BOOTDISK REVOLUTION

This week was more random work! I did more audio, finished my Steam store page, and prepared all the levels for co-op play. Woohoo! Yesterday, I decided to poke around everyone’s favourite topic — please join me for one more ride on the magical replay unicorn!

In case you’re not interested, I’m peppering this long article with assets from this week.

Random Number Generation

Things were looking great the last time I worked on replays, but they were woefully un-tested. All that I knew for sure was that I could record a replay and play it back on the same computer. A better test would be to try playing it back on other computers — so I did that, and it worked great… until I tried playing it back on a Mac.

For a quick, simple refresher: a random number generator (RNG) is like a math formula. You give the formula a starting number, called a ‘seed’, and it spits out an endless series of random numbers for you! Since the numbers are being created by a math formula, though, starting with the same seed always produces the same series of numbers. So the RNG makes Bleed *seem* random, but if you were to play the exact same way, using the same seed, the random numbers would always be the same, making the game always play the same, making things like replays possible.

So. The PC version of Bleed 2 is made using XNA, which comes with an RNG built-in. My dirty Mac port was made using MonoGame, which has its own, different RNG. The RNGs are using different formulas, meaning the game behaves differently on each computer, breaking the replays.

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This week was a grab-bag of work. Among other things, I worked on audio, gave a few environments some much-needed touch-ups, worked on my Steam store page, and put together a press kit. In general, it’s all being done with the goal of “marketing”, so let’s talk about that — and maybe our feelings, too.

First, what do those tasks have to do with marketing? Well, for example, I need a trailer to officially announce the game, and I can’t (wont?) make a trailer without properly implemented audio (I’m sure my audio collaborators wouldn’t appreciate this, either.) I’ll need screenshots, too, and certain images could be dangerous to release — it’s cute having rip-pff Mario and Metroid posters in Wryn’s room, but they aren’t my characters to use and I don’t want to risk any legal trouble. Luckily, some indie dev pals have been kind enough to let me shout out their games in the posters instead (Shutshimi and They Bleed Pixels, for anyone wondering!)

I also plan to open a “coming soon” Steam store page for Bleed 2 when I announce it. Along with the trailer and screenshots, I need to prepare other assets for the store page, like trading cards. I’ve put together some simple cards using images from the “box art” — I might add more, non-box-art cards in the future, but honestly my time could probably be better spent.

Finally, in case you aren’t familiar with press kits: all these materials (along with a bunch of marketing copy about myself and my game) get combined into a ‘press kit’ — literally, like a “Write Your Own News Story About Bleed 2 Kit”. It has the trailer, screenshots, text, links, etc etc etc, everything a journalist might want or need to cover the game. Then you start emailing and hope someone’s interested! Here’s an example of a presskit (made with the great tool, presskit(), by its creators.)

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This week I spent a lot of time preparing marketing stuff. Not my favourite activity, but admittedly very important. I mention it in case you’re wondering what I was up to, because I’m blogging about something totally different: the re-done scoring system!

Most obviously, there are ranks associated with the multipliers now! It gives you a better sense of how you performed, whereas before they were just arbitrary multipliers with no indication if you could have done better. Also obviously, the three ranks are summed up into a final ranking, which I find more satisfying.

In the original Bleed the scoring system was done a bit thoughtlessly. I’ve gone through it and removed some of the categories:

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I’m getting over being sick right now, so hopefully this post is coherent. I took a break from audio this week and tackled balancing the levels for the various difficulty settings!

In case that doesn’t mean anything to you: there are lots of changes to the game depending on the difficulty level, some bigger than others. Enemies spawn in trickier locations and get new behaviours, set-pieces might be longer or more complex, etc etc etc. Easier difficulties establish fundamentals that get expanded on as the game gets harder.

The whole purple/yellow reflectability thing is taken into account, too. On Easy, there are absolutely no yellow enemies (though bosses occasionally use some yellow attacks.) On other difficulties, yellow enemies appear more commonly as the game progresses. On Very Hard, there is a near-even mix of purple and yellow through the entire game (but not exactly 50/50, I think it’s more fun to favour the player a little.)

So, for some Easy vs Very Hard examples!

More baddies, more bullets, more yellow! The bullets move a bit slower on Easy, too.

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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”.

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It’s been a while since I showed a boss, so let’s do that! Here’s a new Rival machine: the Semi Core!

You can actually see him in there! I try to show him inside the Cores whenever I can in Bleed 2. It makes it clear he’s piloting them, plus he gets some more character! I’m happy with how his maniacal laugh turned out.

I’m showing some of his attacks, but since they’re all displayed in large gifs they’re after the break!

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A lot of this week was spent getting Bleed 2 hooked into the Steam API. I can’t really show the behind-the-scenes of how this works, since I’m pretty sure it’s against the Steam contract, but hey! Look at the results!

Maybe not much for you to get excited about, but it pumps me up seeing the title of my game there!

I got things like achievements working, even though I don’t have any actual achievements designed or coded yet. I also implemented cross-platform cloud saving, so your save files should follow you no matter where you go or what computer you’re on! (Creepy!)

Finally I worked on leaderboards, which turned out to be a much bigger headache than I anticipated! I mean, getting them displaying here was fairly easy (I’m using the Bleed 1 leaderboards to test it for now, since there aren’t any for Bleed 2 yet…) but actually coding and laying out the menu in an effective, understandable way has proven pretty difficult!

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Back to work on Bleed 2 this week! I picked the menu system off my list of things to do.

Menu systems might not be thrilling to code (or to read about!) but it’s just one of those things you gotta do if you want a finished game. There’s a surprising amount to consider, depending on the game. What’s in each menu, and how can everything be structured to lead logically to each other? How do you handle a keyboard, mouse and gamepad all being used to navigate it? If there’s more than one player, what do you do about multiple inputs? Etc etc etc. They’re fun little puzzles to solve for me, to be honest.

Design-wise, I’d already taken a first stab at a menu system a long time ago. It was functional, but it was bulky and I couldn’t fit very many items on the screen at once. It was also bloated in terms of storage, with every menu item held in a sprite sheet with two variants for ‘selected’ and ‘unselected’.

First I thinned everything down, and got navigation and highlighting and some simple animations working, too! I also straightened out the menu — it used to be angled, which I originally imaged was stylish, but it made it harder to tell which item was selected and appears messy to me now.

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Happy new years to all!

The bi-annual charity speedrunning marathon Awesome Games Done Quick is on this week! I’d strongly encourage anyone reading this to check it out — it’s a week of the world’s best players beating games in record time (and sometimes even racing each other head-to-head!) all in the name of raising money for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. Pretty amazing to see games and gamers having such a positive impact.

As for me, I spent this week getting organized for the new year. I used sticky notes to map out what’s left and which parts depend on others, letting me figure what order to tackle things in.

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