Suzy Cube Update: Friday January 15, 2016

#suzycube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity

I've been struggling with making progress on Level 1-4 this week. That's the price of jumping into building a level without getting a better sense of what I'm trying to achieve in the first place.

Oh, so doom and gloom, I know, I know! I've got a much better idea of what it is I want to do with the level now and I've got some good napkin sketches to help me flesh it out too. I bet you're all curious what mysteries await inside that cave, eh!?

This did get me thinking about the process of designing levels a little more, though. I'm going through my notes for the rest of the game now, making sure I really do have a good idea of what I want to do with each level. I've noticed a few times now that the more vague my notes are before starting work on a level, the more I struggle trying to find the essence of the level while building it. Which makes perfect sense. It's just like starting a painting without a sketch, really.

You're Pushing my Buttons

One of the more practical things I worked on this week are simple button switches.

Going up?

Above, you can see a simple use of a switch to activate a moving platform, but they are, actually, totally generic and can be used to activate any number of things. I should be able to put them to good use in Level 1-4 and beyond.

Just Use a Little Bug Spray

And what do we have here?

Bug free bug!

That's right! The bees are now bug free!! I wish I had some heroic story of how I tracked down the problem and expertly solved it, but nope! I tore the prefab apart to try to find the cause and couldn't so I rebuilt the enemy component by component looking for what would break it, and it didn't break! So I just overwrote the old buggy bee with the new un-buggy bee. There you go, bug fixed, no clue how!

So, a bit of a slow week, but good foundational work in order to get Level 1-4 in the bag.

See you next week!