The very SERIOUSLY serious Puzzle Cube Game that is definitely not just Rubix Cube from the inside.

Juniper Dev, that one YouTuber, looked into the camera and told me to take this seriously. I think anyway, IDK, I was chewing at the time, so I definitely didn't decide to just do my own thing.

The challenge: one week, build a game around the core concept of SPIN TO WIN. I asked myself what is more spin-to-win than anything else in the known universe. The answer was a Rubik's Cube. The answer was always a Rubik's Cube.

Too bad that wasn't what my initial idea was. My actual idea was going to be based on a sci-fi movie called: The Cube. You're trapped in a cube labyrinth, every room is another deadly cube, and you escape or you don't. Cinema. That was the game I was going to make.

That Cube labyrinth idea survived exactly two features. I made the cube with individual cubbies, and had the rotating mechanic between cubes. The cubbies included doors to each room. It rotated, you went through the door, andddddd it threw you out of the level like a bouncer at closing time.

Time of death: day three. Surviving relatives: four days of jam time and cue when the Rubik's Cube entered the scene.

So, enter: The Rube. You stand inside a hollow Rubik's Cube. The walls are the stickers. You rotate the faces around yourself to line up the colors, and when it's solved, the cube opens and you walk out. It's the escape game I wanted, except the labyrinth is a toy and the toy is trying to leave without you.

Before the web nonsense, the good part. Mouselook to look around, click a face to rotate it, E/Q/Z to pick your axis, a move counter and a timer judging you, and a little music player so you have something to listen to while you fail. It felt like a game. A real one. I was proud for almost a full hour.

Then I clicked Export to Web. The button is right there in Godot. One click, a zip, upload to itch, done. I loaded it in the browser and blue had turned into green. Not all of it. Just two faces, just when highlighted, just enough to make the puzzle unsolvable and me insane.

The web doesn't run Vulkan. My game did. So exporting to the browser quietly swaps the renderer from Forward+ to Compatibility, which is Godot's polite way of saying "now everything runs on WebGL and we all know what assumptions make out of us..."

I did not know I had assumptions. (I had so many ASSumptions.)

The fix was embarrassing in its simplicity. To make a highlighted face glow, I had cranked its emission energy to 5. WebGL has no HDR to catch a number that big, so it slams every channel to 1.0 and bright green and bright blue both land on the same maxed-out color. I changed the 5 to a 2. That's it. Two faces went back to being two colors, the puzzle was solvable again, and three hours of my life were gone.

It shipped. The Rube is on itch, it runs in a browser, blue is blue and green is green, and you can solve a Rubik's Cube from the inside while a timer quietly judges you.

Juniper Dev said take it seriously. I'd like the record to show I took it about as seriously as one can after being ejected from their own game.