Week In Review — Jan 18

It was one hell of a week for work, but a bad week for pictures.

Most of the week was spent preparing Bleed 2 to be integrated with the Steam API. Pretty optimistic of me, since I don’t know for a fact that Bleed 2 will be released on Steam, but I’d like to think there’s a reasonable chance. Anyways, if you don’t know what “integrated with the Steam API” means, allow me to explain:

The Steam API is like a little program that lets your game talk to Steam. This allows your game to have things like leaderboards and achievements and all those other good Steam features that everyone loves. The issue is that the Steam API is written in one programming language, while Bleed 2 is being written in an other. They can’t communicate easily — you couldn’t even pass the number ‘1’ between them without things getting messed up. So, you have to write a third program to translate between the two.

Now, I have no idea how to do that. Lucky for me my father is a professional programmer with decades of experience, and I can come to him when I encounter big hurdles like this. I struggled through on Bleed 1 with his help and managed to get achievements working, and leaderboards half-working. It was pretty bare-bones but it felt like enough. This week he had some time on his hands, so just “for fun” helped me get pretty much everything fully in-place. In less than a week. Just for fun.

So as long as A) Bleed 2 gets on Steam and B) I don’t somehow mess things up between now and then, it’s very likely that Bleed 2 will contain fully-functional in-game leaderboards, achievements, cloud saves, and maybe even more! I know it might not be the most riveting thing to read about, but I’m really jazzed that Bleed 2 will be a huge step up in terms of quality and features and professionalism.

A huge shout out to my dad for making that possible!