Bootdisk Revolution

This week I made a new trailer to announce Bleed 2! (To be clear, the game’s not done, but it does need to be *officially announced*.) I put a trailer together back in May that didn’t work out for various reasons, however THIS one is 210% good to go and will be out in the next week or two, max! Buuttttt anything I wrote about trailer-making would just be a repeat of the May post, so I’ll spare you. Instead, here are a few bits of polish I’ve added to the game over the last little while! Hopefully it isn’t too filler-y!

First we have the Rolling Invader mini-boss (my boss names are so creative, aren’t they??) It’s supposed to exist as a soft bullet-time tutorial, since slow-mo would (ideally) help new players deal with its speedy, dodgy antics. However, the Invader dodged shots instantly, even during bullet time, making the fight a poor introduction to the ability. I changed it so that if the player is slowing time, the Rolling Invader takes a while to react to the incoming bullets. I’m not sure how great it is, but it’s better!

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This week I’ll touch on a new feature in Bleed 2 — mutators! In case anyone doesn’t know, mutators are little tweaks you apply to the game to change how it looks or plays. Beating the game on any difficulty will unlock a selection of mutators, and I thought I’d share a lot of them with you here. I’m keeping most of the interesting ones after the break in case people consider this kind of thing a spoiler.

One really simple mutator is a “debug mode” that lets you see all the tiles and hitboxes! Maybe it’ll interest aspiring game developers, or anyone who’s curious how the game is constructed (there’s a bunch of hacky tricks!)

There’s also “infinite health” and “infinite energy” mutators for when you just wanna mess around, or play with your younger sibling or whatever. Obviously this would invalidate all kinds of leaderboards, achievements, unlocks, etc, so they’re all blocked while mutators are active.

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This week I fixed all the major bugs (that I’m aware of) in Bleed 2’s engine! One of them was a problem with how enemies take damage, which I’m giving a big run-down of today.

First off: how damage worked before. Enemies and player attacks are made up of one or more hitboxes — when the hitboxes touch, the enemies take damage. Easy, right?

Weeeeelllll, not quite. The katana’s hitbox, for example, is large and can easily strike multiple hitboxes at once. If those hitboxes all belong to the same enemy, like a boss, the boss gets hammered with “you got hit!” notifications (one per hitbox), multiplying the damage like crazy.

The easiest way to fix that was to make it so enemies only accept damage once per frame — that’s how I solved it for the original Bleed, and how it’s remained since 2011.

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A while ago I posted about re-doing level-end scores, but that was only one aspect of scoring, and it was only half-done!

This week (among many, many other things) I finally got scoring completely in the game and finished off.

The first task was deciding how many points you get for killing each enemy. Enemies are generally classified as being small, medium, or large, giving 5, 10, and 25 points respectively. Bosses, on the other hand, are worth 500-1000 points — occasionally more. When you kill an enemy, the amount of points you get is multiplied depending on your current style rank — ranging from x1 when you’re at D, to x5 when you’re at S.

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I started the week by sorting the giant list of problems, classifying each item as very-important, kinda-important, and not-really-that-important.

“Very important” items are the ones that absolutely must be done. They include fixing all the major crashes and bugs I’ve found, as well as tasks like making the end credits sequence and balancing the weapons and characters. “Kinda important” items are ones I *could* leave uncorrected, but I’d rather fix them. For example, all the vehicles in level 2 are red, and one of Valentine’s fights has an attack I think is really bad — not critical, but things I think people would notice. All the other items are very low importance, and basically just polish (and I value having a polished game, but game-breaking bugs really should take priority over “adding particles to attack X”.)

Each category ended up filling about two pages, and you can see I tackled a bunch of medium-importance items this week… I was kinda procrastinating on the very-important ones, which won’t be nearly as easy or fast to check off. But I’ll have to do them soon!!

So blah blah blah, what else did I actually do this week? Well, I made Bleed 2’s splash screen!

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Yo!! First off, you should know Summer Games Done Quick starts this weekend. Like, right now!! I love that event so I gotta shout it out every chance I get.

In Bleed 2 news, things are motoring along. I got all achievements implemented, as well as finally having all the unlockable characters roughed in! Most of what took so long was the sheer amount of artwork involved. For example, every character needs a full set of sprites for their in-game cinematics (in addition to their normal sprite sheets) — cinematics alone added almost 200 sprites of work.

So yeah, wah wah it was a lot to do but I got it done! Achievements and unlockable characters were some of the last big, individual items on my sticky wall of doom. Here’s how the wall has progressed over the last six months (I believe the photos were taken Jan/Apr/July.)

Three groups of stickies remain, and they represent big items. From left to right, we have: replays (let’s be real, I’ll probably cut these), officially announcing the game (still needs a while longer) and finally, playtesting/polishing/bugfixing!

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I *almost* finished roughing in the unlockable characters this week. Almost!! I really underestimated how much work it would be! For now, I’ll talk about a few of the hurdles in creating Challenge Mode instead.

I mentioned Challenge Mode a few weeks ago — it’s the one where you can fight up to three bosses at once! In general, it was really easy to implement because of how I code my boss fights! Every boss in Bleed 2 is fought inside an “arena”, which is just a rectangular area of the level that I mark off in code. It’s a habit I got into during Bleed 1 when I designed its Challenge Mode.

Bosses use the rectangle in all of their behaviour. For example: if a boss has an attack where it rushes across the screen, it knows the attack is over once it’s outside the arena boundaries. Using the boundaries, it also knows where to reappear. If I want a boss to move to the center of the arena, I just tell it to move to the point halfway between the arena boundaries. Etc etc. When Challenge Mode starts, I just create a bunch of bosses and give them the level’s arena rectangle. It’s pretty easy!

But.

But, it would be boring if all arenas were perfect rectangles — so they aren’t. Still, in code, the “arena” has to be marked off by a rectangle, which led to some issues.

For example, the Blast Jumper ignores all tile collisions — the only “ground” it knows is the bottom of the arena rectangle. Now that it can be fought in more varied arenas, I had to change how it handled collision detection.

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This week I’d like to announce that Jukio Kallio will be doing the OST for Bleed 2!! You might have already seen this if you follow me on Twitter… I got excited and couldn’t wait to spread the news. Jukio’s been posting snippets of what he’s cooking up, and it friggin’ rocks. Check it out:

Hello I’m working on some HERO CORE METAL for @BootdiskRev‘s BLEED 2! So excited about this one!! pic.twitter.com/iOloIo5BST

— Jukio (@jukiokallio) June 15, 2016

If his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s made music for some really high-profile indies, including Nuclear Throne, LUFTRAUSERS and Octodad! If you wanna check out his entire body of work, you can see his Bandcamp here, or his website here.

And if you want another taste of what he’s doing for Bleed 2, here’s one more snippet he posted (with additional metal hands!):

More WIP stuff for BLEED 2 by @BootdiskRev ! pic.twitter.com/s0u1CgnxnK
— Jukio (@jukiokallio) June 16, 2016

Jukio is a wicked dude full of awesome, creative ideas, and this Mega Man X style mash-up of guitars and synths is gonna take the game to a whole new level. I hope you’re as excited as I am to have this in Bleed 2, and to see what else he comes up with!

(If you’re wondering what I did this week, I’m still working on unlockable characters! It was mostly sprite work — I’ve done at least 250 frames of animation this week. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but for a not-regular-artist like me, it feels like a lot. ‘Till next week!)

This week I finished off Challenge Mode, and started working on unlockable characters! I even streamed some of the work, which will be on my Twitch channel for at least a couple weeks. Obviously, that video and this post will contain spoilers for one of the unlockable characters, so I’m keeping spoilers after the break just in case you care about that kind of thing.

In the original Bleed, most characters just added small twists to the gameplay — the idea being they’d add new challenges for experienced players. They weren’t generally well-received and looking back, probably all felt samey. This time, I’m making an effort to have unlockable characters that are varied and interesting, and one of the most wildly different characters is…

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As you might guess from the first half of title, I worked on the extra modes this week! Here’s the Arcade Mode menu in all its glory. (For anyone who’s not familiar, Arcade Mode tasks you with beating the game on one life, to compete on the leaderboards for score and time.)

There weren’t many single large tasks that took up development time here. Rather, it was a ton of little things. In Arcade Mode, tutorials aren’t shown, cutscenes are shortened, intermissions are skipped, scoring is tracked and saved differently, restrictions are enforced depending on the game mode, etc etc etc. What seems like a million tiny details — I really hope I caught them all.

The only semi-large items to take care of were health pickups and menus. The menu above isn’t too intense, but you gotta have a screen for beating Arcade Mode, too!

If I get time, I want to have an image of Wryn (or whatever character you used) in a victory pose on the right. It’s a bit empty without it!

Also, health pickups are finally in the game! You can also see a timer on the HUD, which can be enabled from the Arcade Menu above.

I had time left over after completing Arcade Mode, so I turned to Challenge Mode (where you pick up to three bosses to fight at once.)

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