Suzy Cube Update: March 30, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

Alright! First week back from GDC and I decided not to mess with things too much and, instead, add a little more life to the game.

Critter Craze

For years now, I've been debating whether or not to add little decorative animals to the game. The idea was for them to just kinda sit around and get frightened off if Suzy got too close. Think of the little birds you come across in many 3D Mario games. Well, I finally decided to take the plunge this week. With things really kicking into high gear next week following our launch window announcement at GDC, it was now or never.

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The behaviour on these little guys is extremely simple. They just run an idle animation until Suzy steps into their trigger volume causing them to play their "fly away" animation.

Happy Easter!

These bunnies work on the same principle, though they will pop back out of their hole is Suzy gives them some space.

Home on the range

I also made a hamster variant for use on desert themed levels!

Noodling and Doodling

The snow and sand mounds used by the bunny and hamster use baked lighting to better blend into the environment. Because of this, I had to re-bake lighting on all levels to which they were added. Baking lighting can take a while which gave me time to doodle.

The many faces of Suzy

Though Noodlecake will be handling the actual production of the story interstitials, I thought I would sketch some ideas. Though the game will have an animated intro and ending, between worlds, we will be using adorable stills of Suzy being adorable.

Save Me!

Finally, before I sign off, I want to talk about what I'm going to be diving into as soon as this post goes out: Checkpoints! I hear you all screaming, "But, Louis, hasn't the game had checkpoints since forever!?" to which I say, yep... So what's the deal?

I have a friend who's been coming over and playing through the game recently and I notice little issues to fix here and there as I watch him play. For the most part, these are usually trivial fixes. Two days ago, however, he got really frustrated by the lack of checkpoints in one of the game's later levels in which the player must navigate a couple of maze-like sections in order to hit a switch at the end of each one. Hitting both switches opens a central door which leads to the goal. A neat concept with one little problem. Checkpoints, as I've implemented them, do not save the state of anything in the level other than Suzy's position and which secret stars she's found. Some of you may have already figured out the issue. If hitting a checkpoint won't save the state of the two switches, and hitting the switches is fundamental to progressing through this level... Then, the level is, fundamentally, ill suited for the use of checkpoints! That's right... This level has zero checkpoints in it. 

Needless to say, my friend got really frustrated trying to beat the level. Enough, in fact, that he didn't. I've since been puzzling out how to reliably save the state of the switches without overhauling the checkpoint and save systems. With a "some time in spring" release window, it's no time for drastic rewrites! I do want to solve this issue, though, since it will be useful in another of the game's levels and the alternative would be to rip these levels out altogether, which I really don't want to do!

And on that, I'm off to fix my checkpoint shortcomings! See you all next week!