One thing I worked on this week was tuning the weapons for Bleed 2! I’m showing a few unlockable weapons in this post, so I’ve hidden those behind the break in case you’re spoiler-averse.
In non-spoilery terms: the original Bleed’s weapons had a lot of issues. When designing them I focused purely on the numbers and their use in ideal situations, as if everyone playing the game was a flawless machine (or a TASer!) Many weapons were theoretically powerful, but in reality underwhelming and pointless. Others were straight-up balanced poorly — see some DPS (damage-per-second) values from the original:
- Pistols: 123
- Rockets: 66
- Laser: 91
- Katana: 150 (used perfectly), 72 (used normally)
- Revolver: 350 (used perfectly), 62 (used normally)
…yeah. This time around, I want weapons to feel powerful and fun even in casual use. For example, the starting weapons in Bleed 2 are the pistols and katana (which can be used as a combo weapon, or as standalones separately.) Here’s the current DPS breakdown for them:
- Pistols: 170
- Katana (Reflecting Swipe): 150
- Katana (Standalone Flurry): 160
I don’t want players to feel they need to button-mash to excel, so the auto-fire attacks of the pistols and the flurry do more damage than spamming the reflect. Also, while the standalone katana weapon does less damage than the pistols, they’re all pretty close — so if you’re all about the katana I hope you can play the game without feeling terribly underpowered.
Returning in Bleed 2 are the rocket launcher and laser rifle, whee! In addition to tuning their damage better, I’ve made some changes to their behaviour that I hope will make them more interesting and fun to use.
The rocket launcher does 180dps right now (slightly more than the pistols.) It’s a large area-of-effect explosion, so it can blow away groups of enemies (which there are a more of in this game) or even hit a few through their shields. Also, while I don’t want to talk specifics, the explosion has special interactions with a couple bosses, making certain fights quicker or exposing weak points in ways you couldn’t before.
The laser rifle also got an overhaul! Now you can hold the attack button to spam a weak-but-constant laser (120dps), or stop firing and allow it to charge up, shooting a giant beam (220dps) that penetrates any shield at max charge. It doesn’t have specially-coded boss interactions like the rocket launcher, but there are several bosses with shields or other defenses (like the Segment Slider!) where the laser rifle really helps out.
This might make you think the weapons all exist within a small range of damage, but that’s not the case. Right now, including unlockable characters and their weapons/abilities, the worst attack in the game does 35dps, and the absolute best does 600dps! Some are just for fun, and others do need to be used well to reach their full dps potential, but in general I’m erring on the side of fun and viability.
Also, since I’ve divided Arcade Mode into “New Game” and “New Game+”, I don’t think this will throw off the balance at all. The super-pure “New Game” is there for those who want it — and the more I work on them, the more I think/hope the weapons of “New Game+” will lead to some really technical, strategic play for speedrunners, and just chaotic fun and diversity for casual players!
I’m using unlockable weapons, abilities and characters as the rewards for completing the game on various difficulties — I’d like Bleed 2 to open up to you as your mastery increases! So I’m really trying to make sure I do a better job with them this time around, and so far I’m feeling confident and hopeful. Feel free to let me know if you have any comments/ideas!