Suzy Cube Update: April 6, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

Sorry for the late update, everyone! Hope you all had a good holiday weekend and a funny April Fool's day!

Check this Out!

Let's get thing started with something I actually put together late last week. So, in my last post, I mentioned a shortcoming with the checkpoint system in Suzy Cube which made it impossible to use checkpoints in levels which required a more elaborate saving scheme. Well, good news! After giving the issue some thorough thinking and slaving away at it for a day, I came up with a serviceable solution. Before I get into it, I would not do it this way if the game had more than two levels which required saving the states of switches and doors, but given the limited necessity of this more involved save system, I feel the band-aid solution I came up with works just fine.

So, rather than go mucking about in the, already working, save system, I opted to create a separate, parallel system which could work in tandem with the existing checkpoint system only on the levels which require it. 

Save Me!

Essentially, I created a simple object which can receive trigger messages and save a boolean state for each to file. If, on level load, data matching the current level is found, a trigger message is sent to each object in the list based on the boolean value found in the save data. By piggybacking on the game's existing trigger message system, it's more or less possible to save and trigger anything on load. This seems pretty simple, and it is fundamentally, but the actual implementation wasn't as simple as re-triggering switches in the level. I had to do some re-jiggering of my trigger setups so reloading from a checkpoint wouldn't, necessarily, re-trigger camera moves and stuff. But, after putting in the work, I'm happy to announce that the offending levels now have properly placed, and working, checkpoints!

It's in the Details

So, if working out my checkpoints conundrum was mostly done last week and over the weekend, what have I been up to this week? The exact kind of work I wouldn't be able to do if I hadn't partnered with the right folks to help bring Suzy to market.

While the Noodlecake side of things have been hard at work on the UI redesign, I've had the opportunity to do several "Power-Up" passes over the game's levels. So far, this has meant playing through all the levels using the Double Jump and Ground Pound power-ups to see if I can use them to get out of bounds or stuck in spots and then to add more opportunities to use the power-ups throughout the game.

This thing rocks!

Amongst other things, this has means plopping a few more ground-poundable rock blocks in levels which, otherwise, wouldn't benefit a ton from the power-up.

Now, how would one get up there?

And for the Double Jump, it's meant placing things like coins above obstacles, just out of reach or, like in the case of the screenshot above, adding rewards to spots which might seem inaccessible at first glance.

The Invincibility and Magnet power-ups are, currently, kind of underused, so my next goal is to find more ways of incorporating them too. Especially by hiding them in tricky spots as rewards for exploration.

This kind of detail oriented design work is exactly the kind of stuff which, likely, wouldn't have happened if Noodlecake weren't there to pick up the slack in more technical and overtly noticeable areas.

Odds and Ends

A couple more things I did this week include adding coins to the critters I made last week and fixing the deflection behaviour on Bone Thrower projectiles.

Though the critters are cute, I thought it would be fun if there was a little, random, incentive for interacting with them. So now, there's a low probability of earning a coin when you scare them off!

Nope!

I don't know how I missed this for so long, but the deflecting the Bone Thrower's projectiles using the Ground Pound never actually worked! Well, a bit of editing to the deflection code and, bam! Deflecting bones!

Well, there ya have it! A good week if I do say so myself! Not much flashy to show, but that's ok, all good work which will really add to the overall quality of the game. In the end, that's what really matters, no? Next week, I'll be continuing on the aforementioned power-ups pass and I hope to, finally, show you some progress on the UI work being done! See you all then!