#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity
Well, hi there folks! Welcome to this week's Suzy Cube development update!
Not a lot to talk about this week, unfortunately. I've not been getting a lot of videos back from testers this time around which means less feedback to act on... booh...
I have, however been ticking little things off the to-do list and updating some plug-ins to fix bugs. That is, until three days ago when I decided to go off script and implement a long deferred feature!
Save me a Seat
As you might have guessed from the screenshot at the top of the post, I've gone ahead and split player saves between three distinct slots. Now, if you want to start a fresh game or if you live in a household with several gamers sharing a device, it's easy to save progress for one playthrough without affecting another.
I've been using Unity's PlayerPrefs system for saving data since, like, forever. This system essentially acts like a dictionary using key-value pairs to store and access data (see last week's post for a quick primer on dictionaries). In order to allow multiple save slots to be accessed individually from a single save file, I simply added a prefix to all dictionary keys to denote the current save slot. For example, what used to be saved simply under "coins" is now saved under "slot1coins" or, say, "slot2coins" and so forth.
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| Are you sure? |
Work on this feature was pretty evenly split between implementing the support for the different save slots and actually building the working interface for managing them. In the above GIF, you can see an example of the confirmation dialogue which is called up when pressing the button to delete a Save Slot... Complete with properly localized text, of course!
This change, obviously, required some reorganization of the game flow from screen to screen, as the old flow took payers directly from the title screen to the level select screen. The current flow now takes players from the title screen to the save slot selection screen before loading the level select menu.
Newton's Apple
Some other changes made this week have included playing around with the project's physics settings. I've lowered the precision on physics calculations while bringing the timing more in line with the game's 60 frames per second target (on supported hardware). So far, this seems to have resulted in a smoother and more consistent experience. The only perceptible problem brought on by these changes was an issue with the behaviour of the Double Jump's glide move no longer arcing down properly. It was easy enough to fix, however, and is now behaving properly again.
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| Keep... It... Up! |
Let's Make a Deal
So, a while back I decided to hold off on mentioning ongoing discussions with publishers since there was nothing I could really share with you guys anyway. Well, today, I'm happy to announce that I've crossed an important threshold! I'm finally ready to trade signatures with an awesome publishing partner. Unfortunately, I'm neither ready nor able to share more about this at the moment. I just wanted to let all of you know that things are definitely moving forward on this front and that I should, hopefully, soon be able to announce who will be helping bring Suzy Cube to the world at large!
And on that note, I wish you all a great weekend and hope to see you here next week for more news.
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