Most of this week was audio work… most of this month was audio work, actually! Turns out it’s a lot of effort if you want to do it well (but totally worth it.) I’m saving a big audio blog for another day so in the meantime, here are some improvements I’ve made to Wryn’s sprites between all the audio!

In a previous blog post, I showed that Wryn is divided into pieces, allowing all her body parts to animate independently. Well, I’ve taken it a bit farther.

Now she’s got three head variations, as well as mouth sprites?? Wha…??

First up, the mouths — Wryn actually has a voice in this game! Don’t worry, no spoken dialogue (I don’t think it fits, at least) but she does have vocalizations. I find it lame when game characters speak without moving their mouths, so I added this detail to make it more cohesive and “real”.

Next, the heads — they animate Wryn’s hair and scarf! A lot of Bleed 2 takes place in fast-moving or windy environments, so this detail helps ground the character in the world and make everything more believable. It’s a small detail, but something I think will be picked up subconsciously.

I also use her new head variations for when she’s moving in calmer environments. It makes her hair bounce while she runs, which I think is another small, cute touch!

Lastly — and you might have noticed this in last week’s gifs — I’ve finally given her pistols proper muzzle flashes (they used to use an explosion animation.) A potential problem I’ve noticed is that the muzzle flashes only last one frame. The game runs at 60fps, but I know lots of streaming/video sites force videos into 30fps (they still do, right? I’m not that behind the times?) in which case many flashes won’t appear if the single frame they exist for is cut. I might experiment with them lasting two frames, just to be sure they can be seen.

All these new additions are independent of each other, so Wryn can be yelling while shooting with her hair blowing in the wind and it all looks great. Again, not sure how consciously people will be aware of things like these, but I hope they’ll make the game more subconsciously exciting and “real” — little bits of polish to take Bleed 2 to the next level!