You didn’t think I’d actually do it, did you? How does it feel to be WRONG — here’s what I did this week!

 

Interior Scenes

As planned, I worked on the layout and enemy placement for the first level! The level takes place in a city, not just the rooftops, so I had some interior scenes to put together.

You can also see some of the new enemy characters there! They’re the ground troops leading the assault on the city. Maybe I’ll do a whole post on them in the future, but for now I’ll say that I’m pretty proud of how they turned out. Like Wryn, they use a combination of skeletal animation and sprite animation, so I can mix and match different heads, bodies, weapons, etc. while using the same animations across all variations.

Of course, ones with different heads, items, etc. have slightly different abilities… although they all die pretty quick so if you’re good you might not even notice, haha. I tend to prefer minor enemies in Bleed as a palate cleanser more than anything else.

 

Bosses!

Also as planned, I refined the bosses for the first level! The Blast Jumper (the mech boss I keep showing) was actually the last boss to be completed for the game, so it needed some relatively minor tweaks, just to make it more challenging and satisfying to fight. That one was pretty simple.

On the other hand, there’s a second boss in the first level that needed to be completely re-done. It was one of the first bosses I made for the game, probably around a year ago? Well, it sucked before and it doesn’t now, but I’m not quite feeling ready to show it. I will say that it appears after this auto-run section that I also started work on:

I literally started prototyping it yesterday so it’s pretty rough — the enemies are randomly spawning to test their AI. Still, I like where it’s going so far!

 

Mouse Cursor

Finally, perhaps most boring of all, I worked on the mouse cursor for the game. You now have your selection between a few styles of cursor, its colour and rotation speed.

In the coming week I hope to complete that auto-run section, finish the first level mini-bosses, and bring the first level to a state where it’s generally complete, like what you might call an alpha. That might turn out to be a bit too ambitious, but I really want to get it there soon so I can move on to the next level and take a break from this one.

Also critical to Bleed 2’s progress, I plan to play a bunch of Smash Bros. Wii U.

Peace!