Spiderbee done!
She’s pretty tough. Haven’t been able to Star-rank her yet, but I think it’s possible with some more practice.

I’ve discussed it with Kongregate briefly and here’s the content I’m thinking of doing for the paid versions of BH2:
• The 9 or 10 extra bosses I’m working on now.
• A randomized endless survival level for each world, limited to one life, no cheats.
• 3 of the playable characters: Slime Bunny, Dry NoLegs and Phyrnna.

So that works out to an extra 20 levels added to the 50 free levels.

The Steam version will have some more improvements:
• Support for widescreen and different resolutions. I’ll put a better HUD at the sides.
• HD graphics and uncompressed audio.
• The usual Steam features: Cloud, cards, achievements, etc.

The Kongregate version will be released first, with the Steam version a bit later. I’ll be posting the game on other sites too, but the premium version will probably only be available on Kongregate.

I’m aiming to have a similar price to EBF4 on each service, but that’s not decided yet.

Oh, and people who buy the game on Kongregate before it’s released on Steam can ask me for a free Steam copy later, if they would prefer that. I’ve been doing the same thing with EBF4 for anyone who asks.

Another boss done. Starting to fall behind schedule slightly. All this geometry is hurting my brain, but I gotta power through and finish the 2nd half of them now.

Also played through The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and it was amazing. I rarely go into a game without knowing anything about it, but that worked very well with this one. Lots of intense surprises, from awesome to terrifying. And the graphics are beautiful. <3

Another boss done! This guy has a thing for spear-shaped bundles of bullets, which are quite fun to graze.

A few people have pointed out that the HP bar looks crap. It just seemed like the most convenient place to put it, but I guess I’ll fix that later. I’ll also replace the graphic for the player’s hitbox with something more contrasty.

Over the last few days I bought a pile of different controllers to test out with Bullet Heaven 2.

The results are:
• Xbox 360: Driver installed automatically and everything worked.
• Xbox One: Had to install the driver manually from Microsoft’s website, but then everything worked.
• PS4: Driver installed automatically and everything almost worked.
• PS3: Had to follow a YouTube tutorial to install a driver and Xinput emulator, but then everything worked.

So PS3 was the only one that was somewhat complicated to set up.
Also PS4 has no START button, so you can’t pause the game! I’ll have to fix that. 😛

I should also note that all of these controllers were wired in with a USB cable, except the 360 one, which is a wired controller. I think it’s possible to get the PS3 and PS4 ones working with Bluetooth, but I haven’t tried that. Apparently there’s no wireless drivers for the Xbox One yet. (Not sure about wireless 360 ones either).

Research tells me that the wired Xbox 360 controller is generally the most compatible with stuff, and is the safest one to pick.

Later on the PS4 controller stopped working everywhere except inside Chrome. No idea what that’s about, but it started after setting up the PS3 controller, so maybe there’s some conflict of drivers or something. I tried installing InputMapper, and now it works again, so I probably recommend using that.

For anyone interested in how the controller inputs are coded, I use Zeh’s Key-Action-Binder.

As a last resort, you can use something like Joy2Key to map controller buttons to keyboard keys, and that should let you use all sorts of other controllers (like PS2). But the game only supports one player on keyboard, so no multiplayer like that.

Anyway. Despite all that, playing with the mouse is still the easiest way to play.
Nothing beats the precision of a mouse. 😀