Suzy Cube Update: January 5, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

Happy New Year! What have I got for the first post of the year!? How about a bunch of work on the game's final Special World Level!? Yay!

A Bit of Everything

As I have done so far, I won't be giving away too much pertaining to this level other than the fact it will likely be the last level players will play as it will require all Stars be found in all of the game's regular and Special World stages to unlock it.

This is fine...

I will, shamelessly, admit that I went ahead and aped what a bunch of games have done in the past with these kinds of "for the real fans" levels by including nods to a number of challenges seen throughout the rest of the game, remixed and rearranged into a recap, of sorts. I hope folks will enjoy the callbacks to their adventures with Suzy.

Three Steps Forward, Two Steps Back

Ugh... Who likes throwing out work? I know I don't! That is, unfortunately, exactly what I ended up doing with most of the work I did late last week and early this week.

Oh, you poor bandage-headed serpent!

For a while now, I've been wrestling with trying to add a splash of coins when damaging the boss. This has been a challenge for a number of reasons all relating back to the way I engineered things years ago. By Tuesday afternoon, I thought I had it and I was so psyched to show it off in this update. Unfortunately, though the coin splash was working, it had also introduced a crashing bug, which I spent the next day and a half trying to fix. Unfortunately, the bug may not even be in my code as some digging on the Unity issue tracker revealed I was not alone in experiencing the error and that some folks were experiencing it on code that had worked error-free in other Unity versions. As of this writing, no solutions have been posted.

So, where does that leave me? At this point in the project, Noodlecake and I have agreed to lock down the Unity version we are using. This is a decision every project eventually has to make as engine updates always require tons of reversion testing. So, for the time being, I've reverted my changes and removed the feature. Scoring a hit on a boss, once again, won't award any coins. I'm not saying I won't end up shipping with some alternative to this feature, but for the time being, it's just not worth the time and effort it will likely take to fix this obtuse crash bug.

And so, on that dreary note, I bid you happy weekend and dive back in and hope to finish the level layout for Level S-11 before calling it a day. See you all next week.