Oh man, I am SOO excited to finally be talking about this on the TA forums! I'll keep it short here but you can read a big post about it on my blog: http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2015/08/say-hello-to-suzy-master-study-of-super.html . The fun part for all of you is that I'm now working full time on a platform game targeting iOS. I'm treating the project as a master study of Super Mario 3D Land, my favourite 3D Mario game, in fact, my favourite 3D platform game. I plan on being pretty vocal during the development, sharing the progress I make and the lessons I learn along the way. For now, I'm just going to share a few gifs with all of you.
Super excited to share more news about Suzy Cube! It's a 3D platform game taking a lot of cues from Super Mario 3D Land. Man I love SM3DL. I was never a huge fan of the 3D Mario games, but 3D Land's mix of 3D + the level structure of the 2D games.. love it! Anyway, I'm going to be blogging about it over at http://louardongames.blogspot.com but also plan to cross post cool developments here starting with a handful of gifs of little Suzy in action. These blocks are only visible when Suzy is close. Trick is, the collision volume is unaffected, only the visible mesh disappears and appears. Good old crumbling blocks! The clever thing here is that the collision is actually deactivated a little after the block collapses so the player has time to notice the collapse and still jump to safety. Wrote a waypoint based mover script and a follower mover script. Voltron together into... Tada! A snake! And Finally, some jump pad variations. Simple jump pad, a bounce pad that allows you to jump higher with each bounce, a jump activated spring board and one you need to ground pound (with the helmet power up) in order to lock into place. Well, that's going to be it for this update. I am working on the game full time now so I hope to have pretty nice updates every week. See you then!
Update for Friday August 28 I've started work on a new level, level 3-3. Why not level 1-2? Well, I won't get into it but I wrote all about that on my blog. The level is lava themed with various timed obstacles that move to the music (some slight bugs to fix regarding this...) I also implemented a simple lava plane which follows the camera in X and Z but keeps a fixed Y height, giving the impression of the lava going on infinitely. I also did some work on some generic stuff that isn't necessarily for level 3-3, like a ghost enemy which will chase you by following everywhere you've been and some retracting spikes which can have their timing easily offest for cool effects. As always you can get more info about this on my blog. Let's look at some gifs!
Not sure what you're using to generate those animated GIFs, but the color banding makes them look much worse than the actual beta. Can you try exporting 'em with dithering enabled? Might help. Really looking forward to seeing boss fights!
I don't have time for a big update this week so I'll just refer you all to my update post on my blog (bad form, I know!): http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2015/09/suzy-cube-update-friday-september-4-2015.html But here's a TLDR for the rest of you: Still working on Level 3-3.. it's taking a long time! Worked on projectiles and cannons!
Level 3-3 is looking insane, especially the rotating platforms. How will Suzy pull off the ground pound attack? And last but not least, any reason this thread isn't in upcoming games section? I suspect you'd be getting a lot more eyeballs there.
WOW this pretty darn cool. especially loving the dark ghost-like character those animations are awesome man
I'm posting here rather than the upcoming games at this point because I think it's too early for that. Keeping it amongst devs for now. How is she going to pull off a ground pound? There are two power up hats in the game which give you a special thing you can do when you're airborne (since there's only a single button = jump). So the ground pound is one of the power up hats. While wearing the helmet, if you press jump again in the air, you do a ground pound.
Soooo... This week's update is kind of a bummer. I've spent most of the week working on the game's final boss/template for all boss fights and I'm considering scrapping my work... Ya... The rig needs to be redone to be easier to use, I'm not really in love with the boss' design.. I don't know. I'll mull it over this weekend and see what I decide to moving forward. This pretty much sums up how I feel about my week. I've also been plagued with the usual list of Unity upgrade bugs after installing 5.2. The worse two only seem to affect my target device (iPod Touch 5th Gen) causing my lightmaps to display without filtering (blocky... and no, it does NOT fit the style) and the other essentially cutting my carefully maintained 60fps in half! So, in order not to leave you all on a sour note, I invite you to check out my latest "Lessons from Suzy" post about how I'm avoiding ambiguous jumps in the game: http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2015/09/lessons-from-suzy-cube-measuring-up.html TLDR:
Suzy Cube Update: September 18, 2015 It's good news this week! I've redesigned the boss! Remodelled and rigged it too! I've made a good bit of progress on the animations as well, which has been fun! My education was in traditional animation, so it's always good to have the opportunity to roll up my sleeves and breath some life into a model. Since this version of the boss has way less body segments than the old one (4 instead of 11) and that those body segments are simpler than the old ones (no spikes), I was able to put much more geometry in the head while still coming out of it using WAY less verts than the old model (624 compared to 2414!), yay! I also decided to forego the blend shapes for this new version as well, getting better results by simply rigging the brow up to three bones, left, middle and right. Here's an animation of the boss getting bopped on the head! Remember, bosses must always be mad and/or incredulous when you score a hit on them! Next week will be more animations as I'm only about half way through the list so far! See you next week!
Update for October 2, 2015 Sorry about skipping the update last week. I ended up spending most of it working on a wedding card for my cousin who's getting married this weekend. Anywho! More boss stuff! Got all the animations done (as far as I can tell) and started hooking things up in Unity. I've got the state machine all up and running and I got kind of carried away hooking up effects and screen shakes and stuff. Here's a before and after of the intro sequence: So, as you can see, I have also been putting SOME work into setting up functionality such as for the intro sequence: locking out player control, switching camera view etc. I've also written a simple little averaging script which makes a transform stay between two other transforms (with a weighting value). I'm using this as a target for the camera in order to frame both Suzy and the boss dynamically. You can see it in action during this bite attack: So, even though Suzy isn't moving you can see the camera following the motion of the boss' head while also keeping Suzy in view. The next couple weeks are likely going to be spent making the boss actually functional and interactive. Kind of important! OH! I've also posted a new "Lessons from Suzy" blog post. This one is on level variety. http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2015/10/lessons-from-suzy-cube-level-variety.html Until next time!
Suzy Cube Update: October 9, 2015 And the boss is.. like 99% done. I just need to polish up some stuff like effects, audio and things. I've spent the week adding functionality to the boss like making it so Suzy can damage it and it can die when it runs out of hit points. With that done, I moved on to building a big variety of actions the boss can perform, like spitting fireballs at you or causing things to happen, like lava columns to shoot up from below. You know, boss stuff! The idea is that each boss in the game will only perform a handful of these possible actions, with every encounter involving a different mix to keep things fresh. The boss was interactive but totally passive all week. I could set off the attacks using debug buttons but it wasn't a real boss fight until this morning when I wrote up the system that drives the boss. It looks something like this: If you want to know more about the inner workings of the boss, you can check out my full blog post about it here: http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2015/10/suzy-cube-update-friday-octobre-9-2015.html The system drives a number of different actions ranging from idling to a raging lava tsunami of doom!! You can check out some of this stuff in action below... Next week's update probably won't be as exciting as I'll just be doing some polish stuff and taking some time to refactor some scripts that need refactoring. See you then! PS: Yes.. that last GIF shows the boss with a couple of band aids on his head. I added these this morning to make it obvious where he's vulnerable.
Update for October 16, 2015 Slim update this week. I spent Monday playing Toto Temple Deluxe and Rayman Legends (both awesome, BTW) to recover from an exhausting long weekend visiting Angel Falls (also awesome, BTW!) So I spend the rest of the week mostly tightening stuff. I fixed some bugs I was having in the level select screen when using a controller.. which looks like this for those interested.. I laid a bunch of ground work for flow through the game. I set up all the level buttons in the select screen (the coloured cubes) and created level stubs for every level I plan to have in the game. So.. I mean, technically, you can play through the whole game now, from start to finish... Only, like 98% of the levels are just a piece of flat grey ground with a goal object and three stars next to where you spawn.. Doing this actually let me sniff out a few bugs I wouldn't have other wise and all things in level select land are now nice and dandy. Oh, and I finished up work on the boss fight functionality. Again just a few polish items and some bug fixing. Any remaining little issues I'll fix as I create the individual boss fights for realzers. i also spend a day trying to update InControl to the latest version... No luck.. Man, it really does not like that my game is in Javascript (gasp! I know I know, spare me! The next one will be in C#, I swear!) Ok, gonna go spend some time properly prioritizing my tasks for next week so I have something interesting for the next update!
Suzy Cube Update: October 23, 2015 It's update time, oh yes it's update time! Spent the week working on Level 2-3, a snow themed level, and a bunch of stuff relating to it. For instance, I wrote a script that allows me to create triggers that can temporarily change pretty much any setting related to how the character handles. This allowed me to create sliding slopes and icy slippery areas too! I created these pick-up style rings which make coins appear. Getting all the blue coins before the timer runs out will earn you a star. You'll want to find stars because some levels will be locked unless you have a certain number of stars. I also modelled and implemented these nifty archways which are really just invisible teleporters that make it seem like two parts of a level are physically linked when they are not. This should be really useful to have in my toolbox going forward. Oh, and I started the week by modelling a number of snow themed props to get into the spirit of things. You can see a small sampling below... Well, That's it for this week. I should have the first pass at this level done early next week, allowing me to move on to other stuff. Man... I can't wait to get to the point where I can make a new level without having to implement any new features... Alas, I'm not there yet! I must continue filling my toolbox! See you next time!
