Almost forgot to post about this!! The third, and final instalment of my mini-series on the camera system in Suzy Cube is live: http://louardongames.blogspot.com.co/2016/10/lessons-from-suzy-cube-camera-system_31.html Happy reading!
Suzy Cube Update: November 4, 2016 Ahoy ahoy! Level 4-1 is finally taking shape. A mix of forested and rocky areas showcasing the Ground Pound power up. Oh! And speaking of Ground Pounds, check out this little guy! Pretty dope, right!? If you defeat him, you can snag the power-up for yourself too so he acts kind of like a mobile power-up dispenser but that comes with show-don't-tell instructions! I also made a jumping Skull wearing a Double Jump hat. I'm hoping as players see these regular enemies wearing silly hats doing something different they will figure out that Suzy wearing a silly hat might just be able to do something different too! I also worked on a couple other odds and ends. I made a set of more reliable and reusable cave entrance style archways. You know, a set of two unconnected doors which teleport the player giving the illusion of them being connected by a tunnel. It's something I've set up for other levels in the past but those were custom, one off set ups. This new prefab allows me to just plop such doorways into a level with no additional setup. So that's cool. I also made a slight modification to my cannons allowing them now to impart an initial velocity to projectiles. So far, all I've been shooting out of cannons are rockets and fireballs, both of which fly themselves, so cannons have only needed to spawn projectiles, not make them go or anything. With this new change, though, cannons can now shoot out otherwise static objects like... oh, I dunno... bombs? I wouldn't stand there if I were you... So, that's it for this week. I'm hoping to wrap up Level 4-1 by mid or late next week and have enough time to start on the next stage, but we shall see. Unexpected stuff has a way of popping up, it seems! P.S. If you're in the Caracas area, I'm planning to attend Expo Game Fest this Sunday so hit me up on Twitter if you're also planning to attend and we can try to meet up. I should have a Suzy build handy for anyone who wants to give it a go.
Yes and no. There's no testing actively happening at the moment but you can totally send me a PM about it so I can add you to the list for the next round of testing.
Suzy Cube Update: November 11, 2016 Loving all the positive comments, keep them coming ^_^ (get it?) Ok, update time, it's a short and sweet one this week. Design draft of Level 4-1 is done! Building out and refining the level is what I spent most of the week on so there's not all that much to say. I fixed up some little stuff here and there, but nothing really noteworthy. All about Level 4-1 this week. Oh, I did add this little feature... Invisible (or nearly) coins which only appear once Suzy passes through them once. We've seen this in Mario, they are handy for rewarding eagle eyed players and setting up situations enticing risk takers to retread dangerous challenges. Anywho, another tool in the box! I'm feeling really good about the next level on the list, Level 5-1. Unlike 4-1, my notes on this one are much clearer and I've got a really good idea of what I want to do with each section of the level. I'm excited to get started on it but I doubt I'll have the opportunity to do so before next week. Like I said, short and sweet. Check back in next week to see how things are getting on with Level 5-1! P.S. I also updated Unity to the latest patch release, finally fixing a LOOONG standing shadow bug!
Suzy Cube Update: November 18, 2016 I'm probably going to be more psyched about this update than the rest of you, but that's cool! Not only did I start work on Level 5-1, but I also completed the design draft of the level!! That's another one in the can! (for now ^_^) It's a lava themed level which has little Suzy navigating platforms paths which sink and emerge from the lava as well as conveyor belt style moving platforms. I want to point out the shape of the platforms. Notice how they have a border and a raised center with sloped sides? It's a bit hard to see given the framerate in the GIFs but I modeled them this way so that the platforms really look like they are emerging from the lava. A flat topped platform would simply seem to appear at the lava's surface and wouldn't read as sinking or rising through the liquid. I wrapped up the major work on the level by Thursday freeing me up to check off some odds and ends from my to-do list. Mostly usability tweaks like this one... This is one of the rooms from the Zelda inspired level, Level 2-1. During game play, the spiked rollers move back and forth in the pit. They aren't super hard to avoid or anything, but since the camera moves from room to room in this level, it was possible to enter the room (through the door on the right) and fall into the pit sight unseen. To remedy this, I added the little guardrail that you can see in the screenshot. I wanted to use this as yet another example of those subtle little details in a level's design which make the difference between done and good. Ok, next week I start work on another level. I've already started doing a bit of paper design on it but I really want to spend the necessary energy on the planning so building the level goes smoothly like it did for this last level. Check in next week for more progress! P.S. No promises though... I picked up a few games during the Xbox Black Friday sale... So.. we'll see...
Suzy Cube Update: November 25, 2016 Great progress on Level 3-2 was made this week, but not much else... Thanks Xbox! As predicted last week, I spent considerable time this week enjoying my early Xbox Black Friday acquisitions. In order not to descend into a dark pit of self loathing and despair, I did make sure to make good progress on Suzy Cube nonetheless! What you see above is the current state of Level 3-2. Once decorated, I hope it will evoke a sense of underground exploration! There are a couple of timing sensitive challenges which could use a bit of rework but the level is otherwise pretty much done. Try timing two snakey bad guys moving one way and a moving platform moving the other way! It's not as easy as it sounds! I hope to wrap up work on the level today, freeing me up for something else next week. I'm not sure if I'm going to be diving straight into another level after this one or working on other improvements to the game. We shall see!
Suzy Cube Update: Decenber 2, 2016 Level 3-2 is done, for the moment, as I spent the later part of Friday and the early part of this week making tweaks and changes and doing a full coins and pick-up pass on the level. It's amazing what a sense of purpose adding collectibles can bring to a level. You'll also notice I've added gradient shapes to the outer portions of the level. During gameplay, these blend into the background colour and help sell the underground look of the level. They are also mightily handy for hiding goodies, seemingly, outside the level bounds, like this star pick-up. I'm also, almost, done with the initial build pass for level 4-2. It's a fun auto-scroll level involving a bunch of moving platforms, mostly moving in the opposite direction to the camera. I still need to complete the end of the level and add enemies and pick-ups, but most of the tricky stuff, like properly timing the platform and camera movements, is already in place. I expect to finish off the first design pass on the level by early next week before moving on to, either, another level or a detour to start re-working the level select screen which is in need of a functional retool. Check in next week to find out!
Suzy Cube Update: Decenber 8, 2016 Wow, folks, I'm sorry I missed Friday. I was really busy and ended up writing my blog post on Thursday instead and then forgot to write my forum update to go with it. Ok, so, I wrapped up the first design pass on Level 2-4 and made good progress on Level 2-2! It's all about rotating blocks! I don't have any deep design insight to go with this this one but I did put some work into custom rotator blocks to solve an issue a friend of mine (http://www.flatheadgames.com/) had with rotators I had in my prototype level many moons ago before Suzy Cube was even, really, a game. His issue was that he couldn't simply walk from face to face by moving against the rotation of the block. This was because, despite having rounded corners, the block's collision volume was a simple box. Well, no more! These new custom rotator blocks have more rounded corners and actually employ compound colliders made up of boxes and capsules in order to form nice rounded edges Suzy can run across. The set up involves 12 capsules (one for each edge) and three intersecting boxes to cover the faces. You can check out by blog post about it for a step by step cross section breakdown of the collider setup. http://louardongames.blogspot.com.co/2016/12/suzy-cube-update-friday-december-8-2016.html That's pretty much it for this week. As I mentioned it was a very busy one, non-Suzy wise, I mean. I hope to be more productive next week. So, it looks like I didn't work on the level select screen after all. Next week? Who knows! One thing's for sure, I'll be continuing work on Level 2-2! See you then.
Suzy Cube Update: Decenber 16, 2016 Sorry, folks, spent many, MANY hours in my kitchen washing utensils, pots and pans and all manner of cooking wares as, apparently, that's a thing you have to do after getting your place fumigated... Bummer... BUUUT... I did finish up the design draft for Level 2-2. Basically, it's a simple continuation of the work I had started last week but with tweaks to the difficulty (such as replacing some rotators with safe platforms and closing gaps) as well as integrating coins, pick-ups and stars. Something else I did was to make the rotators shiny! A loose rule I've been following for Suzy's development has been to use the same, simple material on all solid surfaces. This allows almost every static object and every dynamic object to be batched together along with giving the game a distinct and cohesive look. However, I decided to break this rule for the rotators and give them faked specular highlights in order to better sell their motion, especially when running on top of large rotators which take up most of the screen. See, the problem in those cases is that the silhouette of the rotator isn't visible so there are few cues to give you a good sense of the block's rotation. Seeing the highlight crawl over the surface helps immensely with this. Finally, I've started working on the technical setup for Level 5-2. The level will have Suzy trying to escape an avalanche of sorts while sliding down snowy hills. So I got to work on the avalanche ball of death! The GIF is kinda choppy but I think it still gets across the sense of urgency. Bad news for next week. I've been putting off working on my wife and mine's annual animated holiday card but I must put off no longer. I figure most, if not all, of my week will be spent working on the card so I'm not sure I should promise anything Suzy related. Check back in anyway, though, as we never know!
Happy Holidays from Suzy Cube I wanted to take the time to wish everyone a great holiday season, and to thank all of you for coming along with Suzy and myself on this great journey! I don't plan to work on the game all that much for the next week or so and will, likely, be skipping the next two updates. Keep checking back in for Suzy's return to the blogosphere after Christmas. Happy Holidays! Joyeuses Fêtes! ¡Felices Fiestas!
Suzy Cube Update: Decenber 30, 2016 Just a quicky for anyone checking in this week as I've not much to report having taken, pretty much the whole week off. I did, however, attempt to re-model the lettering used on the title screen. Though I didn't like the results and scrapped the work, I did decide to re-shade the title letters by hand rather than continue using the the old lightmapped letters. Here is a side by side of the old and new for comparison: As you can hopefully see, the old shading was splotchy and less well defined. Oh, and I'm working on this... I'll let all of you speculate about it.
Suzy Cube Update: January 6, 2016 Happy 2017 everybody! First update of the year! Hopefully the first update of the year all of you finally get to play Suzy Cube!! No promises... Ok, so, first thing's first, progress on the pig from last week... It's a piggy bank! And it's shiny! Now, it won't just be sitting there spinning in the game, that's just to show off the shininess. The idea is that if Suzy comes across one of these hidden piggy banks, it'll freak out and run away. If Suzy can chase it down and bop it, it'll explode in a shower of coins! It's just one of those fun, smile inducing surprises. The meat of my week was spent working on that fabled rejiggering of the level select screen! Ok.. half my week... Monday was a holiday and I caught a cold over the holidays... Anywho! LEVEL SELECT! The big change I.m working on is to move from a paged system to a scrollview for the world selection. It looks like this: The reason for the change is that swiping from world to world is much more natural on a touch screen, and I wanted folks using other input devices, like controllers, to be able to intuitively move between worlds by simply selecting past the leftmost or rightmost levels in a world. This, by the way, isn't natively supported by the scrollviews in Unity so I experimented with this custom functionality in a clean blank scene. In this scene, selecting any of the buttons will cause the scrollview to move to center that button on screen. Which looks like this: And, BTW it feels really natural when using a controller. That's really the meat of this redesign, but I'm also going to be taking the opportunity to address some bugs and change up other bits of functionality. I expect to be on this well into next week. So, please, check in next week even though I know UI redesigns aren't the world's most exciting topic! Together, we can get this done! 2017!!
Suzy Cube Update: January 13, 2017 Well, hey folks! Small change of plans. A friend of mine convinced me to enter Suzy Cube into the 2017 IndiePlus contest: http://indieplus.game/ This has, mostly, meant concentrating on making the necessary changes to send a build to the contest rather than strict forward progress. Thankfully, the contest does not require games to be finished. This is good as I don't have time to finish the game in a week. What I did have time to do, however was make this sign to plop into all the stubbed in levels currently taking the place of unfinished stages. What this also means is that I had to move some progress impeding bugs to the top of my stack. Primarily, a couple bugs in Level 2-B. One bug made it impossible to get an opening on the boss during his third attack sequence. No opening, basically meant an unbeatable boss fight... Which is problematic... The other bug involved simply adding this gift box containing a Double Jump power-up next to one of the checkpoints. This was really just a boneheaded oversight on my part as the level requires the use of the power-up to proceed but the placement of this one checkpoint made it possible to respawn with no way of actually getting off the starting platform. Whoops! Well, Double Jump added and problem solved! I also took the opportunity while I was in there to fix a number of other boss related bugs. So all in all, boss fights are in better shape now. Finally, I did get a little work done on the Level Select screen. Most notably has been building upon my work from last week to now have the world pages automatically center after dragging. Simply put, once you lift your finger after a drag, a simple function loops through the page positions and figures out which one is closest to center of the screen and automatically centers on that page. It feels really natural on mobile, just like swiping between pages of your Home Screen. Oh.. I do have this other issue I just can't seem to figure out. I don't know when it happened, but at some point, my pause menu became unresponsive to mouse and touch input. Still works with a controller, but completely unresponsive to taps and clicks. Kind of a problem as it means there's no way of returning to the game after pausing! I would really like to figure out a fix for this before sending a build to the contest... Next week, I plan to send a build out early enough to give me time to react to any issues with the submission process. After that, it's back to the Level Select screen and the last couple of improvements I have planned. Check back in to see how it all went.
You know it's just one guy making this? I hate negative crap like this - you sure know how to piss on someones parade. I'm looking forward to it no matter how long it takes.
Yeah I saw that post checked the forum start date, it's been bit over a year not that long really. Even assuming he doesn't have a day job(which I imagine he does).
