BOOTDISK REVOLUTION

Whew! NOW it’s done! Bleed 2 is out. What a trip. It’s got some very kind coverage from places like Hardcore Gamer, Destructoid and Attack of the Fanboy, and overall I’m really happy and relieved at how it’s been received!

The launch certainly went better than the original’s (when I accidentally shipped an .exe that was only playable by like 10% of the user base, and then didn’t find out for hours because I decided to go for a celebratory lunch, oooooops.) People have still found bugs I wish I caught (and every new one found is another knot in my stomach) but I’ve been working hard at fixing them and I think I’ve got all the critical ones now — and so far I’ve managed to keep replays intact, too! Sweet!

If you’re wondering what it’s like to launch a game, it’s seriously overwhelming, in both good and bad ways. My Steam account, Twitter and inbox has been absolutely slammed — I’ve answered (or at least looked at) at least 200 emails alone this week. There were some incredibly kind messages, a couple rather unpleasant ones, and the rest was either people reporting bugs or (the vast majority) requesting copies of the game. It might not sound like much work, but it somehow is! There are a lot of key scammers out there, and you gotta hustle if you want to avoid getting taken advantage of. I fell for a lot of it back in the Bleed 1 days, but I’d like to think I’m a bit more canny now.

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…wow. I did it! Well, almost — Bleed 2 is out in three days, on Feb 8. I’m stressed, I’m excited, I’m really proud!

I discovered a 2.5 year-old version of the game, so please enjoy some comparison shots as I pat myself on the back for all my hard work!

Four years ago, when I was just starting to put the game together, I had a moment where I suddenly realized the scope of what I was planning. It profoundly depressed me — it honestly didn’t seem possible to complete; trying seemed like a waste of time. I literally curled into a ball went to sleep in the middle of the afternoon. I’m not sure why I kept going from that point, but I’m really glad I did. Piece by piece, day by day — my skills have improved, the game has come together, and now it’s all culminated in the game you’ll be able to play in three days!

I’m not giving an Academy Awards speech of anything, but: huge, HUGE shout-outs to Joonas and Jukio for all the amazing work they’ve provided, the game wouldn’t be half of what it is without them. Additional huge thanks to my family and the friends I’ve kept and made along the way. Having their support and enthusiasm and belief really helped keep me going! Finally, a shout-out to the Toronto game dev community at Gamma Space. I’m so glad to have met such awesome, creative people who share my passions. I tend to think of myself as an independent, solo kind of guy, but I’ve learned having a community like that is really special.

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With a week and a half left, things are getting tight! Bleed 2 is looking good, but I’m still cramming to make sure everything is as polished as it can be. A ton has happened this week so there’s tons to talk about: first, the Clawed Girl!

Yes! The Clawed Girl from They Bleed Pixels is an unlockable character in Bleed 2 — a huge thank-you to Spooky Squid Games for trusting me with their intellectual property. This was a really exciting opportunity to me, and I hope I’ve done the character proud!

Like in her own game, the Clawed Girl is a melee-focused character. This instantly makes her harder to play in a fast, ranged-combat game like Bleed 2, but she’s got plenty of tricks to help balance her out. Her swipes and stabs do way more damage than Wryn’s pistols, and even her air-dash hurts enemies! She can only air-dash once after a jump, but landing hits refreshes her dash — so if you’re good you can combo like crazy and never even touch the ground! Additionally, not pictured, you can end her air-dash with a flying kick that reflects any attack

(UPDATE: I removed the kick because while it looked cool… it always came out when you didn’t want it to, it was hard to use even when you tried to, and when you did use it slowed you down and ultimately wasn’t worth it — you may as well have used the swipe instead! RIP kick.)

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This week I was invited on the Escapist Magazine Twitch stream to talk about Bleed 1 and 2! John Markley played through the original, and a demo of the sequel. Here’s the link if you want to check it out, it was a whole bunch of fun!

Anyways — two and a half weeks until the game comes out, yay! Also: yikes!!

I’ve been busy with bugfixing and playtests this week, which is an invaluable but high-pressure (to me) part of the process. Playtest feedback is almost always useful, but fixing problems also tends to create more problems — Bleed 2 is such a giant interconnected machine at this point, it’s hard to fully appreciate the impact of even small changes (until someone tells me I broke something.)

That’s all fine, but to me the pressure comes from when the feedback concerns more than bugs. What if players aren’t sure how to dodge a specific attack, or they don’t find an unlockable character fun to play? That’s when I have to start weighing my own perspective against fresh ones — sometimes many fresh ones! I feel strongly about the design decisions I’ve made, but I also recognize that I’m not objective on this game any more. I have to decide what to stand firm on, and what to change to make the game as fun as possible!

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Exciting news: Bleed 2 releases on Feb 8!

I announced this a few places earlier in the week, but it just occurred to me that I never said so here. Oops. To try and spread a little hype, I’m putting out mini-trailers each week until release. Here’s a peek at the next one, demonstrating local co-op.

(If you look closely, you can see that the purple player’s bullets are coloured purple now. It only happens in co-op, and I think it helps players keep track of themselves a little better in the chaos!)

Anyways, I spent the last few weeks working on these mini-trailers, as well as about 70(?) semi-personalized emails for games journalists and entertainers to see if they’ll cover the game. I’ll probably have to wait until release to see if many bit, but the game was already mentioned on a Giant Bomb podcast and articles from Hardcore Gamer and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, so I’m feeling encouraged.

As for this week, I spent most of it at AGDQ (which raised over 2 million bucks for cancer prevention!! WOW!!) Bleed got an early-morning speedrun and I really wanted to see it in person — I even ended up getting put on the couch to provide a little commentary! Here’s the video — I can’t bear to see how I look in it, haha, but maybe you’ll enjoy it. Studio blew through the game despite my distracting him with questions, and it was an honour to be a small part of something so awesome.

I got work done despite being at GDQ, mostly polishing things and trying to solve final bugs before release. I was also inspired by the event, and added a few tiny features in the GDQ sprit.

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The last two weeks I’ve been working non-stop on getting PR stuff together for the announcement of the game’s release date, and trying to raise some hype before launch (you thought I got a vacation, huh? Maybe later!) You’ll see the results of that soon, so let’s talk money instead!

This week I was asked if I had a sales target for Bleed 2, which is a very important consideration (if I don’t have target numbers, how will I know if the game’s a financial success?) I think the person who asked assumed that I approached the making of Bleed 2 with a business mindset — analyzing sales trends of the original, deciding how long and how much I could spend on the sequel based on weighing the numbers and potential purchases, etc etc etc. (If you’re a business person, and that sounds like a child’s cartoon version of what would actually go into planning something like this, it’s because I have no idea, haha.)

So as you can probably tell, the considerations that went into making Bleed 2 were more like this:

• The first one sold well! Maybe people would like a second one!
• I’m still REALLY passionate about the game I made, and have lots of ideas how to expand and improve it!

…and then I started working. I’m not saying this is a SMART way to make games (actually it’s super dumb from a business perspective) but it’s what I did. So, to find my target sales numbers, I have to look at what I’ve already spent on the game, and work backwards from there!

So, here are my Bleed 2 expenses so far. The chart represents $42,000 USD. Yikes!!

Obviously the size of the pieces aren’t accurate — sharing how much I’m paying people feels inappropriate. (Why did I make a pie chart, then? It’s for dramatic effect, okay?? Just hold on a second!!) Things that may be unclear include ‘Advertising’ which is how I categorize exhibitions, and ‘Misc’ in which I lump collaborations that didn’t work out (but still had to be paid) and my occasionally paying to work in a collaborative space. It’s a LOT of money already, but thankfully Bleed did pretty well, so I could manage it…

…except for one glaring thing the chart is missing.

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Happy new years!! As always, I’m gonna slack hardcore on this blog post and just pat myself on the back a little. Here’s all the hours I worked in 2016, totaling 1941 actual hours worked!

I kinda hoped that after tracking my worked hours for over three years, I’d start to see interesting patterns emerge (like months or weeks where I’m most or least productive, something like that) but it’s just turning into a mass of squiggly lines. There are a couple trends I think I can spot, but they mostly correlate to deadlines for big events, like the various PAXes.

Anyways, this means I’ve put about 6,000 hours of work into Bleed 2 so far, so yay for me! The game is nearly done, and the major task in front of me (besides continuing to squash bugs and trying to fix replays) is actually promoting and releasing the game! 2017 is looking like it’ll be an exciting year for me personally, and I hope it’s looking that way for you, too.

Be well, be warm, be creative, and have a happy new year!!

Merry Christmas! Or, happy holidays or whatever you like. Hope you’re enjoying some time off!

Usually I like to fix up and release an old game for free around this time of year, but I’m just too busy for that right now (you can always check out the ones I’ve released in the past!) Since you don’t want to read endless blog posts about me fixing bugs, here’s a post about some of the improvements I’ve made to Bleed 2’s weapons and controls instead! I’ll mention a few of the unlockables after the break, in case you’re worried about spoilers.

First up we have the standalone versions of the pistols and katana! They mostly exist to accommodate Bleed 1 players who don’t like the combo weapon, so I worry they’ll come off like a waste of space to everyone else. I’ve tried to combat this somewhat by giving them interesting or unique properties — for example, the standalone katana’s flurry attack is weak-ish, but I’ve improved its area of effect, and it’s now great at taking out lots of little enemies up close, like the Chaff Spammer’s chaff.

I also recently changed the standalone pistols to have an alternate firing mode, similar to the original Bleed’s “akimbo pistols”. It isn’t super useful, but it is stylish as hell…! It’s also really hard to use, so I added some aim-assist on the pistol Wryn fires behind her. It was a bit more work than I expected to get her hands and body looking good no matter what contortion she was in, but it was a fun challenge while I was supposed to be relaxing.

Additional weapons and air-dashes are unlocked to use in Freestyle (“Freestyle” is Bleed 2’s name for “New Game+”) and once you have them all they’re a lot to keep track of. I just assumed dedicated players would manage it, but after playtesting Freestyle a bunch it’s a really REALLY cumbersome system. Everyone who thought they wanted to hold more than two weapons at once in Bleed, be careful what you wish for!! (You can still hold as many as you want though haha, don’t worry.)

Anyways, good ol’ Noobii had a great suggestion — now the number keys 1-4 correspond to the first four weapons in your loadout, allowing you to easily swap between them! It makes the game a LOT more smooth and fun when you’re going for really technical Freestyle runs.

You can also do the weapon-swapping with a controller — a menu option makes D-pad directions correspond to the four weapons, instead of moving Wryn around. There’s also another controller option to enable what I’m calling “manual fire” — it makes it so the right stick only aims, and a user-set fire button needs to be pressed to actually attack. Some players aren’t comfortable with the flicking motion to reflect, so hopefully this accommodates them… I have very firm opinions on how the game plays best, but I’m trying to allow people to do what works for them.

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It’s that time of year again! Where I intend to give myself a vacation — it’s the freakin’ holidays, man — but end up working on replays instead (I REALLY want Bleed 2 to have them) which led to finding and fixing tons of bugs. I also gave my to-do list of features/polish one more look to see what big items were left to be done. Whee!

First: the to-do list. Other than bugs it’s basically all cut. The past few months I’ve been chipping away at the list, implementing bits of polish and features in-between big items like art and bugfixing, and all that’s left at this point are incredibly minor and superficial items. Maybe if I have time to sneak a few in I’ll add them, but most of them won’t have a tangible impact on the game’s quality and will carry the possibility of introducing bugs, so they just don’t seem worth it. An example of a simple addition I made recently was an indicator to highlight your entry on the leaderboards. It’s useful, and also removed from the core game enough that I feel more than comfortable putting it in.

With that done, I gave fixing replays one more shot. Since their breaking is so hard to reliably reproduce, the game had to be played a TON, which also gave me a chance to do lots of balancing/refining on the unlockable weapons and characters — and to find oodles of bugs.

A HUGE problem I found is that many things weren’t being properly reset when you started a game, including the camera and the player. So starting an Arcade Mode run while holding the jump button down (as shown above) could result in two different outcomes, depending on if the player was last in the air or on the ground. Likewise, the camera’s last position was affecting its position at the start of a new game. These things might seem minor but they really aren’t, because they cause a butterfly-effect that quickly breaks the random number generator and ruins replays. It also allowed for a divide-by-zero error under specific circumstances which messed all kinds of things up.

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To any who don’t know: “localizing” a game is the act of changing it to work in a different language or region. It could be as simple as translating all the text in the game, or as involved as redoing all the voice acting and lip-syncing, or changing the script/images/3D models/etc to fit better with the new culture/language. TO BE ABSOLUTELY CLEAR, Bleed 2 isn’t being localized AT ALL (at least not right now) — it’s an involved and expensive task, while I’m just one English-speaking dude who’s resources are limited.

That said! This week I made basic text translations possible — and hopefully, easy. For example, here’s the main menu run through Google Translate to German (definitely NOT the way you want to localize a game. Apologies to any German speakers, I’m sure this isn’t correct!)

Still, it shows you can change the text!! Most of the text in the game used to be hard-coded, but now it’s all stored in an easily readable, easily editable text file, looking something like this:

It’s not a perfect solution — some elements (for example “BLEED 2” on the menu shown above) remain as images, so they can’t be translated in this way. Still, there’s been a fair amount of fan interest in translating the game, so I hope what I’ve done is enough to make someone (or a few someones) happy.

There was more to it than “okay all the text is in this text file now” so of course you get to read about some of the bumps, yaaaaay!

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