I'm currently working on attack patterns for the enemies in BH2.
Still got a lot left to do, but here's some of what I've done so far:

Hay guys!
I've been slacking off lately, and catching up with games that I've been meaning to play.

Since I haven't made anything new, I'll just post some EBF fanart I've got recently!

From PongPang:

From MajMajor:

From Tanita:

On Sunday, Epic Battle Fantasy 4′s group won the Community’s Choice vote on Steam, meaning that EBF4 and the other games in it’s group were selected for a huge discount lasting 8 hours, and featured on Steam’s front page. It was smart of Valve to bundle EBF4 with Final Fantasy 7, as fans of FF are very likely to enjoy EBF too, so I got a chance to leech some players from a very popular game series! :D

This little bit of luck turned out to be huge for me, because in just 8 hours, the total number of people who had bought the game on Steam had almost quadrupled!

So I’ve got a huge number of new players, many of which probably won’t even have heard of EBF before, and the response from them has been pretty good. Besides a few technical problems, no one’s told me that they hate the game. So that’s cool.

Sure, many players who buy games in Steam sales won’t actually end up playing those games, but that’s fine, it still works out to a lot of extra fans (and cash!) that I wasn’t expecting.

I’m not sure how Valve decides what games get featured, but I do know that not all of them get a chance, so I must be doing something right. (EBF4 was also featured on the front page in Europe, the day after launch)

So it looks like I’ve got a good future ahead of me on Steam, and hopefully getting a game through Greenlight won’t take 6 months next time! :P

Steam is now my primary source of income (with Kongregate premium sales being second), and what this means is that I’ll definitely be focusing on larger games with paid content, rather than completely free web games. But I’ll continue to make free web versions too.

And yeah, I’ll probably make EBF5… someday.


If you haven't grabbed a copy yet, EBF4 is still 50% off for a few more days!

Epic Battle Fantasy 4 is 50% off for the Steam Summer sale!
Just so you know.

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Bullet Heaven 2 now has local co-op play for up to 4 players, and full gamepad support (even in the browser)! That's kind of cool IMO.
I'm almost finished with the core mechanics and can soon get on with actually making all of the levels! Woop!

Almost finished drawing and animating the foes for Bullet Heaven 2! There's almost 150 of them!

Yo, I released a demo of the first 5 levels of BulletHeaven 2!

A lot is still unfinished, but check it out: http://kupogames.com/2014/05/25/bullet-heaven-2-demo-first-5-levels/

Make sure you have hardware acceleration enabled, and you should play in full screen since my blog isn't wide enough for the game. :P

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 shows around 5,000 bullets running at 60fps in 1080p. There's also 80 foes in there.

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. Fancy effects can be disabled too. So the minimum hardware requirements will be tiny – easily low enough to run on older mobile devices.

I’m pretty happy with the performance. :D
Time to get on with actually making the game!

Still drawing enemies for Bullet Heaven 2, and I'll probably be at it for a while...

Hey guys, I've released a short demo of what I've done so far, check it out.
Currently busy drawing all of the enemies, and you can see those here.


 

It’s been a while since I drew anything this detailed… Looks like it’s going to take me a long time to draw all of the bosses. Will be animating them this time too.