I’ve finished the first 5 levels! Hurray!
I think BH2 looks much prettier than the previous game, and I hope everyone agrees. Though I guess you’ll have to see it in action to appreciate it.

Now it’s time to work on the player’s animations and weapons, and power-up items.
Once those are done it’ll be almost time to publish a demo!

I gave the foes some platforms to stand on, so they don’t float awkwardly. How do the platforms float? I don’t care.

Here’s what BH2 currently looks like. This is the resolution I’ll be using for the web version (800×600).
The border artwork is currently from EBF4, but I’ll get some original artwork in there later, and give the player some options for it.

The background is just a bunch of falling leaves, that go faster the further you get into the level. It’s just a particle effect. I think it looks pretty cool, and isn’t as distracting as you might think. The best thing about it is that’s it’s incredibly easy to do, so I can actually make a unique background for every level without too much work!

I’ve been playing around with an awesome tool called Adobe Scout, which tells you exactly what your Flash games are doing – All the way down to memory allocations, CPU time, and low level GPU calls. It makes fancy graphs of this data, and you can identify where performance sucks, and see exactly what code is causing it. It’s so detailed that running Bullet Heaven 2 for one minute will generate *gigabytes* of data.

I’ve used it to identify a memory leak and a lot of wasted GPU draw calls, and after tidying things up, BH2 runs better than ever. The screenshot below shows around 3,000 bullets running at 60fps in 1080p.

Obviously my computer is pretty good (but not amazing), but in practice you won’t need this much power. BH2 will rarely need more than 1,000 bullets (much less on easier difficulties), and can be played at 30fps, in a lower resolution. So the minimum requirements will be tiny – easily low enough to run on older mobile devices.

I’m pretty happy.

I do still have a few major features to add though – so we’ll see how much those effect performance later.

Almost finished programming the foes for the first area. Also added a lot of special effects. Enemies now explode like fireworks, which is rather pretty.

I’m going to try to make the first area fully functional before releasing another demo.