Bootdisk Revolution

This week I brought Story Mode to a “beta” state! You can play the whole thing start-to-finish in a proper manner, which is a wonderful milestone. Still, stitching everything together was a pretty small percent of the workload.

There were a bunch of small-to-medium-sized issues in the game that I’ve been aware of for months, but haven’t fixed. A simple example was the Shield Invader. They block your attacks with a shield, but many testers didn’t realize their shots were being stopped and just kept firing at the boss forever. Hitting an invincible enemy now comes with dramatic sprites and sound effects, hopefully making things much more clear (both here and in many other boss fights!)

That’s just one example. Speaking generally (to avoid spoilers), there are a couple other bosses and situations in the game that are a little unusual, that also left players not knowing what to do. I don’t want to take them out, because I think they add a lot of personality to the game, but I don’t want people to get stuck in a fast-paced action game either. I added a bunch of subtle prompts to help confused players out (as well as some not-so-subtle prompts if they really aren’t getting it after a while.)

I added a tutorial for the taunt move, and made all tutorial text change depending on the controller you’re using. I also finally made the game save your progress, allowing me to hide the tutorials on repeat playthroughs, just like in the original Bleed. Whee!

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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.

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Oh boy oh boy! It’s getting close to trailer time. I put one together this week, so here’s what went into making it!

 

Planning

It started with a bunch of planning and research, to figure out what the trailer had to communicate to be successful. If anyone’s curious, two great articles I found were this one, and this one. In the end, here’s what I got:

• Introduce Wryn’s basic abilities (so viewers understand how the game works)
• Demonstrate how fast the game plays when the abilities are used effectively
• Show off the volume and variety of locations and boss fights
• Say who’s working on the game (they’re kind of a big deal)
• Say name of the game, when it’s coming out, for what platforms, and my website
• Do it all fast, with minimal-to-no text, no drawn-out intros, and a maximum of 90 seconds

Once I had that sorted, I went over the song I was using to see how it fit with my criteria. I think the music strongly informs the emotional journey of the trailer, so the action and information had to flow with it.

That’s what I landed on! As the song warms up, I introduce how to play the game, and as it builds to a mini-climax I use more intense and busy footage. Then the song backs off a little, so I use that time to display credits. Finally, the song and trailer ramp way back up and beyond, showing as many bosses and crazy action scenes as possible before ending with the important info.
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I’ve been up to my eyeballs in audio the past handful of weeks, and I know I need a break from it, and you probably do too. BUT!! This week was spent re-writing large parts of my audio engine and roughly balancing the audio of the game.

What’s with me and constantly re-doing things? Well, I’ve been using the same audio code for almost 8 years now, adding to it here and there when I needed to but keeping it mostly intact. The amount of polish Joonas brings to the audio really highlighted major problems in my code and forced me to make it a lot better! I’m about ready to record a trailer, but I don’t want to have obviously crappy audio in it, especially when Joonas is doing such awesome work, soooooo this was the time it had to be done.

An example of a problem I was having: I showed long ago how sounds fade the farther they were from the player, like so.

It’s neat, but it produces unpredictable results. Depending on how zoomed-out the camera is, sounds can be on-screen but faded, or even completely silent. So, a boss could be right there in plain view warming up an attack and you’d never even hear it. Not cool.

I changed the circle to encompass everything the camera could see instead, but that just produced a different flavour of unpredictability, since now sounds can be way off-screen in some cases and still heard, or barely off-screen and not heard.

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Hello there!! This weekend I’m at PAX East, mostly taking it easy but also showing off the game to a few folks. Exciting times!

While I’m gone, let’s finish interviewing Bleed 2’s sound designer Joonas Turner!

Interview (Part 2)

What kind of style did you decide on for Bleed 2, and how did you create it?

With Bleed 2 I had this idea of using musical instruments to build the sounds with, not necessarily as melodic or harmonic elements but more to explore all the weird sounds you can get out of them as a sound design element. So we recorded a bunch of guitars with my assisting sound designer Niilo Takalainen (who also recorded a lot of source elements for me to use) and then we recorded a bunch of synthesizers. As the game is very action packed and stylized I wanted a lot of the sounds to be quite “in your face” and “abstract” to match what was happening on the screen. That all said I wanted to keep some sense of reality or familiarity in the soundscape by having stuff like footsteps or clothes or walls breaking etc sound somewhat “realistic” using normal sources.

We didn’t want any spoken dialogue for the characters so to say, so we only recorded a bunch of short voice clips for actions that the players make. I wanted the voices to tie up together so that they didn’t feel like just random vocals so I came up with this little “kind-of-like-syllables-system” where for example if the character jumps they make a “HU” shout and when they swing a sword they make a “YAH” shout and when they hit an enemy they make a “NAH” shout so when all this happens rapidly it would be a hearty “HUYAHNAH!” and different actions have their own small “vocal snippet” and when you start tying them up you can kinda tell what’s up by just listening, the actions hopefully become familiar to the player like that. The voice of Wryn and Valentine are by the lovely voice of Isa And and the voice of the Rival is me.

So, as the playable characters have their own voices I decided that I want to give the numerous bosses of the game their own identities somehow as well. After getting to know the bosses I nominated various items that would be the ‘prominent layers’ you’d be hearing, for some boss it could be a distorted guitar, for some some it could be a RC Car or for some boss it could be the lush tail sounds of a industrial reverb to emphasize the environment it is in and so on!

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I’m super pumped to announce that Joonas Turner is doing the sound design for Bleed 2!! If his name sounds familiar, it’s because he’s worked on roughly a million games and properties, ranging from Nuclear Throne and Environmental Station Alpha to Angry Birds and Transformers!! He’s an amazingly talented, creative guy, and his sounds are bringing Bleed 2 to life in a huge way.

Here’s a mini-documentary he made for his work on the upcoming Gunkatana! It’s a fascinating (and fun) look at how audio is made.

So, what does a professional sound designer bring to the table? I’m glad you asked!

Attention to Detail

In the original Bleed, Wryn’s boots made a little scuffing sound as she walked, which was nice. In Bleed 2, there are dozens of noises for walking, jumping, landing, wall-kicking, etc — and not just generic sounds, but sounds for carpet, metal, bricks, grates… it all changes depending on her environment and what she’s doing. Now imagine this kind of detail across the whole game. It really brings the world to life!

Surround Sound

All of my previous games have been straight-up mono sound. It never even occured to me to try otherwise! Now, at Joonas’ (much appreciated) insistence, sounds actually match positionally to their location on screen, and fade out the farther off-screen they get! It’s about ten steps up in terms of quality.

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Another awesome milestone reached this week: all sound effects are in the game!! YES!! I’ll be writing a big ol’ post about my sound designer next week (he’s seriously a genius and has brought so much to the game) but for now you’ll have to make do with this lesser article about a boss I cut a long time ago: the Lil’ Guppy Commander!

You may have seen this picture of him before! He wears a Guppy suit and a big gas tank. He combines the pheromones in the tank with overdramatic arm movements to control swarms of Lil’ Guppies. Here’s some clips of his old fight in action, along with some reasons I didn’t think they were very good. What fun!

He spends most of the fight surrounded by a swarm of Lil’ Guppies, making him difficult to damage. However, all of his attacks make use of the Guppies, leaving him open and allowing you to strike. This one was a reflectable attack, where he’d bunch the Guppies into a ball and use them like a hadouken, but reflecting them didn’t deal direct damage and felt weak (you may as well jump over them and just shoot him while they’re flying around.) He was also made before I implemented the effects for reflectable attacks, which is why he’s missing those.

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This week I completed the last cutscenes in the game! That meant a lot of writing, art, and coding.

I’m not some genius writer, so there isn’t much point in a big blog post about it. Mainly, I just try to ensure every line of dialogue has a purpose — usually to drive the action forward or reveal something about a character, that kind of thing. I have little psych profiles and personality summaries on each character that I use to help me decide how they’d respond to events, and what language they’d use. …that’s about it!

With the cutscenes finished, I was able to stitch them together into the game! Now you can play the whole thing from start to finish, including the story (although excluding the credits.) Definitely a very exciting milestone for me. It’s almost like it’s becoming a real game now!

All the new stuff I created this week is late-game and spoilery, so the rest of the post will be a look at how things have progressed over the last three months.

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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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