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!

Implementing save games came with an interesting challenge — cloud saving! I mean, cloud saving is handled by the Steam API, so that’s taken care of, but I had to decide what to do in the case of a save file mismatch. At first I was going to show the two savegames on screen and be like “which one you wanna go with?” but that seemed clunky and I’d rather handle it behind the scenes if possible. Which is what I managed!

Luckily, Bleed is a pretty straightforward game in terms of save files — it’s mostly one-way progress trackers and high scores. So, whenever there’s a mismatch, it takes the two save files and smushes them together, keeping the highest scores and farthest completions from each. It sounds obvious when I type it out, and maybe it is, but it took me a while to get it. This is new stuff for me!

Finally, saving progress means I can detect when things are unlocked, which means I can make a fancy unlock screen!

Okay, it’s not that fancy looking. But it feels fancy to have. (Also, I replaced sprites so this gif wasn’t spoilery. Most of these aren’t unlockables.)

I think having this is important. So, so many people who played Bleed 1 didn’t even know there were unlockable weapons, let alone how to select them. And that’s totally on me, because I never made it clear — I just had ‘change weapon’ in the pause menu and assumed people would find it. Not this time! Now you’re explicitly shown what you unlocked, and where to go to use it. I hope this cuts down confusion, or at least allows me to blame users instead of myself. Hah!

That’s about all I did this week that wasn’t super spoilery! Next week I’ll probably tackle Arcade Mode, and maybe Challenge Mode — but let’s not get carried away. Bye for now!!