I recently found a blog mention of Black Cube. A fan of Black Box-type logic games blogged about the versions that he’s played.
“I do not think [Black Cube] is a better version,” he wrote, referring to the new 3D rules, and I have to agree: they are not simple and accessible like the original rules. Having said that, it would be an interesting game design challenge to make Black Cube more accessible than I was able to manage during the contest. Perhaps one day I’ll take a crack at it.
Back in 2002 I wrote a short postmortem analysis of my game Black Cube. For quite a while the uDevGames contest postmortems were unavailable at the iDevGames website, and even now some of the older ones are missing pictures or proper credits, but Black Cube’s at least has been restored.
Even the incomplete articles can be worth a look. I remember learning for the first time about SWIG and using Python as a game scripting language from the Kiki the Nanobot postmortem. And fans of the Freeverse game Kill Monty might get a kick out of the Kill Dr. Cote postmortem. At a minimum, anyone entering a game development contest in the future might want to read a bunch of these to see the ways each developer handled the time pressure, and how the successful ones were able to reach the finish line with something resembling a fun and complete game. (Some success factors I’ve noticed over the years: teams with well-defined divisions of labor; passion for their game; scope control; and plenty of play-testing and feedback from the community.)