Upcoming Platform Game: Suzy Cube

Suzy Cube Update: April 14, 2017

Even lamer update that last week!

I, basically only worked two days this week as we have a house guest and we threw my wife a birthday shindig... blah blah blah, you don't care.. SUZY!

Ok, ALMOST done with Level 3-3 redesign...



I've got to try out a couple ideas for the last bit of the level to settle on which to go with. Remember, game design doesn't happen in notebooks and there's no substitute for puttin' it in the game and seeing what works!

I've been wrestling with a, still unfixed, crash which only happens on iOS and produces no error in the editor. Those are always the worse to debug, almost no info from XCode, no info from the editor, several minutes per iteration having to build/compile/install to the device each time... Ugh... Back to boardgames for my next project, maybe?

I had a call with another publisher this week as well, with a couple more to go next week. I should be in a good place to make a decision by then.

Oh, and big announcement no one is going to care about! I'm reorganizing my Trello board! I use Trello to manage my tasks, but for years now, I've been using it more or less as a to-do list. This week, however, I've rejiggered it into a set of time specific columns: "Current", "This Week", "Next Week", "April", "May", etc.

That's right folks, I'm scheduling tasks now!

This isn't about forcing myself to stick to some strict timeline as much as it's about motivating me to complete a more consistent amount of work each week. A nice side benefit is that I should start to form a much better idea of a release timeframe... WHICH I STILL WON'T SHARE PUBLICLY!

As I said... ANOTHER crappy update... Check in next week when I, hopefully, redeem myself!

 

Suzy Cube Update: April 21, 2017

Been an interesting week down here... Things are.. uh... getting interesting...

http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/Images/2017/4/19/72e2d8cf361c4c2aa2088dadcb5594bf_18.jpg

Aaaanywho... Amidst all this, Suzy Cube continues to move forward. I spent several hours this week talking with publisher types. What I'm hoping to find is a good partnership which will allow Suzy Cube to be the best it can be while, hopefully, also bringing the game to as many players as possible by opening up the possibility of targeting more platforms. I won't have any concrete news on this for a while, but wanted to keep you all in the loop.

I, FINALLY, finished work on the Level 3-3 redesign.



Nothing much to say about it other that.. YAY! I can move on now!

I made these little mushroom decorators, perfect for forest levels.




You'll notice that with a little scaling and sticking them in a tree, they can look like those awning style mushrooms you find growing on tree bark.

I also made these star hint panels.



Their inclusion might be a bit controversial as I risk robbing players of "Ah-Ha!" moments if they are overused. In the example above from Level 1-2, a star is revealed if Suzy defeats all three of the nearby enemies. In this case, the hint is meant to alert players that a star can be found here without telling them how. I hope this will strike a balance between giving it away and players never finding the star at all. As with most things in game design, only testing will tell!

Oh... that damn crashing bug from the Unity 5.6 upgrade I ran into last week? Ya.. I think I found the offending script. If I comment out everything in the script, no crash... Problem is, I still have no idea how the script could possibly be causing the crash in the first place... I've only wasted three days total working on that stupid crash... not bad... At this rate, i should have it fixed in time for next Christmas!

Dang... Should have closed on the mushrooms or something... Ending on a crash I haven't fixed? What a downer!

Well... on that happy note! See you all next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: April 28, 2017

Got a better one for you folks this week!

First, gonna get the crappy stuff out of the way...
Lots of time spent on bugs. The crash that started happening after upgrading to 5.6 is still happening even after two patches, and yesterday, I started work on a rolling block behaviour (not as trivial as it sounds). It.. uuuh.. misbehaves.



As you can see, it works fine along one axis, but not along the other. When moving the cube along the Z axis, its rotation becomes dependant on the cube's starting rotation rather than rotating around world X. Anyone who thinks they can help with this issue can pop in on the Unity Answers page to chime in:
http://answers.unity3d.com/questions/1346346/how-can-i-get-rigidbodymoverotation-to-rotate-in-w.html?childToView=1346414

Ok, on to less depressing stuff!

Folks who follow me on Twitter (@LouardOnGames) may have seen this gif I posted early last week:



I call them Spinner Pucks and I'm sure they will prove to be great fun. As you can see, they bounce around and off each other, which, let's face it, looks fun already! But they can also make short work of any enemy caught in their spinning spikes as well as pick up coins and stuff for Suzy! She just has to look out for the rebound...



And as you can see, they can be activated and deactivated by jumping on the button.



Sooo, those are pretty cool, right!?

I also started doing some design sketching for Level 4-4. In fact, that's the primary reason for the rolling blocks. In addition to the rolling blocks, though, I'm also planning to use rotators again. But to set the level apart from the, admittedly similar, Level 2-2, I went ahead and designed some more complex rotators to keep things fresh and interesting.



In accordance with my rule of avoiding mesh colliders unless absolutely necessary, though, I had to use pretty complex mashings of box and capsule colliders to properly support smoothly running over the rounded corners.



Well, that's it for this update. I was not able to get through all my tasks for this week (though I hope to knock a couple more off this afternoon) but I did make some nice progress. Check in next week, when I hope to have a lot of Level 4-4 playable.

 

In the spirit of not giving everything away, I am not planning on making it any clearer. Like I said. testing will determine if any more hinting is necessary, but I hope the little plate will be enough. You must keep in mind that most of the stars you find in the game aren't hidden in a way that would require such a hint, they are simply off the main path, or in visible bun dangerous spots.

 

Suzy Cube Update: May 5, 2017

What's up folks!?
Wish I had better news, but, unfortunately, this week has involved a lot of banging my head against bugs... Mostly (all) relating to the block rolling behaviour I mentioned last week.

Before we wade into the sludge, let's have a look at something that worked out much better. Remember my Piggy Bank guys?



Well, a problem with them was that they were really easy to corner. To fix this, I added a really simple obstacle avoidance algorithm to their behaviour. I would like to point out that they are still pretty dumb, but Suzy Cube isn't really about outsmarting genius A.I.s or anything. The idea here was simply to make chasing them more interesting. So how does this algorithm work?



I simply perform a raycast out the front of the pig (blue). If this first raycast hits something, I calculate a reflected vector and do another raycast at this new angle (white). I recursively repeat this, shortening the raycast every time, until one returns no collision. Once this happens, I set the Piggy's new desired heading to match the last raycast direction and voila! In the example above, you see that after reflecting off the sign and a couple more times more, the final raycast will have the Piggy turning left to avoid going in the corner.

As I said, it's pretty simple, it isn't perfect, but it makes the Piggies much more fun to chase and helps avoid them being easily cornered.

So, on to the stuff that hasn't been going so well. I'm still struggling with my rolling blocks.

I was hoping to use the behaviour on these rolling lava enemies who leave a deadly trail behind them, but the script's bugginess had me fall back to simply hand animating them rolling.



I mean... It works fine now, but the amount of time I wasted before doing it this way.. ugh...

I was also hoping to use the rolling block behaviour to make ridable rolling platforms.



Ok... honestly, these work ok. They are more limited than I was hoping, but they basically work.
These tumbling spike frames on the other hand...



You can't really tell from the gif thanks to the low framerate, but these are jittery AF! Not at all usable.

On that happy note. I will leave you for this week and keep seeing about fixing my rolling blocks.
Maybe next week, I'll actually make some progress on Level 4-4? See you then.

 

Suzy Cube Update: May 12, 2017

I opted to put aside smaller tasks and bugs this week to get Level 4-4 done. YAY!

Before I get into that, though. Last Friday, after my update, I did get a couple more things done.



I added a glow to the eyes of the blowtorch panels. It occurred to me about a month ago that if these things are going to have faces and blow flames out, then their eye should really glow when they do so... I finally got around to adding that.



And after rearranging the hierarchy of objects in my rolling block setup, I got them tumbling jitter free! Which was actually instrumental to the design of Level 4-4, my last lava level!





Once again, it's all about rolling and rotating challenges. For any of you who think this is going to be too similar to Level 2-2... well... ok... maybe a bit, but I like to think of it more as a callback to the previous lava themed level about rotating blocks. I'm not too worried about this, though, as Level 4-4 has a much greater variety of hazards and the two levels are far from back to back in the actual order they appear in game. Oh, and 4-4 has this fun little number!



I'm already predicting players will have a tougher time with this level, which, given that it's a fairly late game level, I hope won't be a problem. Of course, only plenty of playtesting will let me know if it's too hard or not.

Since I spent the whole week working on the level, there's not much else to update you all on. Given what having another level in the bag represents for the progress of the overall game though, I'm totally fine with that!

Until next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: May 19, 2017

Ahoy ahoy!
I spent the better part of my week re-working a couple of older levels as I march on towards getting the game ready for another round of testing.

The first level I had a look at was the World 2 boss level. This is the second time I give this level a good once over. It was simply too hard for what is only the game's second boss fight, so I eased up on it. I also made some changes to the Boss' attack sequence, mostly adding more idling time between attacks to give players more breathing room. And I gave the boss this new animation as well:



This "mugging" animation, as a friend calls it, is used to entice players to double jump onto the Boss' head. I hope it will do the trick!

The other level I spent some time reworking is Level 1-4. It really stood out as a big difficulty spike, especially so early in the game and I hope the changes I made will help.



Two of the more important changes I made pertain to the cannons used in the level. I made most of them fire less frequently, which should reduce the pressure on players, and I also made it so the (Suzy-seeking) rockets they fire can now collide with each other. This can seem like a rather trivial change, but in practice, it means that some rockets now explode against each other before ever reaching their target. This keeps the sense of tension and danger while being, in a practical sense, much safer.

I thought I'd also mention this tweak I made which has nothing to do with difficulty. You see the cubes of rock blocks in the screenshot above? These explode when hit by rockets and act as temporary cover for Suzy. I, initially, thought it would be fun to hide coins in all of them to reward players for steering rockets into them. In practice, though, this only served to hurt the level's pacing as players were rewarded for standing around waiting for rockets to blow up all the blocks. Remember, folks, as designers, we should never incentivize boring behaviour!

I've also been wanting to add exploding enemies to the game since forever but never really settled on a design. What I love about the visual design of the Bob'ombs from Super Mario is that it implies they are mechanical. This is important because it means that no living creature is committing suicide. I also didn't want to evoke images of suicide bombers, so having regular Skull enemies carrying bombs was definitely out of the question.

So, after many sketches, I decided to go with big ol' robot wrench hands on a bomb!



As you might expect, if Suzy gets too close, the Bomb Skull's fuse lights up and a chase ensues.



But, Suzy can bop her way out of it too, causing the Bomb Skull to, basically, turn into a bomb.



Kablam!

Finally, I've started work on Level 5-4, another forest level with a vertical penchant. Something about trees just says "climbing" to me, I guess!



Things are still very early on in this design so there's not much to show or talk about yet. I should have more for you on it next week.

Well, that's it for this update. See you next time.

 

I don't want to commit to anything and not come through, so all I will say for now is 5 Worlds, 5 Levels each.

 

Suzy Cube Update: May 26, 2017

Level design was the name of the game this week. Not a flashy update but some good progress made nonetheless.



Work on Level 5-4 is nearly complete! The level itself is done but I'll be doing a coins and pickups pass this afternoon as well as refining the culling zones to optimize performance.



The level is split into three sections. Each section starts with a horizontal obstacle course followed by a vertically auto-scrolling climb around massive tree trunks. A teleporter at the top of each climb takes Suzy to the next section. Using teleporters this way was the easiest way to ensure checkpoints would play nice with the auto-scroll setups.

I also made a couple of small changes to Level 5-2. Nothing major, just "quality of life" stuff to polish the experience.



The level opens with Suzy gettings chased down snowy slopes by a big rolling snow boulder and there's a, sort of, cutscene to start the off the sequence. I finally decided that I should probably pause the game timer during this intro sequence. No sense in forcing players to lose seconds off their time.



I also addressed some awkwardness in this bonus star area of the level. The idea is that Suzy emerges from the archway up top and then is forced to slide down the ramps. If players fail to jump at the end of the third ramp, they will miss the star and be forcefully dumped into the exit teleporter. I had initially made the whole thing way too cramped which made the sliding go by too quickly and also caused Suzy to bump her head when jumping. All Awkward! So, I've opened up the area, and it feels much better now!

Short and sweet. No flashy stuff like new enemies or anything, but it sure feels good to have another level design in the can! For next week, I'm getting to work on the only remaining main game level, Level 2-4! This will be a significant one as it will serve as the game's introduction to the Ground Pound power-up! See you all next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: June 2, 2017

I was busy with other things this week, so it's going to be a slim update. But there are still some nuggets in here.

Before I start on the update, proper, I wanted to get you up to speed on the status of the crash bug I discovered when upgrading to Unity 5.6. After many attempts to fix the problem on my end, I gave up and decided to bundle up a reproduction scene for the folks at Unity. No word on a fix yet, but they came back to me this week with confirmation that they were, indeed, able to reproduce the bug! This is great news as it's, of course, the first step toward issuing a fix. It seems the bug has something to do with OpenGL and does not show up on Metal compatible iOS devices.

Ok! On to some progress. I have not, unfortunately, completed the design on Level 2-4, but I have been making some progress.



The level will be rocky with tight climbing sections and lots of explosions!



The Ground Pound power-up is on the menu as this level will serve as its introduction. This means, plenty of Rock Skull enemies, bombs and metal switches to slam down onto.



Given the level's focus on the Ground Pound power-up, I also thought it would be high time to implement a feature I've had on my to-do list for a month or so now. That's right! Slamming the ground now causes secret, invisible, objects to momentarily reveal themselves!

To achieve this, I simply update a couple of parameters in a shared material when Suzy hits the ground causing it to flash. As all invisible objects share this same material, they all, simultaneously, become visible!

On a related note, I also went ahead and set up a functional invisible gift box.



Much like the invisible coins, moving through the invisible box reveals it, at which point it can be bopped to collect what's inside.

Well, that's it for this week's update. I'll catch you all on the next one.

 

Suzy Cube Update: June 16, 2017

Sorry for the missing update last week, I was out of the country... Aaaand sorry for the late update today, I was busy playing through the game...
FROM START TO FINISH!!!!

That's right! with the exception of bonus levels (which I don't want to talk about too much.. even you guys deserve a LITTLE surprise!), all regular main-line levels are in! Mind you, this does NOT mean they are all in a shippable state! Let's be clear on that! But it is a rather important milestone as, from now on, level design work will be about refinement and honing rather that starting from nothing.

So, as you might have guessed, I've completed work on Level 2-4! It introduces the Ground Pound power-up and includes lot's of things that go BOOM!



It's also a great place for bomb lobbing baddies!



I also spent a bit of time hashing out a "Suzy is behind stuff" solution with a designer friend of mine and he helped me bring my latest idea to life.



I've been trying different solutions to this problem since the start of the project and they've all had drawbacks, especially when it comes to translucency. Finally, I had the idea of using a dithering pattern instead of alpha blending. It's quite noticeable in the gif, but just looks semi-transparent on my iPod's retina display.

Mind you, it isn't the most optimized or technically fancy solution. I simply applied two materials to Suzy's mesh, one, drawn first, which is a solid colour, ignores depth information and is rendered using a dithering pattern, then the 'normal' shaded material, complete with Z read/write on top. By playing with material render queue values, I was also able to ensure the effect wouldn't show up on top of certain other objects like power-ups, enemies and particle effects.

Sorry again for missing last week and sorry this update wasn't meatier.. I'm sure E3 had nothing to do with it... ya...

Anywho, with all the levels now in place, next week will me more of an organizational one that anything, getting the game ready for a big round of testing! I'm not going to promise anything to those who've been chomping at the bit to test the game, but I do hope to have a build ready by next Friday. A lot of that will depend on how many bugs I decide really need to be fixed before testing can start. So, on that note, check back in next Friday! Ciao!