Suzy Cube Update: Friday October 16, 2015

#suzycube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

Contrary to last week's update, this one will be rather slim. I spent an exhausting Thanksgiving weekend visiting Angel Falls with my wife and colleagues of her's then took Tuesday off to recuperate. And, by recuperate, I mean spend the day playing Rayman Legends, which is fantastic, by the way!

As such, not a huge amount of work got done on Suzy Cube this week. Mostly little polish items and bug fixing... Oh, and a day long ordeal involving trying to update InControl.

You're not the Boss of Me!

So, all the boss fight functionality is done! That's right, the final bits of polish have been tended to and only the smallest of bugs remain. I've put the work on the boss aside for now as any remaining little issues will best be dealt with when I loop back around to construct the actual boss fights.

What's on the Menu?

I've had a functional level select menu for a while, but I took the time this week to cross more Ts and dot more Is. I've entered level name and description info for every level planed for the game, I've coloured all of the level selection buttons as a hint to the thematic look and feel of each level and, finally, I've created level stubs for every single level in the game. This last bit is a big deal because it means that the entire game is now playable from start to finish, even if ninety eight percent of the levels are just a spawn point and a level end goal. This allowed me to test out all the level unlocking stuff I had set up half blindly before. Understandably, there were some bugs which I was able to address. Everything about the level selection menu is currently in tiptop shape and working perfectly.

I Have Control!

Something else I did this week was to ensure that everything, menus, gameplay, everything works properly using a game pad. I've been testing this using an Xbox 360 controller on my Mac and my old Moga Power Ace with my iPod touch. Some little issues had crept in over the months, but I've ironed them all out and all is, yet again, working as it should.

I'm Losing Control!

Finally, I spend most of yesterday struggling with trying to update to the latest version of InControl, a fantastic system for Unity games which greatly simplifies working with multiple input methods on multiple platforms. Before I explain why this is such a pain in the ass, let me first explain that I learned to script in Unity years ago when support for coding in C# had only just been added and all the good tutorials out there were written using Javascript. As such, all of my code in Suzy Cube is written entirely in Javascript. The problem is that InControl is not, it's written in C#, as most code in Unity is these days and this means that I had to make some changes to the InControl folder structure and even a bit of the scripts themselves to get it hooked up and working in my project. The crappy thing about this is that it means I can't simply grab updates from the Unity Asset store... After a day of struggling with it, I've pretty much resigned myself to "if it ain't broke..." I'll simply be sticking with the older version of InControl that's currently working perfectly well. This, however, means future proofing and porting to other platforms after the initial release might mean having to re-open this pandora's box!

So, after a lazy week of little bug fixes and simple features here and there, I'm gonna go look through my task list and get my ducks in a row in order to really hit the ground running next week.

See you then!