Composing Wryn

Only two levels left to make for Bleed 2, woohoo! Hopefully they don’t take as long as that last one.

As for composing Wryn — I don’t mean trying to calm her down (I think that’s what we call a “dad joke”.) I thought I’d go behind the scenes on Wryn one more time to show how she’s made, this time in the non-visual sense. There’s a little more going on than you might expect!
As I’ve mentioned before, all objects in Bleed are something I call ‘Entities’, and all Entities have a hitbox. But if you count them up, you’ll see Wryn has five hitboxes. Whaa…?

Well, first off, Wryn needs to be able to collide with the world. So here we have her main hitbox, which tells her when she’s standing on a floor, pushing against a wall, etc. It shrinks a bit during air-dashes to let her get closer to floors and ceilings.

Next we’ve got the three small hitboxes, and those are how Wryn receives damage. One of them is placed at her center, and the other two are rotated around it depending on the direction Wryn is moving. The most obvious example is during an air-dodge, but they even shift subtly during her other animations to match her sprite. They’re as tiny as possible without throwing off the collision detection.
Finally we’ve got the big hitbox, which detects when Wryn dodges hazards. It’s also placed at Wryn’s center, and only activates when she’s in an air-dodge.
And if you want some bonus hitbox goodness, there are also small, invisible hitboxes that spawn whenever you fire a weapon, so you can hit Enemies that are too close to Wryn to be damaged by the bullets coming from her gun. (You may recall I mentioned these in a previous post.)

And that’s it! Tomorrow I get cracking on the game’s second-last level!