What a journey it’s been for Louis-Nicolas Dozois aka NorthernBytes Software, an indie developer who has been toiling away on a Super Mario 3D Land-inspired platformer built from the ground up for touchscreens. That game is called Suzy Cube, and it’s finally now available on iOS, Android, and Apple TV (and coming soon to Steam!). Where do I begin? How about at the beginning. NorthernBytes first posted publicly about Suzy Cube on our forums back in August of 2015, and in fact if you read through that entire thread it documents the evolution of Suzy over these past three years quite well. The following March we got a fantastic hands-on demo of Suzy Cube during GDC 2016, and were so dang impressed with it that we chose it as our Game of the Show that year.
During the next year work continued on Suzy and it wasn’t until the following GDC in March of 2017 that we got another hands-on look, and again, were completely bowled over with how well it played on touchscreen and how inventive and fun the level designs were. Just about a week later Suzy got her very first official trailer, and a few months after that NorthernBytes sent out a Bat Signal for beta testers from our community. Once real-world feedback started pouring in from beta testers, that’s where Suzy really started to take shape, and in August NortherBytes inked a deal to publish Suzy Cube with prominent developer and publisher Noodlecake Games. Go Canada!
Then in September, NorthernBytes put out a really interesting blog post about making touchscreen controls feel great in a 3D platformer like Suzy Cube, and it was a really interesting read. I suggest you check it out if you haven’t. Of course, as close as Suzy was getting to the finish line, you can’t just rush development of a passion project like this, and so it turned out that for the third GDC in a row we checked in on the progress of Suzy Cube this past March. The difference this time around was that Suzy had an actual release window of spring 2018, and just a couple of weeks ago NorthernBytes and Noodlecake finally nailed down a solid release date of June 19th. And guess what? That’s today!
We’ll have a full review coming really soon, but based on all the time we’ve spent with Suzy over the years, I can confidently say that if you enjoy 3D platformers and want to marvel at just how well they can control on a touchscreen when a developer puts in the time and effort to craft them properly, then go ahead and dive right into Suzy Cube without reservation, and be sure to leave your thoughts about it in our forums.
