I usually feel like blog posts have to be these big productions… and that mentality results in my making very few posts. I’m trying something new — short and simple, here’s what I worked on this week! I hope you find it somewhat interesting!

 Cinematics System

There are going to be in-game cinematics in Bleed 2, but don’t worry!! They’re nothing more than a few seconds long, and mostly just level transitions… but they will be there, so I made a re-usable system for player cinematics! It uses a small number of animations that can be swapped out depending on the current player character, so the story will make sense no matter who you’re using or how many players are present. Co-op is only a thought right now, but I’m trying to anticipate problems like that ahead of time, so it should be fairly easy to put in when and if the time comes!

Entity Draw Order

In the original Bleed, entities (like bullets, enemies, etc) drew to the screen in a pretty random order. This week I changed how drawing works to help make sure smaller entities aren’t hidden behind larger ones! The image is a pretty extreme example, but it does demonstrate before and after the change. The number and location of bullets is much more apparent now.

 

Pistols / Katana Combo Weapon

Finally, I re-wrote the pistols/katana combo weapon — due to a glitch, you could swing the katana literally every other frame (so, 30 times every second.) You can still swing it really quickly… but I think at some point there needs to be a reasonable limit in place. My two main reasons for this are: One, I don’t want players to feel they need to button mash to excel. Two, while I want bullet reflecting to be easy and responsive, I want there to be some cooldown on it so players can’t blindly swing non-stop and insta-win everything.

Also, while the pistols previously took 100ms (~6 frames) to start firing after the katana swipe, I’ve brought it down to 50ms (~3 frames.) One of the main goals of Bleed is quick and responsive combat, and even 6 frames begins to feel like a sloppy, cumbersome delay when you get in hectic situations. They fire so quickly now that I had to tweak the animations — while the sword is out Wryn fires with the pistol in her back hand only, switching to both hands once the katana is put away.

Aaaaand that’s it! Next week I plan to begin piecing the first level together, specifically refining its bosses, making them more challenging, responsive and fun. With any luck I’ll have a post up about that, too!