Soooo this week, I got the final level roughly half-way finished… but then something happened. I got accepted to show off Bleed 2 at an upcoming expo — something I’ve never done before! The prospect is equally exciting and terrifying.
The event is about a month away, which means I really have to alter my game plan here. Up until this point I’ve been piecing Bleed 2 together in rough, with the intention of having a very-unpolished-but-fully-playable alpha that I could playtest, improve and add to. While it might look okay in gifs, the fact is there are a LOT of basic things missing or rough around the edges, including music, sound effects, particle effects, menus, etc. There’s no way I can show it off like this.
And so, the assembly of the main campaign has been put on hold. Over the coming weeks I’ll be focusing on making the first level as complete and polished as possible. In many ways this will be good for the game, because it means a lot of refining and bug-fixing, which will positively affect the entire game as a whole. It’ll also be a test of how good I can make the first level, hopefully establishing the level of quality for the rest of the game and giving me an idea of how long it will take for me to accomplish that.
This all happened late in the week, but I got a little work started already:
I altered the sprites of enemy bullets to make their colour more clear. I’m also playing with an alternate colouring of the unreflectable yellow bullets, to further differentiate them. This is for the sake of visual clarity, and to help out people like me who are colour deficient.
I also fixed a bug with the Entity draw order. If several Entities were drawing on the same level, it would cause the sprites to flicker and fight since they didn’t know which should draw on top of the other. Now every Entity has a small random offset to their draw order, solving the issue.
That’s it for now… there will be many more changes in the weeks to come. Hopefully I can get the level together in time to show it off well! Aiiieee!!