Yo!! First off, you should know Summer Games Done Quick starts this weekend. Like, right now!! I love that event so I gotta shout it out every chance I get.

In Bleed 2 news, things are motoring along. I got all achievements implemented, as well as finally having all the unlockable characters roughed in! Most of what took so long was the sheer amount of artwork involved. For example, every character needs a full set of sprites for their in-game cinematics (in addition to their normal sprite sheets) — cinematics alone added almost 200 sprites of work.

So yeah, wah wah it was a lot to do but I got it done! Achievements and unlockable characters were some of the last big, individual items on my sticky wall of doom. Here’s how the wall has progressed over the last six months (I believe the photos were taken Jan/Apr/July.)

Three groups of stickies remain, and they represent big items. From left to right, we have: replays (let’s be real, I’ll probably cut these), officially announcing the game (still needs a while longer) and finally, playtesting/polishing/bugfixing!

Over the years that I’ve been making Bleed 2, I’ve been collecting all the glitches and bugs and rough edges I find and logging them in a text file. Now it’s finally time to turn to that and fix everything wrong with the game (that I’m aware of, at least!)

There’s a saying in software development that goes something like “once you’re done the first 90%, you still have the second 90% to go”, and that’s kinda the feeling I got from opening up the text file. Every line is a different problem-to-solve or thing-to-do, ranging from “investigate this crash” to “playtest the game with every character and make them actually fun.” Its scale is daunting.

The list needs some serious triage. I’ll start next week by going through the file as ruthlessly as possible, deciding how urgent each item is (or if they even need to be done.) I have to get a solid plan together, otherwise I feel the chance is high that I’ll get bogged down and lost trying to aimlessly check things off the list. One of the hardest parts of indie dev is staying disciplined, so this will be the test of that! See you next week!

…and check out SGDQ!!