Week In Review — July 10

I started the week by sorting the giant list of problems, classifying each item as very-important, kinda-important, and not-really-that-important.

“Very important” items are the ones that absolutely must be done. They include fixing all the major crashes and bugs I’ve found, as well as tasks like making the end credits sequence and balancing the weapons and characters. “Kinda important” items are ones I *could* leave uncorrected, but I’d rather fix them. For example, all the vehicles in level 2 are red, and one of Valentine’s fights has an attack I think is really bad — not critical, but things I think people would notice. All the other items are very low importance, and basically just polish (and I value having a polished game, but game-breaking bugs really should take priority over “adding particles to attack X”.)

Each category ended up filling about two pages, and you can see I tackled a bunch of medium-importance items this week… I was kinda procrastinating on the very-important ones, which won’t be nearly as easy or fast to check off. But I’ll have to do them soon!!

So blah blah blah, what else did I actually do this week? Well, I made Bleed 2’s splash screen!

Ooooh, aaaah! I’ve wanted to try coding a circle transition and I finally got my excuse. I also coded some randomness in the menu — sometimes Jukio is credited first, sometimes Joonas is. They’re both putting so much awesome work into the game, I don’t want either to feel slighted (I’m sure they wouldn’t, but I’m dumb like that.)

I actually really like it when games don’t have splash screens, and let you get right in the action (like in Braid, or The Witness), but I do want to shout them out, and I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished. I’ll probably make it skippable, at least.

Other than that, just lots of rounding off rough edges — fixing lots of glitches with bosses (mostly ones I haven’t shown, or I’d talk about that), making sure co-op cinematics behaved properly, so on and so forth. I also finally fixed Wryn’s taunt sprites! Her hair isn’t symmetrical, so her sprite should look different depending on which direction she’s facing. I’ve had it mirrored up until now, but I finally decided to fix it.

I’m not sure if anyone even notices details like that, but they matter to me! I guess I’ll have to start tackling the huge items next week — if I put them off much longer I won’t really have a choice!