This week continued the editing/tightening process for the game by moving on to level 3! A friend of mine asked me to define “editing/tightening” in more concrete terms, and I think this week’s work provides some pretty concrete examples. Maybe it sounds tacky, but I find most games have taken on a life of their […]
Special note! World-record holder Noobii_TV will be speedrunning Bleed for The Fast Force Marathon 3 benefiting Doctors Without Borders today at 1AM CST! If you’re up then, the action will be at this Twitch channel. Level two has finally reached a quality where I’m pretty much done with it, so hurray! I spent the week […]
All the changes I made last week meant a complete re-design of the second level’s layout. It’s been a fun process watching it go from an embarrassment to something I’m having fun with, and it’s got me thinking about what constitutes good level design. I’ll take you through my thought process so far, and maybe […]
So, at this point I’d say Bleed 2 is close to an alpha state! …you know, kind of. I left the final level half-finished to create the demo for TCAF, but that aside the story mode is playable from start to near-finish. The only problem is that it kind of sucks right now, but don’t […]
As I mentioned, I spent the previous week exhibiting at TCAF! After the madness that was getting everything ready and then showing the game, I was totally beat. I’ve taken the week off to recharge so I don’t have a ton to report, but maybe you’re interested in hearing a little about the ups and […]
Woohoo! This weekend I’m exhibiting Bleed 2 at TCAF! The show is as awesome as it is free, so come give the game a shot and say hi if you’re in the area! Something I managed to add for the exhibition is a co-op mode! In the original Bleed, co-op was basically a hack I […]
This week I playtested the first level of Bleed 2 at Bento Miso! It was a really positive experience — everyone there is creative and intelligent and super nice, and I learned a lot about how my game will be understood by new players. I figure this is as good a time as any to […]
This week I finished the menus for the demo, re-worked some bosses, did a lot of difficulty balancing, and also added tutorials! This may be a familiar concept to many, but I’ve built the first level to slowly and (hopefully) organically introduce Bleed 2’s mechanics. In case you don’t know what I mean, check it […]
This week I got audio working in the game, as planned. Creating music and sound effects takes me a very long time, so for now it’s re-used audio from the original Bleed. My goal is to create a functional demo first, and then spend whatever time I have left over making it polished and fresh. […]
One of the things I worked on this week was particle effects! You probably know what they are, but in case you don’t — particles are tiny images, used purely for aesthetics. I have them all in their own sprite sheet, just like tilesets or animations or anything else. Particles don’t need collision detection or […]