This week I worked on things that blog poorly, like the controller rumble system and implementation. So now all actions and characters have controller rumble (which you can also disable in the options, don’t worry!) but do you really want to read about that…? I’m guessing no, so here’s a couple random things I’ve added and thought about over the last few months.

 

Health Pickups

Yes, yes, you say. We know about health pickups. Well, some of them were more challenging to implement than you’d expect! They’re exclusive to Arcade Mode, and most are hidden out of the way so you have to sacrifice a bit of time to get them, but two levels in Bleed 2 really don’t have anywhere to hide them (like in the picture above!) I want each level to have one, though… what to do?

My solution is that the two troublesome levels begin with the pickups in plain view, and the level won’t properly begin until they’re gone. Players have three options: grab the health and begin the level, wait five seconds for the pickup to fade, or shoot the pickup to destroy it. I think grabbing health will clear your style meter, so if you care about score (or are too cool for extra health) shooting is the quickest-but-riskiest option. The fourth, fastest option, is to begin the level at max health, in which case the health pickup never spawns and the level begins immediately.

The health spawns at an awkward high position right now because I don’t want players to accidentally grab it as it appears, but there’s better ways of doing this and I’ll probably polish it up at some point. Since these kinds of health pickups aren’t hidden, grabbing them won’t get you the achievement for finding ‘hidden’ health pickups. Lastly, the two levels with health in plain view are roughly one-third and two-thirds of the way through the game, so they’ll work out pretty well for beginners attempting Arcade Mode, I think!

 

Animated Dialogue

Much less in-depth is that dialogue faces now have simple animations for talking! I’m still using the sprites from the original Bleed here… I might eventually change them but that’s really, really low on the priority list right now. It’s been there forever, but the dialogue text also has a subtle drop shadow which is also new from the first game. Oooh, aaah.

 

New Reticles

Finally, perhaps tiniest of all, I’ve added a few new reticle styles to the game! I’m mostly using them as subtle references to other games I love… you might spot a cursor from the original Unreal Tournament, old LucasArts adventure games, or maybe Nuclear Throne (which I’m just getting into and am really enjoying!)

That’s all for now! Next week’s blog post might be a little light, too… diving right back into work after weeks of crunching for (and attending) PAX resulted in a pretty below-standard work week, and I can feel myself getting burnt out. I promised myself I’d take a short break after the convention and I’ll probably actually do that next week to get some energy back. We’ll see how that goes!