Week In Review — Aug 7

This week I made a new trailer to announce Bleed 2! (To be clear, the game’s not done, but it does need to be *officially announced*.) I put a trailer together back in May that didn’t work out for various reasons, however THIS one is 210% good to go and will be out in the next week or two, max! Buuttttt anything I wrote about trailer-making would just be a repeat of the May post, so I’ll spare you. Instead, here are a few bits of polish I’ve added to the game over the last little while! Hopefully it isn’t too filler-y!

First we have the Rolling Invader mini-boss (my boss names are so creative, aren’t they??) It’s supposed to exist as a soft bullet-time tutorial, since slow-mo would (ideally) help new players deal with its speedy, dodgy antics. However, the Invader dodged shots instantly, even during bullet time, making the fight a poor introduction to the ability. I changed it so that if the player is slowing time, the Rolling Invader takes a while to react to the incoming bullets. I’m not sure how great it is, but it’s better!

I added a new behaviour for boss deaths — when they die, all on-screen bullets are dismissed, the idea being to avoid those lame deaths where you kill the boss and then die to a stray bullet left behind. Most bullets could use their “hit wall” animation to disappear, but the giant bullets explode on impact and it looked stupid for them to spontaneously explode mid-air. So, I made a new animation for that.

Finally, levels now have a separate gravity for particles, which I mainly use for speedy environments. You can see the bullet casings and Lil’ Guppy bits zooming off above. I think it lends some weight to the fast-moving sections, of which there are many in the game!

Aaaaand that’s about it for now! Exciting things are coming soon so I hope you can hang in there just a bit longer!