Suzy Cube Update: May 25, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

My apologies! The day just flew right by and I only realized I forgot to write an update about three hour ago! Another packed week, but mostly bug fixes, so let's dive in!

Fumigation

You know what, I'll start with what I'm in the middle of doing right now. Well, right now, and for the past three and a half hours or so!

Noodlecake have been producing nightly iOS builds for testing since last week. Things have been shaping up really well and suddenly, yesterday, I noticed that the frame rate had tanked on Level 3-4 when playing on my iPod Touch. It's always been one of the more demanding levels in the game, sure, but even on my meagre iPod, the frame rate always stayed at a nice playable 30 fps with only the occasional dip into the high twenties. Well, not since yesterday! I've been experiencing hard drops into the low teens and, after hours at it, I still haven't figured out who the culprit is! I think I'm about to shelve things for tonight. 

Hey, the issue appeared spontaneously, maybe it'll fix itself just as mysteriously?

Hey there, little buddy!

Apart from this persisting performance issue, I spent a lot of my time fixing a wide variety of bugs including hamsters and bunnies awarding infinite coins, UI elements not returning to their proper positions after animating and manually having to re-enter data for every level in the game because Unity prefabs are dangerous, I started building this project years ago as a total noob and I never initially intended for anyone else to have to dig through my spaghetti and duct tape!

Act Like a Local

Why, yes! Suzy DOES speak Japanese, actually!

Both myself and the lead developer on the project over at Noodlecake have been dealing with localization issues having received the completed translations earlier this week. The new translations also allowed me to go through the languages I know and pick and choose when to use my own (or friend's) translations VS those returned to us by the localization company. Best of both worlds!

Bed Time Story

The story stuff has continued to progress too. I drew and scanned in a number of rough sketches to use as little easter eggs on the story screens. Speaking of which, I finished arranging all the cork board scenes for all of the non-animated story interstitials, including the one for the Secret World!

Unrelated image... Just wanted to share another screenshot.

More good news! The guy who was heading up the effort to create the animated intro and ending was back at work this week! Suzy's gonna get her animations after all! To help out with this, I took some time between bug squashing and reporting to doodle up a storyboard for the ending animation. I hope folks like the gag we have prepared!

Like most weeks centred around bug fixes, There's not much to show, but believe me when I say we are working hard to wrap things up and deliver a solid product and a darn fun game! See you next week!