Bleed 2 reached an awesome milestone this week — all audio is in the game!! I ran through it once to test everything out, and I can’t stress how much more engaging and alive the game is now!

I remember having a similar moment with the original Bleed — working on the same game for years, and in partial/total silence… I still love it, but after a while I’ve seen it all before a thousand times, and I start to worry that even the most exciting moments have become stale… I start to lose perspective, and worry that what I’m feeling in those moments is how the player will feel when they play it for the first time! But then the audio finally gets in there, suddenly the game is ALIVE and EXCITING and FRESH, and I get this massive adrenaline-rush kick in the pants at seeing it come together! (Hopefully THAT will be more reflective of a player’s first time, haha!)

Anyways, all audio in is fantastic, but it also exposed a ton of problems with how I’m handling the audio (like the timing of cutscenes, or bugs with looping audio, or sound effects being too quiet or too loud, etc.) But, this is what I accounted for and what I’ll spend the next week in crunch-mode fixing, ideally in time for the IGF submission! Even with all those problems and deadlines, it’s really, really exciting for me to be at this point. It’s almost like an actual game now!

Speaking of being an actual game, this week I made that short intro sequence I talked about last post!

I’ve never paid so much attention to the timing of audio and how things fit together! But now that I’ve got this pro-level audio, the attention is definitely deserved. I roughed out my plans for an intro sequence using my ancient copy of Premiere, trying to make it fit to Jukio’s music and mood! Once I was happy with it, I started drawing and animating (and I’ve gone into my process in past posts, so I won’t do so here.)

It’s a real short sequence, about 10-12sec long. I only want to establish two things: one, that Wryn is the world’s new greatest (and only) hero…

…and two, that villains like Valentine exist, and would view a single hero defending the world as a great opportunity to attack.

I don’t know if my wording in the news headline is as clear as it can be, so I’ll try to keep thinking about it… Jukio’s intro lends a sinister quality to it though, so it reads much better when you have the audio there (audio helps so much!!) I think the intro gives much-needed context to the story regardless — now when Valentine shows up, she’s not just some random blue-haired boss lady. She’s the one from the intro! She’s important!

The intro only took me a few days to make, and then I started on refining the audio. But that’s probably what next week’s post will be about (and there’s so much of it left to do…) that I may as well leave it until then! Have a good week!