Before No Man’s Sky, there was Cube World. If you haven’t heard of it, that’s not surprising. The voxel exploration game began development back in 2011 and footage of its blocky paradise stole the internet’s collective heart back in 2013. Cube World receded back into obscurity after a controversial Steam alpha in 2019. As I write this, there are a mere 19 people playing Cube World. The game is still in an unfinished alpha state and has a “mostly negative” review score on Steam. It’s been years since a new Cube World build was uploaded to the PC platform.
Seven years later, most developers working on a game with zero traction would probably move on. But if you asked Picroma, the studio behind Cube World, they might say they’re just getting started.
Picroma consists of two people: Wolfram von Funck, also known as Wollay, and his wife Sarah von Funck. Wollay is the face of Cube World is Wollay, and he’s got a scant internet presence. He was most active around 2019, when Cube World‘s alpha released on Steam. Though these things are commonplace now, at the time, players saw promise in the way Cube World generated dungeons, towns, and NPCs on the fly. The ideas for an endless adventure were all there, but the details that make an RPG sticky — progression, loot, quests — weren’t balanced very well.
At first, fans accepted these aspects of Cube World as the growing pains that come with most early-access games. But after a flurry of updates near the launch, Wollay seemingly disappeared. The game languished, and even its most ardent defenders of the game became disgruntled. No matter how fans feel about Wollay, every single post he makes is like an event for the Cube World fandom.
You see, Wollay has been working on Cube World this entire time. Since the 2019 Steam fiasco, Wollay has added a system that procedurally generates the game’s creatures, and he’s expanded the customization options. He’s added more classes, frogman and lizardman, and a small zoo of new creatures. He doesn’t post much, and he doesn’t make grand promises. Wollay never links to the game, which is still being sold in an unfinished state on Steam, nor does he encourage people to buy it. Yet even as the world has moved on, Wollay remains obsessed with his creation.
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