Bootdisk Revolution

Yeeeaaaahh!! Bleed 2’s Endless Mode is now out on PC, Xbox One and PS4!

The perfect little cherry on top of the new Endless Mode is that (on PC, at least) it comes with daily challenges, too! This feature was put in very last-minute, in literally the final week of development. I had no idea what I was doing at first, but thanks to help from Vertex Pop’s Mobeen Fikree, this pastebin snippet and my dad, I managed to get it done! I thought I’d share the process of making daily runs, since I couldn’t find many resources online for this kind of thing.

Warning, this is a very wordy post. I use images to try and break it up but if you really wanna know how to do this… you gotta read!

Okay, so, first challenge: how do you give everyone the same run each day? This one’s actually really easy: there’s a thing called Unix Time, which tells you the number of seconds that have passed since Jan 1, 1970 in UTC. Given that information, you can find the number of days passed since Jan 1, 1970 UTC, and that gives you a number that goes up by one, every day, at the same time, for everyone! Use that number as the seed for the level-generating RNG and bam! Good to go!

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First off, awesome news: Bleed 2 is headed to PS4 and Xbox One on Feb 6 and 9, respectively!! Finally!! That’s basically the one-year anniversary of Bleed 2 on Steam, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the milestone. As always, the port and publishing are all thanks to Digerati Distribution and Nephilim Game Studios.

Naturally, the console version comes packaged with Endless Mode — coming out on console is what pushed me to take another shot at the mode in the first place, and I’m glad it came together. Speaking of coming together, here’s one more blog post to detail some of the miscellaneous work that was needed to make Endless Mode a reality!

For instance, the boss that concludes every level (there has to be a boss fight, right?) Thanks to my work on Challenge Mode it was pretty easy to set up bosses, with 16 of the Story Mode bosses available to be fought! The selection is slightly limited at the start of a run, but quickly expands the farther in you get. There might even be a chance of a boss rush happening, if you’re really unlucky…!

As a side note, when things like bosses, chunks and environments get randomly chosen they’re all recorded in a list, to make sure you don’t see repeats too close to each other (and in the case of bosses, you should never see the same boss twice in a run.)

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It’s finally time to talk about the baddies and hazards you’ll face in Bleed 2’s Endless Mode — yay! First, some broad information:

An Endless Mode “run” is five levels long. To differentiate those levels and lend a sense of progression to each run, every level is tagged as a different “environment”, changing the chunks that are used to create it as well as the baddies and environmental hazards that appear!

So for example, in a level that’s a “lava” environment: when the level gets pieced together from random chunks, special lava-only “hazard” chunks are sprinkled into the mix — those chunks are built around lava-themed hazards like falling rocks and lava-spewing geysers. Throughout the level you’ll also see lava-themed baddies, like the flying and burrowing bugs from Bleed 1. It helps give levels their own identity!

Hazard chunks are used only by specific environments, but all the other chunk types are shared across all environments — so every chunk needs to spawn the right baddies for whatever environment they belong to. To accomplish this, chunks have generic enemy spawn types and spawn positions. So instead of saying “always make two flying bugs here”, it’s more like “make two flying enemies here,” and then it’s up to each environment to fill in the blanks with their unique baddies.

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Now we’re on to the REALLY exciting stuff — the camera!! Seriously, I don’t know how this will read from a player’s perspective, but from the development side this was a tricky puzzle, and REALLY important to solve. The camera in Bleed 2’s Story Mode is meticulously controlled — maximizing screen space, showing the way forward and making gameplay as smooth as possible (I showed a little bit of that in this post.) Having a similar-quality camera in Endless Mode was an absolute must.

In abstract, the way I did it sounds kinda basic. I created “camera zones” — invisible volumes that, when entered, give instructions to the game’s camera on how to behave. Every level chunk is absolutely plastered with camera zones — if I did my job right, they cover 100% of every chunk (and if I messed up on this I guarantee you’ll be able to tell.) Here’s a shot with camera zones drawn in translucent blue:

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Hello again! Last week we talked about the basics of Bleed 2’s Endless Mode, and this week I’d like to start going a little deeper. One of the first challenges I ran into was how to make the randomly-generated levels feel varied and interesting, and I tried to solve this in a variety of ways.

First, the design of the chunks (the building blocks that make up a level.) Maybe this is obvious, but I tried to make sure the gameplay within every chunk was unique in some way, mainly through the architecture and hazard usage/placement. Some chunks are narrow and cramped while others are open with a missing a roof or wall, some use lots of ramps while others feature pass-through platforms… you get the idea.

Same thing with the kinds of enemies and how they’re used (one chunk might mainly use grenade enemies while another focuses on turrets… etc etc etc. This is really important too, but I’ll be getting into enemies a bit later.) Not all of the differences are so extreme, but every chunk provides something the others don’t, and I think the moment to moment contrast helps keep things fresh.

(By the way: in one of the examples above, you can see pits that extend way down to a floor. In the actual game, the floor is off-screen, so they look like bottomless pits. You get damaged and teleported back to safe ground before hitting the floor, so nobody will know the difference! This is to stop you from falling through to a different chunk, or coming back up through a chunk with an open ceiling.)

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