Hay guys, this post is just a little reminder of how difficulty levels will work in Bull Heaven 2.

All the screenshots I’ve been posting so far are on the hardest difficulty, because they look the most impressive. Obviously most people won’t be skilled enough to play at that difficulty.

The difficulty levels are:
• Casual: ~25% bullets
• Hard: ~50% bullets
• Heavenly: 100% bullets

You’ll be able to switch difficulty at any time, much like in EBF4, but scores and ranks will be counted separately for each difficulty.

On top of that, there will be cheats (basically difficulty modifiers), much like in the previous game, but now they can also be used to make the game harder. These will include stuff like:
• Less or more lives.
• Less or more enemy HP.
• Slower or faster game speed.
• More items drops.
• Less or more bombs.
• Longer or shorter death-bomb time.

These usually won’t invalidate scores, ranks or achievements, but they will effect the numbers to balance things. For example, reducing the game speed by 10% will also reduce your score by 10%.

There will be no permanent upgrades this time. But the cheats and other extras will be unlocked gradually (maybe even with the coins you collect), so they’ll function quite similarly.

Sound reasonable?

And the spider’s theme is… webs and strings, obviously!
I’m actually having a lot of trouble beating this guy, and there’s two more bosses after him.
I’ll have to practice more!

The hovertank’s theme is “following you around and trying to hit you with it’s massive canon”.
I didn’t have to think very hard to come up with that one.

Anyway, a lot of the patterns’ difficulty depends on how well you manipulate the tank’s position.

I updated the design for the hovertank boss because I wasn’t satisfied with the original one. Plus I think this one will suit the factory levels better, since they’re gonna be quite gray. It looks pretty damn cool in motion!
I also started playing around with filters in Starling. A 16-bit mode is something I’ve always wanted to add to my games, and it turns out I can do it with just one line of code. Hurray!

Here’s the source for the filter, btw.

In motion you can tell it’s a filter, but it still looks pretty good. In screenshots it looks almost legit. It doesn’t seem to have a huge effect on performance (or at least not on my computer), so I’ll leave it in as a bonus feature.

I think this is my favorite boss so far. The way she(?) moves around ended up looking pretty cool. Her theme is fast movement and honeycomb shields!

Adding in the honeycombs makes me see how much better the game will look once I draw proper backgrounds. Oh, and the honeycombs are there to punish you for spraying bullets, and they change up the gameplay quite a bit. I might actually go back and add some bubbles to the turtle boss.