Suzy Cube Update: Friday August 21, 2015

#gamedev #madewithunity #indiedev #iosdev

I was hoping to have a little more in this update, but I spent the whole morning moving the router and modem around the apartment trying to squeeze the most speed out of our, less than stelar, connection.

I've written a mover script that allows an object to follow a series of waypoints in a continuous loop. I also wrote another mover script that allows one object to follow behind another. I combined these to create the snake enemy seen above. The head follows a set of waypoints and each body segment follows the one in front of it. I'm also working on a ghost enemy, reminiscent of shadow Mario, who follows everywhere the player has been using the follow behaviour. The idea with this enemy is that you must keep moving to avoid it catching up. It still needs work before it's ready to show off but the basic behaviour works great.

Proximity blocks

Collapsing blocks

Next we have a couple of custom block behaviours that should make things interesting. The first is a block that simply appears when Suzy is close. The trick with these is that the collision volume is never affected, the block is always there as far as the physics are concerned, only the visual representation appears and disappears. 

The other behaviour is that of collapsing blocks. When you stand on one, the block first appears to crack, then it shakes and finally it falls apart. Again, there's some trickery here to tip things in the player's favour. The collision volume is actually deactivated slightly after the block visually collapses. This way, hopefully, the player has enough time to see the block collapse and THEN jump to safety. It's these kinds of little touches that make the difference between a game that feels crappy and one that feels great.

Various jump pads

And finally, this gif simply shows off the four different kinds of jump pads I made about a month ago:

• Jump Pad: Simply gives you an upward kick when you touch it.
• Bounce Pad: Takes your fall speed into consideration. This allows you to gain more and more height (to a maximum) each time you bounce on it.
• Jump Triggered Pad: Gives you a kick, but only if you jump while standing on it.
• Spring Pad: A special pad used in conjunction with the Ground Pound power up (helmet). You need to pound down on it to lock it into place. After a delay it pops back out launching you up in the process.

This is just a little bit of what I've got so far. I've also been working on a real first level for a while now but I'll devote a whole post to it and the intent behind it's design.

Bye for now!