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:

• Deaths: Judging players on this suggests dying is an expected part of the game, and puts simply ‘not dying’ as the pinnacle of achievement. I don’t like either implication. It’s also a meaningless stat in Arcade Mode since the game is over if you die.
• Difficulty: I tried to encourage play on harder difficulties by giving a bonus for it, but it’s ultimately pretty empty to have one rank decided no matter how you perform.

Naturally, this means I had to find new categories!

• Time: Bleed 2 will not be a race against the clock. I just want to reward players who don’t dawdle. The window for an S-rank will be pretty generous.
• Damage: This does all the things that the ‘Deaths’ category should have: rewarding and encouraging skilled play, and being relevant even in Arcade Mode.

The ‘Style’ category remains in, which is just an average of your style rank throughout the level. Well, mostly — since you start each individual level (in Story Mode) with zero style rank, it takes a bit of time to work up to an S-rank, which can skew the average towards the low end. So, the S-rank is given a bit of favour to offset this (this is also true of the original Bleed.)

Finally, we have the Triple S-rank! It only appears as the total when you get three S-ranks. It’s a small touch, but I like acknowledging when people are total badasses!

Overall, this does make ranking well harder to do than the original. On the other hand, the multipliers are uniform now, whereas in Bleed they were all over the place. (In Bleed 2 an S-rank is x1.25, an A-rank is x1.10, etc.) You won’t be punished with a negative multiplier unless you score a C or lower. I think that’s fair!

That’s about as many times as I can read and write the word ‘rank’ without it looking funny. You know what I mean…? Well, anyways, see you next week!