Bootdisk Revolution

I worked on achievements this week! You can’t trigger them in-game yet, but other than that all the artwork and design is done.

I gotta be real with you here: I generally find achievements to be boring and patronizing. I don’t think simply playing a game is worthy of praise (unless you’re playing Ikaruga, then good for you!!) But seriously. “Started The Game?” “Beat Level One?” “Died 100 Times?” Those aren’t worthy of note (the last one is almost a cruel mocking of the player!)

But, instead of endlessly ranting about the big bad cheevos, I’ll explain how my distaste for them informed my own achievement design!

I should say that I’m all for achievements that celebrate *actual* achievements on the part of the player. If you beat the whole game, then of course I want to acknowledge that! Above are the achievement icons for beating Story Mode in the original Bleed, and Bleed 2 — both ranked by bronze/silver/gold, but now you have a better indication of what difficulty they correspond to.

I’m also trying to take the psychology of less-skilled players into account. The achievement for Easy isn’t marked by a difficulty, and is simply called “Story Mode Clear”. On the opposite end of the spectrum, “Story Mode Clear: Very Hard” comes with a fancy purple background and a big VH to distinguish it as being more worthy of note (ooooooh, aaaaaah.)

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This week I created another animated scene. I even streamed a day of the work! The video isn’t exactly action-packed, but if you want to watch, it’ll be on my fancy new Twitch page for a week or two. (I concluded it by playing through the first level, so that might interest you!)

I call this scene an ‘intermission’ because it plays between levels to give you a little break. The world is under attack, and Wryn is the greatest (and only) hero they have, so the world is watching and reporting on her every move! I think it’s really cute, but it’ll also help people who care about story, clearing up questions players may have and filling in the blanks for anyone who didn’t play the original Bleed. Of course, if you don’t care about the story you can skip this with the press of a button (or just play Arcade Mode.)

The process of making of these animations was the same I used for the main menu, so I won’t cover that ground again too much.

There’s the process above, and the final sprite sheet below! There are variations for his eyes and mouth, so he can blink and talk.

What is different is the footage on the news screen! That’s not a pre-captured screenshot, it’s taken from a playthrough I had just finished!

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Can’t stop the menu train, baby! While they’re not as adorable as the main menu, I created the level select and loadout menus this week!

 

Level Select

Here’s the new level select! I tried to make it reminiscent of a PVR menu — Bleed 2 has a minor ‘television’ motif going on. It’s less cute than the original Bleed’s level select, but it gets more information across with the level previews and high scores and stuff. Here’s a gif of it in action!

There’s a bit more going on than you might notice (or be able to tell from the compressed gif.) The level preview has a subtle static effect on top, and the preview images become slightly dark and fade in when you switch between levels — when left at full brightness, it’s really jarring to watch.

The level previews were pretty easy to make — I shrunk down the background assets for most levels and then touched them up to not look so nasty.

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I got a lot of awesome work done this week! 95% of the audio is now in the game (the only remaining audio is the last boss, and a handfull of environmental sounds.) I did a first, tiny bit of playtesting. Aaaaaaand I got the main menu done!

Thanks to the menu system I set up a while ago, the hard part was making Wryn’s animations. I wanted to repeat what I did with the original Bleed and use the main menu to show off Wryn’s personality. It also ties directly into the game, since the first level opens with her in front of her couch, playing video games.

So! Here’s what went into making the animations for the main menu.

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This week was more random work! I did more audio, finished my Steam store page, and prepared all the levels for co-op play. Woohoo! Yesterday, I decided to poke around everyone’s favourite topic — please join me for one more ride on the magical replay unicorn!

In case you’re not interested, I’m peppering this long article with assets from this week.

Random Number Generation

Things were looking great the last time I worked on replays, but they were woefully un-tested. All that I knew for sure was that I could record a replay and play it back on the same computer. A better test would be to try playing it back on other computers — so I did that, and it worked great… until I tried playing it back on a Mac.

For a quick, simple refresher: a random number generator (RNG) is like a math formula. You give the formula a starting number, called a ‘seed’, and it spits out an endless series of random numbers for you! Since the numbers are being created by a math formula, though, starting with the same seed always produces the same series of numbers. So the RNG makes Bleed *seem* random, but if you were to play the exact same way, using the same seed, the random numbers would always be the same, making the game always play the same, making things like replays possible.

So. The PC version of Bleed 2 is made using XNA, which comes with an RNG built-in. My dirty Mac port was made using MonoGame, which has its own, different RNG. The RNGs are using different formulas, meaning the game behaves differently on each computer, breaking the replays.

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This week was a grab-bag of work. Among other things, I worked on audio, gave a few environments some much-needed touch-ups, worked on my Steam store page, and put together a press kit. In general, it’s all being done with the goal of “marketing”, so let’s talk about that — and maybe our feelings, too.

First, what do those tasks have to do with marketing? Well, for example, I need a trailer to officially announce the game, and I can’t (wont?) make a trailer without properly implemented audio (I’m sure my audio collaborators wouldn’t appreciate this, either.) I’ll need screenshots, too, and certain images could be dangerous to release — it’s cute having rip-pff Mario and Metroid posters in Wryn’s room, but they aren’t my characters to use and I don’t want to risk any legal trouble. Luckily, some indie dev pals have been kind enough to let me shout out their games in the posters instead (Shutshimi and They Bleed Pixels, for anyone wondering!)

I also plan to open a “coming soon” Steam store page for Bleed 2 when I announce it. Along with the trailer and screenshots, I need to prepare other assets for the store page, like trading cards. I’ve put together some simple cards using images from the “box art” — I might add more, non-box-art cards in the future, but honestly my time could probably be better spent.

Finally, in case you aren’t familiar with press kits: all these materials (along with a bunch of marketing copy about myself and my game) get combined into a ‘press kit’ — literally, like a “Write Your Own News Story About Bleed 2 Kit”. It has the trailer, screenshots, text, links, etc etc etc, everything a journalist might want or need to cover the game. Then you start emailing and hope someone’s interested! Here’s an example of a presskit (made with the great tool, presskit(), by its creators.)

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This week I spent a lot of time preparing marketing stuff. Not my favourite activity, but admittedly very important. I mention it in case you’re wondering what I was up to, because I’m blogging about something totally different: the re-done scoring system!

Most obviously, there are ranks associated with the multipliers now! It gives you a better sense of how you performed, whereas before they were just arbitrary multipliers with no indication if you could have done better. Also obviously, the three ranks are summed up into a final ranking, which I find more satisfying.

In the original Bleed the scoring system was done a bit thoughtlessly. I’ve gone through it and removed some of the categories:

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I’m getting over being sick right now, so hopefully this post is coherent. I took a break from audio this week and tackled balancing the levels for the various difficulty settings!

In case that doesn’t mean anything to you: there are lots of changes to the game depending on the difficulty level, some bigger than others. Enemies spawn in trickier locations and get new behaviours, set-pieces might be longer or more complex, etc etc etc. Easier difficulties establish fundamentals that get expanded on as the game gets harder.

The whole purple/yellow reflectability thing is taken into account, too. On Easy, there are absolutely no yellow enemies (though bosses occasionally use some yellow attacks.) On other difficulties, yellow enemies appear more commonly as the game progresses. On Very Hard, there is a near-even mix of purple and yellow through the entire game (but not exactly 50/50, I think it’s more fun to favour the player a little.)

So, for some Easy vs Very Hard examples!

More baddies, more bullets, more yellow! The bullets move a bit slower on Easy, too.

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Most of this week was audio work… most of this month was audio work, actually! Turns out it’s a lot of effort if you want to do it well (but totally worth it.) I’m saving a big audio blog for another day so in the meantime, here are some improvements I’ve made to Wryn’s sprites between all the audio!

In a previous blog post, I showed that Wryn is divided into pieces, allowing all her body parts to animate independently. Well, I’ve taken it a bit farther.

Now she’s got three head variations, as well as mouth sprites?? Wha…??

First up, the mouths — Wryn actually has a voice in this game! Don’t worry, no spoken dialogue (I don’t think it fits, at least) but she does have vocalizations. I find it lame when game characters speak without moving their mouths, so I added this detail to make it more cohesive and “real”.

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It’s been a while since I showed a boss, so let’s do that! Here’s a new Rival machine: the Semi Core!

You can actually see him in there! I try to show him inside the Cores whenever I can in Bleed 2. It makes it clear he’s piloting them, plus he gets some more character! I’m happy with how his maniacal laugh turned out.

I’m showing some of his attacks, but since they’re all displayed in large gifs they’re after the break!

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