I worked on the seventh level this week: touching up environment art, finalizing the tileset, bringing the first section to near-completion, and starting on the second. There’s a large amount left to do including some complicated set-pieces and all the bosses, but hey, it’s good progress so far.

Meanwhile, let’s see how in-game cutscenes are made for Bleed 2!

It’s pretty simple, actually. First, I have this collection of sprites used for cut-scenes. Some are re-created from Wryn’s sprite sheet, but others, like Wryn playing videogames, have been created specifically for the cutscenes.

I’ve programmed a simple “cutscene helper” entity that uses these sprites to mimic Wryn! It knows all her stats, like move speed, weight, height, etc, so everything is exactly the same between the two of them. Can you tell the difference!?!!??

When it’s time for a cutscene, the player-controlled Wryn is alerted that a cutscene is taking place. This blocks all input to her, stops her from drawing, and letterboxxes the screen.

At the exact same moment, the cutscene helper moves to where Wryn was standing, matching her animations, movement speed, etc. At this point the game takes over, running through hard-coded instructions telling the helper entity how to move and animate to play out the cutscene.

So for the cutscene above, it’s literally: play Wryn’s idle animation while moving up, and keep the missile under her feet. Once at a certain position, make Wryn jump up and play the jump animation. When she reaches the peak of her jump, the cutscene is over. Real literal and real simple!

When it’s all over, Wryn moves to the cutscene helper’s location, control is returned to the player, and the helper is removed.

It feels a little low-tech, but it gets the job done! Since cutscenes are made from a small sprite collection, it’ll be easy to add characters later and allow them to have cutscenes with minimal effort!

I’ll be going into overdrive for the next few weeks, trying to finish this level so I’m ready to collaborate with my audio partners. Updates might be light as a result, but I’ll do my best!