If you missed the news: I’m showing Bleed 2 at PAX Prime next weekend! Come by, say hi, try the game! I’ll be in the Indie MEGABOOTH!

I spent this week preparing a new demo build for the show. At face value it’ll look like I’m simply demoing the first level of the game, but there are a ton of edits I’ve made to help it shine in an exhibition setting, as well as fixing some common problem areas. I’m gonna list as many of these edits as possible to show the amount of work that can go into preparing a demo! I hope it’s not too much of a ramble.

 

Build An Arcade Cabinet

My basic philosophy to showing at exhibitions is to treat the booth like a big arcade cabinet. It should be simple and straightforward and entirely self-contained, and ideally it should draw peoples’ attention as much as possible. If I do it right, I shouldn’t even need to be there at all (although of course I will be, for just about every moment!)

First off, I created a new main screen with as little clutter as possible — just the game logo and player select (arcade-style!) Since some stations will have co-op and some won’t, player two’s area won’t even display if a second controller isn’t plugged in.

More, I added an attract mode! For those not familiar: you know how if you leave old arcade cabinets alone, the game will start playing itself? That’s called an “attract mode” — it’s meant to get people interested so they’ll try the game. It’s a lot more exciting than the main screen, and will work much better than me hassling every person who comes by. Who knew all my replay work would eventually have a payoff!

 

Get To The Point

The noisy, crowded expo hall isn’t the place for subtle world-building or trying peoples’ patience. For the demo, I’ve made all the (already short) cutscenes even shorter (the intro is about 4 sec, for example.) Also, the normal game is pretty hands-off, giving you time to experiment and figure things out before showing tutorials — not in the demo!! Now they appear almost immediately. Sadly, the level outro cutscene and intermissions won’t be included — I think they’re cute and fun, but it’s just not what people will be interested in on a show floor.

 

Teaching The Player

Coming back to the tutorials, I think it’s very important that the game itself can teach people how to play. The less I have to interrupt players and explain things the better (and again, ideally I won’t have to do that at all!) In the spirit of this, I’ve revised tutorials to be as clear as possible — especially the one that teaches bullet reflecting.

The bullet-reflecting tutorial is basically a boss, the Shield Invader — it blocks your attacks, but a reflected bullet will take it out. It works fine for solo play, but in co-op it’s really easy for the second player to get behind its shield and just shoot it dead before either player knows they were supposed to learn something. Even if it’s dispatched properly, the second player never gets the tutorial and neither player seems to intuitively understand the purple/yellow mechanic.

So! I made a variation of the fight  with two Shield Invaders for co-op. These ones are totally invincible so you can’t take them out even if you get behind them. They also stand still and fire slower bullets — hopefully the scene is easy to take in and teaches everything well.

 

Remove Frustrations

Because the reflect tutorial wasn’t getting through to people, I had more Shield Invaders in the next area to reinforce the concept… but after two exhibitions and lots of playtesting, it really stands out as a main place players get stuck — if they didn’t understand before it does nothing to teach them, and it’s actually much harder since the Invaders are positioned so awkwardly.

I think in this case I was trying too hard to force players to understand, and it led to a lot of frustration — especially in exhibition settings. For the demo, I’ve replaced those baddies with normal Invaders — better to have people enjoy the game while playing it sub-optimally than getting frustrated and giving up. I imagine it’s also much easier for spectators to get into a game when those playing it aren’t stuck and frustrated.

Another main source of frustration is the Blast Jumper boss — so many people don’t understand that the pistols can hurt it, and spend ages fighting it purely by reflecting its bullets. Plenty more don’t even see there’s a health bar! I’ve added a visual effect to help draw attention to the health bar when it appears, as well as glow and shake effects to try and accentuate when bosses take damage (I also tried the boss itself flashing in typical shmup fashion, but I hate how it looks.) I’m hoping that removing those (aforementioned) Shield Invaders will help too — they come right before the Blast Jumper, and may have been conditioning players to focus purely on reflecting bullets. Fingers crossed.

 

Keep Players Engaged

I want everyone to have fun with the demo and be engaged, which means accounting for players of all skill levels. The demo starts at Normal (a proven good fit for 90% of people) but if you’re doing really well and not taking damage it quickly scales up — and if you die a lot, it of course goes back down. It’s a lot harder to increase the difficulty than decrease it — I don’t want to accidentally stomp people, and I want to back off when I am. If you’re reading this and want to see the highest difficulty, beat the first two areas without taking damage and you’ll be there as fast as possible. If you die even once, the difficulty will never raise from then on.

 

Playtesting

Exhibiting is a great way to get TONS of playtesting done, and to see how the general public will respond to and play my game! I’ve tried to maximize what I get out of exhibiting in this sense — all kinds of stats will be recorded behind the scenes, tracking where people commonly die or get stuck, or how quickly the demo is cleared on average.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to put in a few new boss attacks on the harder difficulties. I have no idea how much they’ll actually be seen, but it’ll be cool if I can get a little data on how they end up playing.

 

Polish

Finally, I added random bits of polish here and there — particles, explosions, a final “thank you for playing!” screen, that kind of thing! I also added a few new death messages that’ll only make sense in the context of a PAX demo. Why not have some fun with it!

Aaaand, that about sums it up! Many of these changes are purely for demo purposes but who knows, depending on how people respond to some of them, they might get incorporated into the actual game! All the feedback I’m sure to get will really help Bleed 2 be the best game it can be.

PAX has me nervous, but also very excited! I’m sure it’s gonna be a blast and I hope I’ll see you there!