One of the things I worked on this week was particle effects! You probably know what they are, but in case you don’t — particles are tiny images, used purely for aesthetics. I have them all in their own sprite sheet, just like tilesets or animations or anything else.

Particles don’t need collision detection or AI or any other fancy code, so you can have a whole bunch of them on-screen without much of a performance cost! Mine have a few basic properties like weight, transparency, scale, rotation and animation speed… and that’s about it!

Anyways, they can add a lot of life and polish to any game. There’s already a bunch in Bleed 2, like bullet casings and air-dodge trails. Here are some more I put in this week:

Bam! Hitting enemies with the katana now plays a slicing animation along with some other effects, and dying Invaders lose their guns. These are all particles!
Some much more subtle particle work. Little dust clouds and kicked up when Wryn runs and jumps.
I added effects for when enemies fire bullets, and when bullets are reflected. Many enemies use the same command to fire their bullets, so I only need to put the particle instructions in that one command to make them appear for all bullets — it makes me feel semi-clever. You may notice the firing and reflecting particles are the same, but bullet reflecting layers more particles on top.
And finally, some particles for bosses! You can see the bullet-firing particles re-size to match the bullet they belong to, and there’s also some big particles for when bosses perform big reflectable attacks, as well as for when Wryn parries them. Additionally, the Blast Jumper’s cannons now glow before firing, which makes it a lot more fair. And you can see the re-coloured particles in action, too!!

Now, you might be saying: those are nice, but are they really vital for the demo? Well… no. They’re going to make it a lot more polished looking, but what I really should be focusing on is menus and audio, because right now the game doesn’t have any. So, next week I’ll stop slacking on that and get some damn audio in there!

…not that you’ll be able to see it in gifs — but still!

Oh, and happy Easter, for those who celebrate!