This week I’ll touch on a new feature in Bleed 2 — mutators! In case anyone doesn’t know, mutators are little tweaks you apply to the game to change how it looks or plays. Beating the game on any difficulty will unlock a selection of mutators, and I thought I’d share a lot of them with you here. I’m keeping most of the interesting ones after the break in case people consider this kind of thing a spoiler.

One really simple mutator is a “debug mode” that lets you see all the tiles and hitboxes! Maybe it’ll interest aspiring game developers, or anyone who’s curious how the game is constructed (there’s a bunch of hacky tricks!)

There’s also “infinite health” and “infinite energy” mutators for when you just wanna mess around, or play with your younger sibling or whatever. Obviously this would invalidate all kinds of leaderboards, achievements, unlocks, etc, so they’re all blocked while mutators are active.

There’s a “tiny bullets” mutator that… makes all the bullets tiny. When I started the game years ago, the enemy bullets were much smaller, and while I eventually sized them up the old bullets and the code for them remained. No sense in letting them go to waste…? I’m not sure if the special, huge bullets should shrink into normal, smaller bullets in this mode — that seems a little boring.

There’s also an “unreflectable bullets” mutator! Originally, Valentine (the enemy leader) was going to use unreflectable bullets as her boss fight gimmick. Fortunately I realized that was pretty lame all-around, but again the code’s still in there so why not have it as a mutator!

Finally, we have “death bullets”! In this mode, all enemies release a spray of bullets (matching their colour) on death. It’s kind of demanding on the computer in more hectic situations — I’m pretty sure you can see my computer hitch in the gif. Then again my computer is about 7 years old, and it’s an optional mode… but regardless I’ll try and optimize it when I get the time.

Of course you can combine them all together, so if you want tiny, unreflectable death bullets with all the debug options on, that’s totally possible too! I know none of them are really major, but I hope they’ll be fun little extras to play around with!

That’s all for this week! Take care!