Category Archives: Black Cube News

MindTheCube Games and Mac OS X 10.15

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Sadly, I have had to update the pages for my Mac OS X games to show that they no longer work after Mac OS X 10.14 “Mojave”. This is because Apple removed support for 32-bit programs from OS X 10.15 “Catalina”, released late 2019. (An event affectionately referred to as the App-ocalypse.)

I may try to rebuild the Unity games at some point. I already started improving Pawns for iOS, which gives me a head start on a new Mac version. I’m not sure how difficult A Tack! will be to update.

Amazingly, the three non-Unity games (Black Cube, Asteroid Rally, and WordBeGone) have been working since the earliest versions of OS X. I recompiled them for the Intel transition about 10 years ago, but that was all they needed. But there is no simple way to rebuild them now, and I have no plans to rewrite them.

Ironically, my oldest “Mac Classic” games (3d Brick Bash! and 3d Paddle Bash!) CAN be run on 10.15 using an emulator like SheepShaver.

Black Cube Postmortem Available Once More

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.)