Suzy Cube Update: June 30, 2017

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

Man! I am inundated by gameplay clips!!

Testing the Waters

Not much else to talk about this week. I started my week implementing some last minute tweaks and bug fixes based on my own playthroughs and feedback from a friend. One such tweak had me diving into Suzy's character controller to fix a bug which could cut her jumping short when trying to jump while pressing into a wall. The controller was erroneously treating it as a collision with a ceiling! Whoops! Fixing this, obviously, smoothed out a number of sporadically unreliable jumps.

By mid week, I had a build ready to go for testing. On Wednesday, Touch Arcade mentioned my search for testers on their front page and the floodgates were blown wide open!

In one day, I quadrupled the number of testers I had previously and I've been reading feedback emails and pouring over gameplay videos ever since.

Read and React

As you might expect, then, I've been quite busy gathering playtest notes and implementing nips, tucks and fixes based on them.

For example, I added a guardrail to a semi-hidden area of the first level after watching a player misstep and fall to his death...

Stay behind the white line.

And I also made things a bit easier on Level 3-1, a snowy auto-scrolling level, by slowing down the scrolling slightly and also moving the kill wall which follows the camera. 

Don't fall behind!

The kill wall will, as the name implies, kill poor little Suzy if she falls too far behind the camera's view. It's meant to, basically, accelerate what is, for all intents and purposes, an inevitability.

I noticed, from a few gameplay clips, that players seemed to get flustered by the pressure, so I gave them a bit more breathing room when falling behind and slowed things down a bit. We'll see if easing off this way helps with completion on this level.

So far, no obvious disasters in the gameplay department. Players don't seem to be getting lost or anything and, other than the issue above involving Level 3-1, folks seem to be more than capable of getting through most levels.

Still More to Do

As previously mentioned, I won't be discussing specifics regarding the game's 'Special' levels in order to keep some surprises for even Suzy's most loyal followers, but I did want to mention that I've got the paper design done for Level 2-S and plan on drafting it and, hopefully, one more special level next week. For those of you who are currious, the special levels are optional levels which are meant to be short departures from the game's regular levels and offer an opportunity for players to earn more Bonus Stars to unlock later levels.

On that, I bid you all farewell until next week. I've got many more videos to view, notes to take and tweaks to make.