Suzy Cube Update: October 27, 2017

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

Another shorty this week. Small improvements and rewriting a better version of something which worked ok before.

Sorry for the light work week folks. We've had internet issues and we are planning a big Halloween party! That said, here's what I did get up to this week.

Marital Miss

I want to open this one with a story... 

It's late, my wife and I are in Panama, at the airport, waiting for our flight back to Caracas. We've been there for a while and she asks to play Suzy Cube. This does not happen. I have no intention of passing up the opportunity to gather data on a novice player's experience with the game. Things went totally fine until the second level where she had a lot of trouble with the bit pictured above involving three jump-pads. Keep in mind, this part is near the end of the level and she's had little issue with the countless jump-pads before these ones. That first jump from the bottom to the middle was her white whale. I ended up taking the phone from her and trying it myself. For the life of me, I couldn't reproduce the trouble she was having. Honestly, watching her struggle, I didn't really get what she was doing "wrong". 

The lesson here, fellow designers, as always, is that there is no substitute for putting your game in the hands of players, of all skill levels. I ended up adjusting the strength of the jump-pads to help alleviate the issue. I'll have to hand it to her again to see it I was successful.

She also ran into issues with the camera in this area which helped me find a bug in the camera triggers in this bit of the level. Hurray for testing!

Déjà Vu

And the rest of my week was spent working on something I thought would take me an afternoon to finish.

For a long while now, the game has included what I call "Coin Sequences". Usually triggered by jumping through a ring, a series of coins would appear and could grant some reward for their collection. These sequences were often on a timer for added challenge.

They worked fine, but were a pain to setup because they were built from generic triggers all sending messages back and forth to each other. All kind of a mess. This meant that I used them sparingly and would sometimes find an issue with one which I then had to go and manually fix in all the others throughout the game.

The straw that broke the camel's back came in the form of a visual flourish I thought was missing. Though the coins would appear in order in the sequence, one at a time, if some of the coins were off screen, the whole effect lacked directionality. Furthermore, there was often nothing to connect the collection of the coins to the reward once activated, especially if the coins were collected out of order. I wanted to add a trail effect.

Follow the bouncing ball

And here it is! As you can see, the bouncing trail gives a great sense of directionality and motion to the spawning of the coins. When all coins are collected, a final trail is spawned from the location of the final collected coin to the location of the reward, serving to tie the actions together.

When I decided to go ahead and add this trail functionality, I took the opportunity to write a custom script just to handle these types of coin sequences. What seemed, at first, like a quick and easy task turned out to be quite a bit more work than I had anticipated. The issue mostly stemmed from me repeatedly realizing I had forgotten some piece of functionality. After all, the whole point of this new approach was to have it handle any type of coin sequence I needed. Among other things, they had to support using a timer or not, a reward or not, playing a sound which pitches up at each coin collected... Or not, etc.

In the end, I think I spent a couple days on the script and then a day more going through all the game's levels and replacing the old clunky coin sequences by the new slick ones. I will just take solace in the belief that every little improvement helps.

Well, there you have it, my week in a nutshell! I also wrote an email to Noodlecake asking how we should proceed going forward. I feel I've not been managing their end of things very well and I want to make sure I'm involved and giving them all the support they need to move forward. 

On that, I wish you all a great weekend. And if you are platform game fans, which I assume you are, I wish you much Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time! I've heard amazing things about both.