Suzy Cube Update: Friday October 14, 2016

#suzycube #indiedev #gamedev #madewithunity 

Yup, same top image as last week. Which might be indicative of how slim this update is going to be...

I mentioned last week that I was planning some work to expand the functionality of the in-game camera and that's what I spent the better part of the week doing, though Monday was spent coming back from a beach trip for the Canadian Thanksgiving weekend and Tuesday was kind of a short day as I spent much of it with my wife who stayed home sick.

Cam Girl

So, about this work on the camera. Instead of going into details here, I've decided, instead, to write a set of three Lessons from Suzy Cube posts about the various pieces of functionality which come together to make up the camera system used in the game. (update: you can read the first post here)

The short version, regarding the work I did this week, is that I've added a new type of camera trigger which can be used to stop the camera from moving in a particular axis which is great for helping players feel when they are at the edge of a level or to have Suzy drop off screen if she falls to her death. The other stuff I worked on was to implement automated camera movement based on Suzy's speed and fall time.

The Big Guy

After wrapping up work on the new camera functionality, I headed straight into Maya to start animating the Skull Bully enemy I introduced last week.

Here it is looking tough...

"Grrr! I'm big and menacing!"

And here it is noticing Suzy and getting all riled up...

"Oooh! I'm riled up!"

I'm probably going to spending the rest of the afternoon producing materials for the Lessons from Suzy Cube posts about the camera system, so I don't foresee getting back to animating the Bully until next week. I'm about halfway through the list of animations. Once I'm done with those, I can move on to importing into Unity, implementation and effects!

Testing on Hiatus

On a side note, since feedback from testers means more work on existing levels which means less progress on new levels, I've actually put testing on hold for an undetermined amount of time. Once I've got a design draft of every level done, I'll start a new round of testing targeting a few levels per build. The lessons I've learned from these early rounds of testing have been invaluable already and I strive to incorporate them into every new level I design.

Speaking of which, I don't really know how much longer I'll be working on the Skull Bully, so I can't really say when work is going to start on the next level, but I'm hoping it'll be sooner rather than later.

I'll see you all next week with more animated GIFs of the Skull Bully, no doubt! Stay tuned for my upcoming posts regarding the camera system and if you haven't read them yet, you can catch up on my series of Lessons from Suzy Cube posts in the meantime.