Suzy Cube Update: November 10, 2017

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity 

More work on Special World levels this week, along with the usual bug fixes and minor improvements.

A good week spent finishing off work on the two levels I worked on last week as well as getting a good way through re-jiggering an existing level into a new, harder, night time version.

Thrill of the Chase

Relaxing forest vibe...

Ok, fine! You've pulled it out of me. I'll let you all in on the hook for Level S-5, which made it's blurry debut last week.

Let me go, bro!

The Chaser Ghost! I revealed this tenacious menace years ago. It shadows all of Suzy's movements on a delay, forcing you to keep moving lest it catch up!

Wow! So long ago!

It adds a frantic wrinkle to an already challenging level!

Night Time is My Time

So, when you're working on a game all by your lonesome, you've got to consider where you put your energy. In order to deliver the best possible content to the majority of players while also having plenty for fans to do. Part of my strategy for creating compelling and well designed Special World levels is to remix existing levels with new twists and challenges.

Going... Down?

With that, I present to you, Level S-4. Astute testers may be able to deduce which level was used as the scaffolding from its shape.

In order to vary things a bit, I went ahead and created night time versions of the original background and lighting along with the functional changes to the level. Much of the level's original structure remains intact but several platforms have been moved or removed and enemies and hazards have been swapped out or added.

The approach will allow players to enjoy some of the game's best levels in new ways while allowing me to deliver extra content without breaking the bank.

Save Me a Seat, Will Ya?

I also fixed a perplexing bug I noticed late last week. Save data seemed mismatched between the Save Slots screen and the Level Select screen and wiping a Save Slot resulted in residual data hanging around.

All Stars in Slot B... no biggy!

After a bit of digging around, I discovered that what seemed like separate loading bugs on two different screens turned out to be a single dumb bug in the function used by the Save Slot to loop through all the worlds to load and delete data.

If your game has 5 Worlds, numbered 1 to 5, make sure you aren't looping through them from 0 to 4... Duh...

A Shade Brighter

Finally, I've hired someone to have a look at a number of shaders in the game. These shaders were all created in Shader Forge but all do really simple stuff, so I knew they could be optimized if they were re-written by hand.

I happened to see a tweet from someone looking for short term work doing Unity shader stuff so I thought, "Hey! What an opportune coincidence!" We've been going back and forth all week as he tweaks stuff and I send him back revisions. So far so good, though!

And on that, I bid you ciao, bye and see you next week! I hope to finish work on Level S-4 next week, but Noodlecake and I will be collaborating on leaderboard and achievement implementations, so that's gonna take top priority. See you then!