Upcoming Platform Game: Suzy Cube

Suzy Cube Update: December 15, 2017

Darn holiday season! I've got a party to get to around noon, so I can't ramble on too long...

So first, I wrapped up design and sparse decoration on Level S-10.



That's right! I didn't even blur the screenshot this time. You're welcome!
The gimmick is inspired by a challenge in Super Mario Odyssey, though a little more forgiving. Was a fun one to work on and I hope you'll all enjoy it!



I also spent quite a while on trying to fix a framerate dip which occurs in this bit of Level S-5. I was poking around the level making some nips and tucks and I noticed I was dropping from solid 30fps on iPod Touch 5 to 25-ish. Not good! Both the shockwave bumpers and collapsing platforms seemed to contribute and my attempts so far to optimize both of them have not yielded the desired results. I shall continue to poke and prod!

Otherwise, we've moved the project over to the latest Unity 2017.2 patch. And with that done, Noodlecake have gone ahead and merged their social and analytics backends into the project mainline. With that stuff now available to me, I've gone ahead and written in the hooks to award achievements, update leaderboards and log some basic analytics events. Much on-device testing will be needed to ensure it's all working, of course.

And that's pretty much been my week! I hope to see you all back here next week for what might be my last update before I take a little break for the holidays. Ciao until then.

 

Suzy Cube Update: December 22, 2017

Hey, folks! copying my blog post again this week, sorry to those of you who normally check both updates. I've got to run out and do some last minute grocery shopping!



Oh, system updates... Why must you always be so aggravating!? I've been downloading updates all week, and let me tell you, on this internet connection, it's not great!

Up to Date Update
The fun all started when I realized I couldn't build for iOS locally anymore. It was making it really hard for me to keep testing optimizations. With some help from Noodlecake, it was discovered that I needed to update my copy of Xcode. One long download later, problem still persisted... OH! It's because I hadn't actually installed the latest version of Xcode, just the latest supported by Mac OS Mavericks, which I was running... So I had to update to Sierra, not High Sierra, mind you, as I was warned it would bork a bunch of stuff if I did. So, then, after another leeeengthy download, I updated to Mac OS Sierra aaand... Well, you'll have to stay tuned for the conclusion, because as of writing this, I'm still staring at a progress bar for Xcode 9, which we suspect will fix my initial issue of no longer being able to build to iOS. Maybe I should go back to designing board games?

Meanwhile
So, for the most part, I've been able to continue working on some stuff without influencing the downloads too much, though the installs do tend to require that I step away to allow them to complete properly.

So, what have I been up to when not staring at progress bars? Mostly small level improvements and decoration.

I've focused mostly on switching out a few pickups here and there and adding more coins, mostly in out of the way places as rewards for those who stray off the beaten path. In the screenshot up top, I changed the location of a teleporter which leads to a bonus room where a star can be found. It used to be, more or less, where the snowman is now. There was no way anyone would miss it, nothing secret or rewarding about it. Now, players need to realize that they can jump up to the ledge and make their way to the teleporter to access the bonus room. Much more engaging!



Level 4-3 got a bunch of decoration love in the form of stone block patterns, warm torchlight and optimized lightmap packing.



I didn't bother going overboard with the details as Suzy is getting chased down these towers by huge spiked crushers the whole time and players tend to rush through the level. Just enough decoration to give the space a sense of construction and theme.

Odds and Ends
Finally, I also received updated mockups for the level select screen from Noodlecake. I'm really liking how it's coming together! Oh, and I spent some time on the paper design for the final Special World stage. I don't want to make it super long or impossibly hard or anything, but I am hoping to pack in a little nod to, essentially, every other part of the game. I hope I'm not biting off more than I can chew!

And on that, merry Christmas! I don't foresee skipping next Friday's update, but, in case I do, happy New Year for good measure!

 

Suzy Cube Update: December 29, 2017

With the holidays and all, I've only had one full day of work this week, so not much to update folks on.

What I ended up spending my time on, mostly, was trying different approaches to optimizing the collapsing platforms which had been proving problematic in large quantities on base hardware (Gen5 iPod Touch).

In my testing, I discovered that turning off shadow receiving on the platforms produced quite a performance boost, but Suzy's drop shadow is so integral to judging jumps, that turning off this setting simply wasn't an option.



What I settled on was aggressively reducing the platform's vertex count from 130 to 30. This, however, did mean sacrificing visual quality and letting the texture express the shape rather than using individually modeled stonework. But, that's the price we have to pay for performance sometimes.

Anywho, like I said, not much to update on this week. So, on that note, I'll get back to prepping for the season's last party.

Happy New Year everyone and see you in 2018!

 

Suzy Cube Update: January 5, 2017

First update of 2018! Here we go!

I'm working on a level and I ripped out most of the work I did last week and early this week... YAY! Update done!

Oh, you want more details, do you!? FINE!

The level I'm working on is Level S-11 or the very final Special World stage. It's the one players will unlock by finding all the Stars in the game.



Much like the Mario games and many others in the genre seem to do with these "bonus level" style stages, I'm taking a "nostalgia trip" approach to the level's design. I'm attempting to call back to a number of the challenges and enemies faced throughout the game. Sort of like: "Hey, remember all that fun you had with Suzy?"



That's not to say the level doesn't include a number of unique twits on old challenges, of course.

So, what was I moaning on about at the top of the post?



For a while now, I've been hoping to award coins when damaging bosses. I wanted to do this by splashing coins out when bopping the poor serpents. Unfortunately, due to some very early engineering decisions (I use the term very loosely), this proved to be quite a pain in the ass. Once I finally got it working, it turned out I had introduced a crash bug! Long story short, I ended up tearing out all the work I had done rather than continuing to try to fix the bug (which may actually be a Unity issue). I'm not saying I won't ship with some version of the feature, I'm just saying that, for the time being, it's just not worth the time and effort when compared to MUCH more pressing tasks.

And that just about does it! I'm gonna dive back into level design and see about finish off the layout for Level S-11 before the weekend.

Good to be back! I hope you'll all check in on Suzy's progress next week. Ciao and Happy New Year!

 

Suzy Cube Update: January 13, 2017

Hey, folks! Sorry about the late update. I had to help out with some embassy related tasks on Friday. I was able to pre-write my blog update, but not my forum post.

Ok, with that out of the way!
Level S-11, the game's finalist final end level of the end is done!



It's kinda hard, but not, like, punishingly crushing like many of Nintendo's big-secret-final-levels. I wanted the level to act like a fun recap of your adventures without, necessarily, making you want to crack your phone from gripping it too tightly. With S-11 all good and done, I moved on to some more decoration work.



Prettying up Level 4-4 is going quite well.



I'm expecting to wrap up decoration on the level on Monday.

Oh, and here's a tidbit which was decided on Friday so didn't make it into my blog update.
I'm going to have a call with Noodlecake on Tuesday where I hope to discuss a number of topics related to wrapping up development and prepping for launch. Before folks get too excited, I want to temper expectations by pointing out that, though work on support for things like social features has progressed nicely, we are still at the mockup phase with the UI redesign. After this meeting, I hope to have a better sense of when we can expect implementation on those changes to begin. As we work out how long we expect this stuff to take, we can start firming up the release window!

On that, have a great end-of-weekend, and I look forward to seeing you all next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: January 19, 2018

Hey yo!
So, I had a very productive call with Noodlecake this week. We mostly discussed the upcoming UI overhaul but also touched on a number of other topics here and there, including story presentation! More on that in a bit.

Fist, I just wanted to give a quick update on progress. It's pretty much the same old same old. Fixed some bugs, made some tweaks and improvements to levels and started work on Level S-6.



This was started pretty late in the week, so It's early goings, but I hope to wrap it up by mid next week.

So, what's this about story!!? Is Suzy Cube going to be winning writing awards and redefining our very notion of interactive narrative!? No, of course not. I'm basically aping a Mario game launched on a handheld system after all.

The story, such as it is, will simply serve as a little context and some diversion between worlds. To present this thin narrative, I always intended to use comic strip style wordless panels but never really knew what these would look like. During our call, Noodlecake's graphic designer and I decide to each come up with some mockups of what we imagine these could look like, trying to keep in mind the tone of the game and our time and budget constraints. Here's what I've got so far.



This first one is a vector trace-over of 3D assets from the game. I imagine an actual final version of this would probably include some more details to spruce up the empty areas, but this image still gives a pretty good idea of the results we could expect from this approach. Nice thing with this method is that, since it's built on top of actual game assets, it matches the look of the game nicely.



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.

Well, what do you guys think? Let be know and I'll see you all next week, maybe with more mockups to share!

 

Suzy Cube Update: January 26, 2018

I promised you a completed level this week and so I give you three!!! (one is almost finished... so sue me)
As these are Special World levels, I'm gonna keep things vague, but I still wanted to share progress with all of you.



First, Level S-2. This one came together fairly quickly as it's a remix of an earlier stage. Tighter time limit and shuffled enemies and pickups distinguish this one from the original while also dialing up the challenge. I also went ahead and created a dusky tinted version of the original skybox to change up a feel a bit.



Next is Level S-6, which I mentioned last week. It's a great opportunity to get reacquainted with some old friends.



Finally, Level S-8, a lava themed level that's about 95% done. I still have to give it a polish and pickups pass.

And, with that, we've got all levels in the Special World accounted for!! Which means that, from now on, my main responsibilities will be bug fixes, level decoration and supporting the Noodlecake guys on their end of things.

Speaking of Noodlecake...
I mentioned we were working on coming up with a look for the story interstitials. Well, here's what I got back from them last week.



I'm a big fan of the brightness and simplicity of this look. It's evocative of the game without imitating the look of the in-game graphics. Also, it's really neat to see another artist's interpretation of the game's art style and characters! I look forward to seeing more!

On that, I bid you all happy weekend and good gaming and I'll see you all next week.

 

Suzy Cube Update: February 2, 2018

As I said last week, this week was almost entirely dedicated to level decoration.

First off, I finished off Level S-8, officially completing work on the Special World stages.



I spent more time than I expected on these stages, yes, but I think they are all the better for it in the end.

I then tacked the World 4 boss stage, Level 4-B.




All about those forest hues and mushrooms and shrubs! I also ended up tweaking the lighting a bit to make it a tad warmer and more saturated.



Level 5-1 also got some work done. This one was pretty quick as I had, inexplicably, started decorating the level while designing it. I kept things pretty understated for this level to make sure lower end devices don't choke on all the moving platforms.



And finally, I just barely started work decorating Level 5-2. I hope to make more progress on it by the end of the day.

Next week, I will probably be changing gears to work on control tutorials. There's not much to teach, but I still see folks dragging their finger on the touch screen like they're moving a cursor on a laptop touchpad. I'm going to have to clearly communicate how to treat the screen like a joystick.

And on that, have a good weekend and check back in next week to see how I did!

 

Suzy Cube Update: February 9, 2018

Gonna go very TLDR this week and invite you all to check out my full blog post for more details:
http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2018/02/suzy-cube-update-february-9-2018.html

Riiiito!

So, I spent the whole week working on functional, animated tutorial scenes. Here's a still from the gamepad version:



Gamepad controls for Suzy Cube are pretty straight forward, the real big deal was ensuring folks knew how to play the game on touchscreens. Lots of less game-savvy folks will hold the device in one hand and make little swipe motions with their other index, like when playing a match 3 game. It was important to me to show both how to best hold the device and the idea of using the left side of the screen like a joystick.



Here's a zoomed in view of what that looks like. I look forward to seeing how this goes down with new players!

So, this doesn't seem like that much work, right? Thing is, I wanted to come up with an easy to tweak approach to creating these scenes which would make accommodating multiple control schemes easy too. ("WHAAAT!?")

What I ended up doing was creating a script which sends fake inputs to the actual playable Suzy by way of an animation sequence.



This same script then simultaneously sends these input changes as parameters to the animation state machine which drives whatever control scheme graphics are included in the scene.



This way, a single animation sequence controls the Suzy avatar on screen while, simultaneously, driving the tutorial animations to match! This makes it really easy to adjust the actual sequence of actions with no additional work needed and with the right animator controller setup, any new control scheme can easily be represented. ("What does he mean!!?")

Cool? Cool!
That's it for this week. See you all next week when I plan to get back to level decoration!

 

Suzy Cube Update: February 16, 2018

I had a couple days carved out of my week, so not a huge update. What I did get around to was completing decoration work on Level 5-2





I'm also about half way through decorating level 5-3.



This means I'm almost done decorating all of the game's levels! We're going to have plenty of nice polished content to show off at GDC this year!

Speaking of which, I had a really productive call with Noodlecake yesterday to discuss our plans for the conference. We want to make sure we'll be showing folks some cool new stuff like levels which we haven't showcased before as well as some of the forthcoming changes to the game's UI.

That's actually it, really. With Monday off due to Carnaval and spending a big chunk of Wednesday making truffles to surprise my wife on Valentine's Day, it's been a bit of a Suzy light week.

Keep checking in as March rolls in to follow us on our journey to GDC 2018!

 

Suzy Cube Update: February 23, 2018

Hiya, folks! Happy Friday!

So, continuing the decoration work from last week, I'm almost done with Level 5-4!



Once I finish decorating the level and optimize the lightmap, that'll will be it for level decoration!! OGM, this is happening!!



It's been taking me a weirdly long time to decorate this one for whatever reason.

For future projects, I will definitely invest more time into front loading and automating the sort of rote, mindless decoration tasks in order to get levels to a shippable state without so much tedium.

I also worked on our GDC debug menu!



In addition to allowing us quick access to some hand picked levels to show off (blurred out because I haven't decided what these will be yet), this year's menu also gives us a big fat PLAY button to simulate a first time play experience. This will be perfect for handing the game to new players at the conference!

I also added functionality which should, honestly, have been there from day one. We can now enter the name of any scene in the project and hit the load button to load it up! Very handy for debugging, footage capture, etc.

Other that some not-so-notable bug fixes, that's been it for this week. I'm off to finish decorating Level 5-4. Have yourselves a great weekend, and I'll see you all next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: March 2, 2018

Wow! Sorry about this late post, folks. I literally forgot about it until right now! Ok, so what have we got!?

Well, this week was more of a refinement week for me. Lots of time spent in all the game's levels making improvements.



Lots of levels simply got extra coins. Hey, they are fun to collect and help ensure players have plenty of lives for tougher levels.



Without really planning to, I found myself adding a lot of rotating groups of coins. I think I like how they catch the eye and can add a little life to otherwise plain platforms.

I also had a look at all the lightmaps in the game. A number of them needed optimizing, so I rebaked them.



Now all the levels have nice tight lightmaps! I wanna get the most out of my texels, baby!

Oh! And, get this. While running around the game with the Double Jump hat, I discovered that the final challenge in Level 5-1 could be skipped entirely!



I had to widen this gap to the goal in order to prevent players from simply jumping over to it without defeating the Skull Bullies. I found some other spots here and there in other levels where the Double Jump could get Suzy to, kind of, out-of-bounds spots, but for most of them, I just hid some coins there and left it at that. After all, I don't want to discourage exploration and experimentation. This Level 5-1 bypass, though.. ya, that had to go. ^_^

The good folks at Noodlecake put me in contact with the cool beans from One Simple Idea who will be handling the game's trailer for GDC. I'm very excited to see what they come up with!

Which reminds me... Holy crap! It's March! GDC is only a few weeks away!!! AAAH!!

I hope I'll see some of you there, but for now, I'll see you next week!

 

Suzy Cube Update: March 9, 2018

GDC will soon be upon us! So how goes the prep work?



So, as you can see here, I've gone ahead and picked the three levels we'll be showing off on the GDC debug menu. They are a good mix of visuals and gameplay while also being levels that haven't been shown off in video yet. I hope folks get a kick out of them!

Though our new menus won't be ready for GDC, I spent some time this week capturing screenshots of all the game's levels to use as backgrounds in the new Level Select Screen.



Worse comes to worse, I'll be able to show off the great mockups Noodlecake have already produced for the new menus.

On the trailer front, we got to see the first rough cut this week. It's not ready for the public yet, but I'm diggin' it so far. I'm very excited to see the final product and to show it off to all of you!

Finally, I've been continuing to fix bugs and make small improvements across the game. A friend of mine played through the first two worlds on the weekend and I ended the session with a small list of observations which turned into work items for this week. The biggest of which was a pretty sizeable redesign of the start of Level 2-S.



It's one of the game's special stages so I've blurred it out.

Basically, the level is broken up into four little timed puzzles. My buddy really struggled with the first puzzle, needing to reattempt it several times before, finally, progressing past it. Funny thing is, once he beat the first puzzle, he completed the whole level, all three remaining puzzles, in one go! I had to force him to try again the last couple times which tells me the first puzzle was simply much too obtuse. Hopefully my changes have remedied this situation!

Well, there we have it! Only one Friday update left before I'm off to GDC. Things are heating up!... No.. like, seriously, anyone else getting really hot in here!?

 

Suzy Cube Update: March 16, 2018

I am sick and really need to get back to bed. As such, I invite all of you to check out my blog update rather than summarize it here.

http://louardongames.blogspot.com/2018/03/suzycube-gamedev-indiedev-madewithunity.html

For those wondering, I go into some detail about fixing a couple of pretty important bugs, including this one...



Ok, I've got to sleep this off before getting on the plane on Sunday!

BTW. If you are planning on attending GDC, hit me up on Twitter (@LouardOnGames) so we can meet and fist bump and I can let you play the game!

Ok... bye zzz

 

Suzy Cube Update: March 23, 2018

Ok, so GDC was rough this year with the cold and everything, but even though this update is super late, I come with some pretty big news!... But since I'm super lazy, I'll let you all bounce over to my blog to read it!... I'm gonna pop some Nyquil now.

https://louardongames.blogspot.com/2018/03/suzy-cube-update-march-23-2018.html