Suzy Cube Update: January 13, 2017

#suzycube #indiedev #gamedev #madewithunity 

Small change of plans this week as a friend of mine convinced me to submit Suzy Cube to the 2017 FunPlus IndiePlus mobile games competition!

Healthy Competition

Thankfully, the contest accepts unfinished games. Which is good, because the submission deadline is in a week and I still have a number of levels which are only stubbed in. Not to worry, I made a handy dandy sign to address this issue.

Maybe the sign should read: Coming Eventually?

I think it gets the idea across.

Also in light of this, I had to bump certain bug fixes to the top of my stack. Level 2-B included two progress impeding bugs which I had to address. The first of which involved the boss fight sequence getting messed up and no longer giving you an opportunity to land a hit on the boss between its attacks, which is kind of important. The other bug made it impossible to progress if you died after a certain checkpoint while climbing up to face the boss.

Always make sure players have all they need to proceed.

The problem stemmed from the fact that the level requires the use of the Double Jump power-up yet this one checkpoint left you stranded after a respawn. I simply added the gift box you see above containing the required power-up. It was a trivial change to make to a fix a boneheaded oversight.

I also took the opportunity to fix some less game breaking yet equally bothersome bugs mostly related to boss fights. It's now possible, for instance, to skip the boss' intro animation without it messing up the attack sequences! Yay!

Expert Navigator

I also continued work on the Level Select screen this week. Functionality is almost where I want it now with only one substantial change left to implement.

I expanded on the work I did last week which allowed the world pages of the level Select screen to center themselves automatically upon selecting a level. Now, after dragging between panels, the screen will automatically center on the closest page. This basically acts like paging between screens on your iPhones home screen.

Swipy swipy

This interaction feels particularly natural on the touch screen. Exactly as you would expect.

Buggin' Me

There's a really baffling bug I would like to fix before next week but it's got me completely stumped. I don't know when it happened, but at some point, my pause menu became complete unresponsive to touch and mouse input. Meaning if you pause the game during gameplay, there's no way to unpause! Interactions still work fine using a controller but attempting to click on any of the pause screen buttons causes all buttons to be deselected and nothing to respond! Kind of a problem...

Just depressing...

So, obviously, I'll see what I can do about fixing this bug before sending a build up for the contest! But that's actually, pretty much it. I would, otherwise, like to send a build out pretty early in the week to give me time to deal with any unforeseen hiccups in the submission process so I can then dive back into finishing up my Level Select UI changes.

Check back in next week to see how it all went!