Woohoo! This weekend I’m exhibiting Bleed 2 at TCAF! The show is as awesome as it is free, so come give the game a shot and say hi if you’re in the area!

Something I managed to add for the exhibition is a co-op mode! In the original Bleed, co-op was basically a hack I put in at the last minute because I thought it’d be fun. I know there were a lot of issues with it as a result, so I’ve tried to improve it in several ways.

Better Camera

Previously the camera followed only player one, but now it’s weighted to take player two’s position into account. It’s not an even weighting — it strongly favours the first player — but it is there, and I can always fiddle with the bias to see if it helps.

Auto-Teleport

A huge gripe in the first game was that the second player could easily be left behind and lost off-screen. Now an indicator appears to point at the second player if they go off-screen. The indicator doubles as a countdown timer — if it hits zero, the second player is automatically teleported back to player one.

Bullet-Time

In the original, both players shared control over bullet-time: they both needed to hold the bullet-time button to fully slow time, with a single player holding the button yielding half the results at half the energy drain. That mechanic seems a bit too ridiculous to me now, so it’s been scrapped — I was trying to promote a sense of teamwork, but I have a new idea of how to accomplish that…

Better Gameplay

Finally, our dear friend Palette-Swapped Wryn doesn’t have a purple sword — hers is yellow! As you might guess, this means player two will be able to reflect the normally-unreflectable yellow bullets and attacks! Some of the minor enemies are palette-swapped in co-op as well, so player two has an equal amount of gameplay to participate in.
Hopefully feedback from TCAF will help me understand if I’m on the right track here!