BOOTDISK REVOLUTION

A while ago I posted about re-doing level-end scores, but that was only one aspect of scoring, and it was only half-done!

This week (among many, many other things) I finally got scoring completely in the game and finished off.

The first task was deciding how many points you get for killing each enemy. Enemies are generally classified as being small, medium, or large, giving 5, 10, and 25 points respectively. Bosses, on the other hand, are worth 500-1000 points — occasionally more. When you kill an enemy, the amount of points you get is multiplied depending on your current style rank — ranging from x1 when you’re at D, to x5 when you’re at S.

Continue reading →

I started the week by sorting the giant list of problems, classifying each item as very-important, kinda-important, and not-really-that-important.

“Very important” items are the ones that absolutely must be done. They include fixing all the major crashes and bugs I’ve found, as well as tasks like making the end credits sequence and balancing the weapons and characters. “Kinda important” items are ones I *could* leave uncorrected, but I’d rather fix them. For example, all the vehicles in level 2 are red, and one of Valentine’s fights has an attack I think is really bad — not critical, but things I think people would notice. All the other items are very low importance, and basically just polish (and I value having a polished game, but game-breaking bugs really should take priority over “adding particles to attack X”.)

Each category ended up filling about two pages, and you can see I tackled a bunch of medium-importance items this week… I was kinda procrastinating on the very-important ones, which won’t be nearly as easy or fast to check off. But I’ll have to do them soon!!

So blah blah blah, what else did I actually do this week? Well, I made Bleed 2’s splash screen!

Continue reading →

Yo!! First off, you should know Summer Games Done Quick starts this weekend. Like, right now!! I love that event so I gotta shout it out every chance I get.

In Bleed 2 news, things are motoring along. I got all achievements implemented, as well as finally having all the unlockable characters roughed in! Most of what took so long was the sheer amount of artwork involved. For example, every character needs a full set of sprites for their in-game cinematics (in addition to their normal sprite sheets) — cinematics alone added almost 200 sprites of work.

So yeah, wah wah it was a lot to do but I got it done! Achievements and unlockable characters were some of the last big, individual items on my sticky wall of doom. Here’s how the wall has progressed over the last six months (I believe the photos were taken Jan/Apr/July.)

Three groups of stickies remain, and they represent big items. From left to right, we have: replays (let’s be real, I’ll probably cut these), officially announcing the game (still needs a while longer) and finally, playtesting/polishing/bugfixing!

Continue reading →

I *almost* finished roughing in the unlockable characters this week. Almost!! I really underestimated how much work it would be! For now, I’ll talk about a few of the hurdles in creating Challenge Mode instead.

I mentioned Challenge Mode a few weeks ago — it’s the one where you can fight up to three bosses at once! In general, it was really easy to implement because of how I code my boss fights! Every boss in Bleed 2 is fought inside an “arena”, which is just a rectangular area of the level that I mark off in code. It’s a habit I got into during Bleed 1 when I designed its Challenge Mode.

Bosses use the rectangle in all of their behaviour. For example: if a boss has an attack where it rushes across the screen, it knows the attack is over once it’s outside the arena boundaries. Using the boundaries, it also knows where to reappear. If I want a boss to move to the center of the arena, I just tell it to move to the point halfway between the arena boundaries. Etc etc. When Challenge Mode starts, I just create a bunch of bosses and give them the level’s arena rectangle. It’s pretty easy!

But.

But, it would be boring if all arenas were perfect rectangles — so they aren’t. Still, in code, the “arena” has to be marked off by a rectangle, which led to some issues.

For example, the Blast Jumper ignores all tile collisions — the only “ground” it knows is the bottom of the arena rectangle. Now that it can be fought in more varied arenas, I had to change how it handled collision detection.

Continue reading →

This week I’d like to announce that Jukio Kallio will be doing the OST for Bleed 2!! You might have already seen this if you follow me on Twitter… I got excited and couldn’t wait to spread the news. Jukio’s been posting snippets of what he’s cooking up, and it friggin’ rocks. Check it out:

Hello I’m working on some HERO CORE METAL for @BootdiskRev‘s BLEED 2! So excited about this one!! pic.twitter.com/iOloIo5BST

— Jukio (@jukiokallio) June 15, 2016

If his name sounds familiar, it’s probably because he’s made music for some really high-profile indies, including Nuclear Throne, LUFTRAUSERS and Octodad! If you wanna check out his entire body of work, you can see his Bandcamp here, or his website here.

And if you want another taste of what he’s doing for Bleed 2, here’s one more snippet he posted (with additional metal hands!):

More WIP stuff for BLEED 2 by @BootdiskRev ! pic.twitter.com/s0u1CgnxnK
— Jukio (@jukiokallio) June 16, 2016

Jukio is a wicked dude full of awesome, creative ideas, and this Mega Man X style mash-up of guitars and synths is gonna take the game to a whole new level. I hope you’re as excited as I am to have this in Bleed 2, and to see what else he comes up with!

(If you’re wondering what I did this week, I’m still working on unlockable characters! It was mostly sprite work — I’ve done at least 250 frames of animation this week. I don’t know if that’s a lot, but for a not-regular-artist like me, it feels like a lot. ‘Till next week!)

This week I finished off Challenge Mode, and started working on unlockable characters! I even streamed some of the work, which will be on my Twitch channel for at least a couple weeks. Obviously, that video and this post will contain spoilers for one of the unlockable characters, so I’m keeping spoilers after the break just in case you care about that kind of thing.

In the original Bleed, most characters just added small twists to the gameplay — the idea being they’d add new challenges for experienced players. They weren’t generally well-received and looking back, probably all felt samey. This time, I’m making an effort to have unlockable characters that are varied and interesting, and one of the most wildly different characters is…

Continue reading →

As you might guess from the first half of title, I worked on the extra modes this week! Here’s the Arcade Mode menu in all its glory. (For anyone who’s not familiar, Arcade Mode tasks you with beating the game on one life, to compete on the leaderboards for score and time.)

There weren’t many single large tasks that took up development time here. Rather, it was a ton of little things. In Arcade Mode, tutorials aren’t shown, cutscenes are shortened, intermissions are skipped, scoring is tracked and saved differently, restrictions are enforced depending on the game mode, etc etc etc. What seems like a million tiny details — I really hope I caught them all.

The only semi-large items to take care of were health pickups and menus. The menu above isn’t too intense, but you gotta have a screen for beating Arcade Mode, too!

If I get time, I want to have an image of Wryn (or whatever character you used) in a victory pose on the right. It’s a bit empty without it!

Also, health pickups are finally in the game! You can also see a timer on the HUD, which can be enabled from the Arcade Menu above.

I had time left over after completing Arcade Mode, so I turned to Challenge Mode (where you pick up to three bosses to fight at once.)

Continue reading →

This week I brought Story Mode to a “beta” state! You can play the whole thing start-to-finish in a proper manner, which is a wonderful milestone. Still, stitching everything together was a pretty small percent of the workload.

There were a bunch of small-to-medium-sized issues in the game that I’ve been aware of for months, but haven’t fixed. A simple example was the Shield Invader. They block your attacks with a shield, but many testers didn’t realize their shots were being stopped and just kept firing at the boss forever. Hitting an invincible enemy now comes with dramatic sprites and sound effects, hopefully making things much more clear (both here and in many other boss fights!)

That’s just one example. Speaking generally (to avoid spoilers), there are a couple other bosses and situations in the game that are a little unusual, that also left players not knowing what to do. I don’t want to take them out, because I think they add a lot of personality to the game, but I don’t want people to get stuck in a fast-paced action game either. I added a bunch of subtle prompts to help confused players out (as well as some not-so-subtle prompts if they really aren’t getting it after a while.)

I added a tutorial for the taunt move, and made all tutorial text change depending on the controller you’re using. I also finally made the game save your progress, allowing me to hide the tutorials on repeat playthroughs, just like in the original Bleed. Whee!

Continue reading →

Bad news. Due to a setback, the trailer won’t be out for a little while. Sincere apologies to anyone who was excited for it, or is frustrated by the delays — I’m right there with you and I’ll make it happen as soon as I can. The only other productive thing to do in the meantime is to hammer away at the remainder of the game, and that’s what’s gonna happen!

 

What I Did This Week

Much of this week was spent preparing submissions for PAX Prime (they’re trying to call it PAX West this year, but I ain’t buyin’ it!!) I’m trying to get Bleed 2 into either the PAX 10, or the Indie Megabooth, so I can exhibit there and have a grand old time. Wish me luck!

Besides that, I plan to have the game at “beta” by mid-June. Meaning, I want all these stickies gone except for “Bugfixing”, “Playtesting” and “Polish”! So when I wasn’t preparing festival submissions, I was working on getting rid of these bad boys.

What remains in those stickies? Well, leaderboards were, and they got knocked out this week. Before leaderboards were just a mocked-up, non-functioning menu — now it’s 100% working! I’m using data from the original Bleed, since there aren’t any entries for Bleed 2 yet.

Since there’s so many entries displayed (up to 100), I added special movement code just for this menu. Pressing left/right scrolls up/down in batches of 10, and holding any button scrolls in that direction. Nothing too fancy, just details you gotta think about. There doesn’t need to be a selector for individual entries unless I get replays 100% working, but you can see I’m ready and hoping for that.

Continue reading →

Oh boy oh boy! It’s getting close to trailer time. I put one together this week, so here’s what went into making it!

 

Planning

It started with a bunch of planning and research, to figure out what the trailer had to communicate to be successful. If anyone’s curious, two great articles I found were this one, and this one. In the end, here’s what I got:

• Introduce Wryn’s basic abilities (so viewers understand how the game works)
• Demonstrate how fast the game plays when the abilities are used effectively
• Show off the volume and variety of locations and boss fights
• Say who’s working on the game (they’re kind of a big deal)
• Say name of the game, when it’s coming out, for what platforms, and my website
• Do it all fast, with minimal-to-no text, no drawn-out intros, and a maximum of 90 seconds

Once I had that sorted, I went over the song I was using to see how it fit with my criteria. I think the music strongly informs the emotional journey of the trailer, so the action and information had to flow with it.

That’s what I landed on! As the song warms up, I introduce how to play the game, and as it builds to a mini-climax I use more intense and busy footage. Then the song backs off a little, so I use that time to display credits. Finally, the song and trailer ramp way back up and beyond, showing as many bosses and crazy action scenes as possible before ending with the important info.
Continue reading →