Fusion of the Jungle Book and Armageddon – The Cub is finally coming out!

In “The Cub”, the team revisits the same neon-lit, satirical dystopian Earth immediately after the events in “Golf Club: Nostalgia.” A continuation of the saga, this time merging elements of the Jungle Book and Armageddon. As an evolved child, you explore the remnants of civilization while being hunted by those who fled to Mars decades ago but have returned, setting their sights on you.

To keep you company on this journey, the smooth-voiced radio host of Radio Nostalgia from Mars shares a collection of stories, apocalyptic tunes, and Mars-living announcements to paint a vivid picture of this dystopian world.

A brand-new Steam demo has also been released by the team, allowing people to try the game for themselves.

“The Cub” has been released today on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch platforms. Although originally announced for Xbox as well, the team had to redirect resources, and thus, the Xbox release has been postponed until further notice.

Additionally, a completely new Steam demo version has been released by the team, giving people the opportunity to try the game on their own.

To celebrate the release of the studio’s third game, we had a chat with Igor Simić, the founder.

SGA: What are the major improvements/innovations you’ve introduced in terms of game design, art, and production?

Igor: The Cub was initially presented to the publisher as Golf Club: Wasteland (now on stores as Golf Club: Nostalgia), but this time from the perspective of a running, jumping, and climbing boy, exploring the ruins of buildings, monuments, neon signs, billboards that were mostly in the background in our first game. Simply put, it enhances immersion. From an artistic standpoint, this means that the objects the boy interacts with should simultaneously appear painterly and fit the color palette of our universe, while remaining clear for platformer gameplay. Most platformer level designs have clear angles and edges, which are harder to achieve in a world of ruins and mutated nature. Games like Tarzan, Jungle Book, Another World, and Heart of Darkness served as examples for this.

From a game design perspective, Golf Club had a straightforward 2D golf mechanic, and the levels were arranged like mini-golf, but in an urban post-apocalypse setting due to the story. In the case of The Cub, things are significantly more complex because of the various mechanics such as running, crouching, sneaking, swinging, sliding, jumping, edge grabbing, goat vaulting, double jumping, etc., all requiring a sense of flow and finesse. When the mechanics aren’t perfect, players feel that something is off, even though they might not be able to pinpoint it. In golf, which mechanically was far from perfect, there’s only the act of hitting the ball, so there’s far less room for frustration.

Golf Club is essentially a turn-based game: you hit the ball, then the character automatically moves to the next position, and you hit again. The Cub requires an uninterrupted flow where each subsequent move needs to be fluid, allowing the player to enjoy the experience. Another challenge was integrating the story and the abundance of TVs, books, newspapers, and items the player can find in the abandoned corners.

Production-wise, the development of The Cub took significantly longer, partly due to the larger game and because we were simultaneously working on Highwater for Netflix. With morning meetings, task planning through Jira and Trello, there was still a fair amount of improvisation since not everything can be unequivocally defined; a lot has to be experimented with.

SGA: We believe the entire team has upgraded compared to previous projects. How has this reflected in the game?

Igor: The main advancement is having a game and level designer who directly translated sketches on paper into level design while simultaneously testing and defining mechanics, becoming a crucial link between the concept and the player’s moment-to-moment experience. The expansion of the team also assisted Stepko (Nikola Stepković), our art director, in the realm of animation and visual tightening of level design, UI, and all the details the player might come across. Golf Club was made by seven people, and now, even though the team worked on two games simultaneously, there were over twenty people.

SGA: Why was it important for you to stick to local folklore, so to speak? How has the foreign audience received these elements?

Igor: The reason is quite practical: Yugoslav architecture is something we are familiar with, making it the foundation for our science fiction. Additionally, it’s essential as a world element considering our games deal with technological progress, and the modernist ruins of Yugoslavia suggest that we’ve already experienced one apocalypse in the ’90s. Apart from Belgrade and regional architecture, there are many examples of modernism from Central Europe, connecting the belief in progress from the mid-20th century with the faith in Silicon Valley technology of the 21st century, embodied in pink neons and architectural places like the AASA building inspired by NASA.

The foreign audience mostly has no clue about our references. Nevertheless, they now see that Genex, for example, repeats in our games. Some of the audience recognizes monuments or the Berlin Alex Tower, so having that anchor in reality seems interesting to them.