Suzy Cube Update: April 20, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

Finishing touches were the name of the game this week. As we begin to firm up dates internally, it's time to start locking things down. As such, this week was my last chance to fix niggling issues in levels.

Falling for You

So, "locking down the levels", what does this mean? In short, it means that, after this week, changes will only be made to levels to address bugs found in playtesting. In other words, this was my last chance to make adjustments for adjustment's sake.

Hide and seek

This has included a final pass adding little secrets to find like out-of-the-way coin caches!

Log ride!

And... for really specific reasons, I've spent the bulk of the last couple days trying to rework these log climbing sections in Level 3-4. Timing platforms so they descend but can still be climbed is tricky. Most tricky has been spacing them out such that players don't need to wait a long time for the right part of the sequence to start climbing. This is essentially what prompted me to change what was previously there. The old climbing logs worked, in that it was possible to use them to get up the waterfalls and proceed, but if a player arrived at the wrong time, they could be stuck waiting several seconds for a platform to come by to start climbing. Worse still was that the way the pattern of platforms was set up, it was sometimes possible to start climbing only to get stranded. These new platform patterns work much better! And while I was at it, I also fixed a bug in Unity's CharacterMotor script so Suzy won't teleport along with a moving platform as its position is reset!

Bits and Bobs

And, as usual, I've been making my way through my list of old bugs, polishing stuff up.

Do you hear a buzzing sound?

For example, I changed up the way the buzzing sound of the bee enemies is handled so it sounds more consistent and less grating. 

On the UI front, I really thought I would be showing you guys some stuff this week, but after throwing some mockups back and forth with Noodlecake, I realized I would prefer to allow things to firm up a bit more before I show you what they've been putting together. If my previous experience has taught me anything it is that it's incredibly easy to underestimate the time it takes to make a good UI. However long you've set aside for UI, double it... then quadruple that!

Okey dokey! That'll be it for me this week. From now on, I'm all bug fixes and UI support! See you all next week!