This week I playtested the first level of Bleed 2 at Bento Miso! It was a really positive experience — everyone there is creative and intelligent and super nice, and I learned a lot about how my game will be understood by new players. I figure this is as good a time as any to go over some changes I’ve made based on playtesting.

Cutscenes

The game features a few (very quick) in-game cutscenes to move the action along. I’ve done my best to make these as seamless as possible, but in some cases they’re apparently too seamless — it took a while for some players to realize when a cutscene had ended. To combat this, the HUD is hidden and the game is slightly letterboxed during cutscenes. Hopefully this makes the distinction clear.

Shield Invaders

Some Invaders have shields that need to be blown off by reflecting their bullets back at them. When de-shielded, they play a little animation and their shield flies off to illustrate that they’re vulnerable now. Many people missed the visual cues and would sit waiting for them to fire again. A de-shielded Invader now dies immediately from the force of the explosion, which is also a lot more satisfying.

Leading the Player

Watching people play showed me when I wasn’t properly indicating it was time to move on. Most egregious was after the Shield Invader mini-boss, where I somehow expected people to enter a building that looked like a solid wall. I really dislike big flashing arrows pointing the way (even though I totally used them in Bleed) so I added an animation to illustrate the path to take.

Other than that, the game was recording some simple stats behind the scenes — mainly clear time and death count/cause. On average, it took about 6 minutes to beat, with the fastest clear time being 4 minutes and the longest being 12. Nobody died more than twice but most died at the last boss, which makes sense since they were worn down from all the preceding action.

The demo was set on the easiest difficulty, so I find these numbers encouraging. I’ve watched a bunch of let’s plays of the original where people struggled to overcome the first boss (let alone the first level) and I’d like to make the difficulty progression more of a curve than a brick wall this time.

Then again, the Bento Miso crowd is no stranger to videogames, so I’ll have to wait and see how the good people of TCAF handle it!