I did it!! Yesss!! It took two full weeks of work but Bleed 2’s end credits and cast roll are finally done. I’m really proud of myself for pushing through and making it happen. I’m also mentally exhausted (this might sound overdramatic/indulgent, but art is difficult for me.)

I hope you’ll understand if this post is light — I’d love to show pics of what I worked on, but come on! It’s the ending of the game! Instead, I’ll share a few changes/bits of polish I’ve been adding to bosses lately, and call it a day.

First we have the ninja fight (I don’t think I’ve shown it on the blog before, but it’s in the trailer for a few seconds!) It repeatedly rushes you from random spots in the clouds. It would occasionally appear at locations that put it behind the HUD — hardly fair, so I fixed that. It also attacks REALLY fast on harder difficulties, to the point where if you died, it would be attacking you before the screen fully faded in after the restart. Not only did I fix that here, but I went through all the other bosses and made sure they give you time to respawn before attacking.

I also experimented with adding more reflectable elements to some bosses! For example, the Kitty Chopper now randomly fires reflectable missiles. I think it gives you a few more options during that attack and helps keep it interesting. This brought several non-obvious bits of polish with it. For one, the little missile in the chopper’s missile bay glows before firing to warn you of the reflectable missile (it’s sometimes hard to see, but it is there.) More importantly, once you reflect a missile it stops colliding with anything but the chopper — otherwise it was super easy to accidentally shoot and destroy the missile you just reflected, which felt really lame.

I tried the same thing with the Semi Core, but I didn’t enjoy it as much so I removed them. It just felt like one too many things going on in that fight — not to mention, if you want to maximize your damage by reflecting all possible missiles into the Semi Core, you need to smack them down at a really sharp angle, which also felt awkward and silly to me.

Aaaaand that’s all I got today! More next week… I just need to relax today!   :D