Cubed3 has managed to obtain a huge response from Greg Szemiot Crossbeam Studios concerning a wide array of issues. Overall, it seems that the company has been struggling as of late and the team will be focusing on the PC front for now.
“I will not sugar coat anything. Falafelkid was right in his article. CSE has had many problems throughout the years. We were naive and perhaps arrogant, “riding the wave of publicity,” as he puts it. We take our projects very seriously but we made many mistakes. The biggest mistake was not taking the business side seriously for many years. As CEO, the fault lies squarely with me. I put the game ideas first and said “I’ll take care of the business stuff later.” We also then announced projects that were merely ideas or designs at the time. The fact that those haven’t panned out yet makes me apologise profusely to both my staff and gamers who believed in us and the projects.
Since 2005, when we first started to toy with the idea of re-designing Orb for the then Revolution, we only had a few levels done in 3D Gamestudio. We planned on eventually moving on to Torque. When we announced the game was in planning for Wii it was our hope and far-fetched dream that it would come to fruition. Obviously that backfired. We made the announcement with little more than a design for the Wii version and gave up completely on developing any other version. I believe it was sheer arrogance; a start-up developer with no experience of console development announcing a title for the Wii when it was still in planning. This behaviour killed us slowly over time. Not even the biggest companies do that, and it was a difficult lesson to learn.
Since our recent falling out with a potential investor, CSE has died. It may sound strange, but perhaps it is for the better as it put many things into perspective. At the end of his article Falafekid gave a series of Useful Tips. Before he even published this article we had done many of these. We have started on a single PC project. It is a small project, and we’re not even going to officially announce any details until the game is at least 50% done. Our new focus is why we have not updated the website or brought our forums back online. They were proving to be a distraction.
I do very much want to see Orb completed. I have spent nine years on the storyline, working out plot holes, and making the world as detailed as possible. We knew the project was extremely ambitious for a start-up company. We just hoped things would have worked out and we wouldn’t be in the position we are in now.
Since the death and slow rebirth of CSE over the first half of this year, we have discussed this new project with some of the ex-staff. We have staff coming back to work on the project. Our former lead programmer, James Bond, has returned, old concept artists from the pre-Nintendo era have come back, and some others are expressing great interest in working with us. It’s not going to be a ground-breaking title; we can’t do a project of that calibre on our budget. However, the title will be to the best of our abilities. It is a fresh start for us and hopefully will prove to be the correct course of action. I just hope it does work out for us on this project so someday we can deliver on our promises for Orb and Thorn. Currently, we only have ideas and storylines for Orb and Thorn, but as James has said, they are good ideas and storylines.
With proper support and some luck, we hope to appear on consoles in the next generation. For right now, our focus is to get the experience needed and titles under our belt to enable us to push a project as ambitious as Orb and have it succeed.”
