Suzy Cube Update: January 19, 2018

#SuzyCube #gamedev #indiedev #madewithunity @NoodlecakeGames 

More level design, bug fixing and artwork experiments filled my docket this week.

A Little Something Special

On the level design front, I started building Level S-6 this week. It's still early goings for this map so I don't have much to share about it yet. I hope to wrap it up my Wednesday or Thursday of next week.

All Arted Up

Following a very productive call with Noodlecake during which we outlined plans for the UI overhaul they will be undertaking, we also got on the subject of the game's story presentation, such as it is.

Suzy Cube is not going to be winning any Pulitzer prizes but we still want to present a bit of context and motivation for Suzy to set off on a Skull stomping adventure. To present this tale, I had always planned to use wordless comic strip style panels. What I never worked out, though, is what these would actually look like. Discussing this with the graphic designer from Noodlecake, we decided to each go our separate ways and come back with some mockups. We figured that, it would be best to get the ball rolling on these by exploring different possible looks until we find something we like which will still be cheap or easy enough to produce not to blow our budget.

I proposed a couple.

Lazy afternoon

This first one is a vector trace-over of models from the game. A final version of this would probably include a bit more details to fill in the blank spaces, but this still gives a pretty good idea of the results we could get out of this approach. Since the illustration is built on top of actual game models, the look matches that of gameplay nicely.

Gadzooks!

On the other hand, we have this cut-out style take on a similar scene. The completely different approach results in an illustration which stands out against the look of the actual game while, perhaps, better capturing the cute and silly personality of the product. I'm not going to lie, this is the one which ended up better resonating with us.

I'll probably continue to play around with these and other takes and also look forward to seeing what Noodlecake produce on their end!

A Bug or Two

And, finally, between this other stuff, I've just been doing the usual cleanup, fixes and tweaks, all in the hopes of delivering the best little Suzy I can to all of you!

And that's our update this week. Still no talk of dates, though from the call, we are all still confident of being on track to release within our tentative (super secret) release window. Next week, I hope to show you more look-dev mockups for the story panels and update you all on more level design progress! See you then.