notes Ertan. “The graphics used in the game are designed to keep players focused more on gameplay. Since game mechanics create their own unique aesthetic, we did not want to overwhelm this with a complex GUI design.”
For those who would like to try LVL, it can be found at Apple’s App Store and Google Play.