Suzy Cube Update: February 17, 2017

#suzycube #indiedev #gamedev #madewithunity 

Great news! Suzy Cube is a top 10 finalist in the 2017 IndiePlus game design competition! Most amazingly, this means I've been invited to attend the winners announcement ceremony in San Francisco during GDC 2017!

Ok, now for the, maybe, less great news. This has already derailed my plans for the game this week and will continue to disrupt my work until my return from the conference in two weeks.

Best Foot Forward

Last year, when preparing for GDC, I spent about a month and a half (I think) preparing and decorating all the levels in World 1 in order to have something complete-looking to show. Obviously, something similar won't be possible in a week so I've elected to choose two levels to which I'll give the prettying up treatment. These will, of course, be chosen from some of the game's newer levels so folks who saw the game last year will have something new to play.

As you can see up top, part of getting ready has also involved putting together some promo material. The folks organizing the IndiePlus contest requested artwork to use for making posters to put up at the event. Well, I wasn't going to miss out on the opportunity to show off Suzy, so I decided to provide them with a complete poster to use.

Fun fact: I don't own 3D rendering software. So I actually laid out the scene in Unity by taking screen captures. Finally, I took screen captures of the elements separately to bring into Photoshop. I ran some filters over everything to hide the jaggies along with some touch ups by hand, but for our leading lady, I actually traced over her 3D model using vector shapes to get perfectly sharp, resolution independent results. I, probably, could have spent another day or two on it, easily, but the contest folks had to get the posters out to the printer by end-of-day yesterday. For the time invested, I'm quite happy with the results. 

And having this artwork made it possible for me to quickly make a couple other pieces of promo material. A lock screen for my iPod and a wallpaper for my laptop! Feel free to download them for yourself!

Lockscreen background! (iPhone 5)

Desktop wallpaper! (Retina Macbook)

Any Progress?

So, what progress have I actually made on the game? Well, I've decided Level 3-4 will be one of the levels I show off next week. I think the waterfalls and stuff are cool. So I've done a bit of decorating work on the level along with a few tweaks to the design.

And, if you'll remember, I teased an eyepatch wearing miscreant last week. Well, the new enemy is animated, imported and all hooked up. What's it all about?..

I've got a BONE to pick with you!

That's right... It's basically a Hammer Bro! In the gif, I've made some tweaks so as not to kill Suzy, but as you can see, its behaviour is simply to jump between waypoints periodically chucking something at the player. What gets chucked is pretty open ended but I've made two versions, the one you see above, throwing bones and another which throws bombs!

So, that's been my week... a crazy week it's been! I'm re-vectoring my work toward another strong GDC showing. Check in next week for my last update before the conference to see how things are shaping up!