Bad news. Due to a setback, the trailer won’t be out for a little while. Sincere apologies to anyone who was excited for it, or is frustrated by the delays — I’m right there with you and I’ll make it happen as soon as I can. The only other productive thing to do in the meantime is to hammer away at the remainder of the game, and that’s what’s gonna happen!

 

What I Did This Week

Much of this week was spent preparing submissions for PAX Prime (they’re trying to call it PAX West this year, but I ain’t buyin’ it!!) I’m trying to get Bleed 2 into either the PAX 10, or the Indie Megabooth, so I can exhibit there and have a grand old time. Wish me luck!

Besides that, I plan to have the game at “beta” by mid-June. Meaning, I want all these stickies gone except for “Bugfixing”, “Playtesting” and “Polish”! So when I wasn’t preparing festival submissions, I was working on getting rid of these bad boys.

What remains in those stickies? Well, leaderboards were, and they got knocked out this week. Before leaderboards were just a mocked-up, non-functioning menu — now it’s 100% working! I’m using data from the original Bleed, since there aren’t any entries for Bleed 2 yet.

Since there’s so many entries displayed (up to 100), I added special movement code just for this menu. Pressing left/right scrolls up/down in batches of 10, and holding any button scrolls in that direction. Nothing too fancy, just details you gotta think about. There doesn’t need to be a selector for individual entries unless I get replays 100% working, but you can see I’m ready and hoping for that.

I also got a co-op interface hooked up! It improves on Bleed 1 in a lot of ways:

• There’s no in-game drop-in/drop-out anymore. Maybe this sounds like a negative, but it means co-op players can have their own leaderboards, because it ensures co-op play was done the whole way through. In the original Bleed, having a co-op player at any time disqualified you from the leaderboards… yeah. It was dumb.
• It’s clear which character you are, and you can easily switch characters! Just in case player one wants to be yellow for a change. Why not?
• You can easily play co-op with only one controller! In Bleed 1, you had to find some obscure option buried in the menus if you wanted to do this. Now, just press X on a controller and bam. It’s the co-op controller!

 

What I’m Gonna Do In The Coming Weeks

How about going forward? What else needs to be done? Well:

• Story Mode: A few last things need to be stitched together, and I want a screen showing what’s unlocked when you beat the game.
• Extra Characters: There are 5 unlockable characters. Maybe they don’t have to be perfect, but I need all their sprites, weapons, abilities, etc done, as well as a character select screen.
• Achievements: I have to code and test them all! Certain little things, like health pickups in Arcade Mode, need to be coded so their achievements are possible to get.
• Arcade Mode: I need to add special code to lots of little places for Arcade Mode. It needs to track and upload scores properly, shorten cutscenes, have a final score screen, restrict characters/abilities in ‘New Game’ mode, etc
• Challenge Mode: I know it’s in the menu in that gif up there, but it actually doesn’t exist yet.   😀
• Replays: The big one. If I have time, I’ll make sure they properly record and play back all characters/weapons/abilities, work across all platforms, upload and download to the leaderboards, etc

Aaaaaaand that’s it! Can I do it in a month? Let’s find out!! See you next week!