Articles - Bloodlife mod for Hotline Miami

Hey there! It's been a while, hasn't it?

Back in March 2018 I released a mod called Hotline Miami: Redux. The idea of said mod was to improve upon things that I felt Hotline Miami 1 could have done better. As the only programmer working on the mod, I was extremely fatigued during the weeks leading to its release, I was 16 years old at the time and I spent my entire summer vacation (which here in South America starts in December and ends in March) sitting at the computer and ignoring everything (and everyone) else that was going on because I wanted to make this mod and I wanted to make it fast (as I felt I wouldn't have time to continue working on it when school started again).

Due to a number of factors (mainly just my own incompetence), despite being my most downloaded project according to Itch.io's stats, the mod wasn't received well by the community. I'll never forget the following day, I was extremely tired so I went to sleep as soon as the game finished uploading, when I woke up I pulled up my phone before getting out of bed and the very first thing I did was check the comments on the Itch page. I felt completely devastated. First comment I read was someone saying I had ruined Hotline Miami.

2 years later, I graduated from High School, moved to a different city, made new friends, a lot has changed since then, but I still haven't gotten over Redux's reception. It haunts me because Hotline Miami is a game that's very important to me, what Dennaton Games did inspired the course of my life and is what made me want to become a game developer. So I started taking notes of what I did wrong with Redux, as how I handled the project was a major embarrassment, and began working on the next update for it.

Why am I telling you this? What does this have to do with Bloodlife?

With me being the main programmer of both mods, there's a lot of overlap between what I do in Redux and what I do in Bloodlife.

One thing I immediately noticed was wrong with Redux was the inability to play through the whole game in one sitting due to memory leaks. This wasn't an issue exclusive to Redux as it was also present in Bloodlife

Why did this happen?

Hotline Miami was developed in Game Maker 7, which is the latest and most up to date release of the Game Maker engine.

if you live in 2007.

By the time Hotline Miami 1 came out, Game Maker 7 was already outdated by 5 years. This caused a lot of problems for Dennaton as the game would consistently and constantly crash on Windows 8 and it meant the game wouldn't be able to receive console ports. Those who played Hotline Miami back in 2012 might recall experiencing a plethora of errors (and quite possibly a disdain towards one "objDevolver")

Reasonably, Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital chose to port the game to a more stable engine in 2013 with the help of Abstraction Games, which is the version that by now most people are familiar with.

This 2013 re-release of the game (referred in the game's launcher as "Updated") runs on PhyreEngine, which is a proprietary engine developed by Sony Interactive Entertainment aimed towards game development for the PlayStation consoles, but does support other platforms such as PC.

Unfortunately, the community doesn't have access to this version of the game (and never will, unless Sony decides to give people access to it, which is not a very smart move as PhyreEngine is still supported and will be for a while) and therefore can not be modified, so any mods for Hotline Miami have to be made using the buggy Game Maker 7 release of it.

By now, Game Maker 7 is 13 years old. This is what YouTube looked like 13 years ago:

Nostalgic? Sure (If anyone has a CSS theme for Stylus that makes YouTube look like this pls hit me up). Usable by today's standards? Adobe Flash doesn't even exist anymore.

So of course, when making a Hotline Miami mod it is borderline required to port your mod to a newer version of GameMaker and for a while that was GameMaker: Studio 1.4.

GameMaker: Studio 1.4 fixes a lot of the very glaring issues with the Game Maker 7 release of Hotline Miami, but introduces newer ones. Among many, the biggest and ugliest of them all is the introduction of memory leaks. This is something that seems to be an inherent problem with this version of the engine, as it is an issue that presents itself in many GameMaker: Studio 1.x games

So of course the solution is to then again port the game to the newer GameMaker Studio 2.

For a while I was hesitant to make the jump to GameMaker Studio 2 because of the massive differences in GUI, which I was afraid would negatively impact my workflow. But after some tweaking and using it for a while I grew accustomed to it.

So lately I've been working on getting Bloodlife and the next Hotline Miami: Redux update running on GameMaker Studio 2

Compatibility_Instances, Compatibility_Instances...

GameMaker Studio 2 changed how a lot of things worked from the development side of things. While you can import a GameMaker: Studio 1.x game and reasonably expect it to work right off the bat, developing one part of a game in Studio 1 and then finishing it in Studio 2 requires you to re-structure a lot of the game in order to take advantage of (and in some cases, just use) Studio 2.

For example: GameMaker Studio 2 changed how tiles work, sure it'll display the tiles that I put back in Studio 1, but if they break then I have to re-tile the entire game with the new system (which I might or might not have to do...)

The point of this update

I hope this update was useful so that you guys understand more about the problems that arise when it comes to developing Hotline Miami mods as well as the tools I have to fight with daily and why things are the way they are. I don't want to make a buggy game, no developer wants that. And I want to ensure that my mods can be enjoyed without the player having to jump through hoops of crashes and bugs.

Sadly that means taking more time to develop the game...

"mfw when" when people ask me if the mod is still being developed. (It is, I've already spent 5 years on it, I'm not going to stop until it's finished)

If you're disappointed by how infrequent my updates are here on ModDB, I have a Discord server at Discord.gg , there we can chat about Hotline Miami, game dev, give each other feedback and stuff like that.

I also have a Twitter account at @Pi0h1 which I want to start using for less shitposting/retweeting and instead to post more updates regarding my projects

Peace!

We are currently nearing the end of 2019, and it'll be the beginning of a new decade. The 2020s.

I've been working on Bloodlife solo since early December, 2015.

The story I want to tell with Bloodlife is one I feel passionate about, hence why I'm still going on with this. It is a mountain I chose to climb and I promised to myself that I would reach its top no matter what.

I started its development because I wanted to learn what it was like to spend years of my life working on a project, and polishing every single little tiny insignificant detail of it, I have now learned what that feels like. And I'm, honestly, beginning to feel depressed as I'm still not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

As such, earlier this year I decided to scale down some of my ambitions with the project to make it more... realizable.

This might sound anti-climactic to some. But Bloodlife is a game that I'm actually really happy with in its current state. And I rather release a game, than none at all.

Currently, all of the "game" things are done, levels, gameplay, you name it.

Erick will be able to choose between a maximum of 5 guns at the start of a level, you unlock a new gun after beating an Erick level, so by around half the game you'll already have all of the guns he can start with.

Ben will be restricted to one playstyle, but it'll be one with a heavy focus on melee combat, to contrast with Erick's reliance on guns.

The game has a total of 14 playable levels, I put a lot of effort and time towards making sure that they're fun to play, and they're the part of the game I'm the most proud of and I hope you guys will have as much fun playing through them as I did making them.

The cutscenes in the game are pretty simple and nothing mind-blowing, and I want to make up for that with its dialogue and the interactions between the characters, this was the plan all along however, so not much has changed regarding that. That said, I'm having difficulties with the cutscenes on a technical side. I'm using a modified version of the vanilla Hotline Miami 1 dialogue object, and it is a very awkward dialogue system to work with. So that's why that's taking me so much time.

I'm still pouring all of my heart into this game, but I got too many things going on in my life and different projects I wish to work on, but I also can't allow myself to just shelf a project and leave it unreleased indefinitely.

So what exactly are these ambitions that I'm scaling down on?

Well... yeah, just reducing the number of guns Erick can start with was one, and also limiting Ben to only one type of playstyle.

I had some really cool ideas such as adding mini-games, an overworld you could explore, a fake internet a la GTA, revisiting the scenes of crimes you committed, etc. That's all stuff that sounds cool but that it's simply not practical... thankfully I've never spoken about any of those things! So no one was hoping for them anyways!... although... I now have mentioned them... ugh, whatever.

The point to this is: I'm asking you to not be surprised if you find I have cut things I've talked about or promised on previous dev blogs and such, it's just the nature of game development, as projects evolve, you end up having to remove things that don't work or that don't contribute to much of anything, or that are simply not realistically achievable. I'm also a human being and I've been working on this alone with the occasional help of friends, I can always forget about certain things or details and/or change my mind regarding certain topics or opinions I once held regarding game design.

I still don't have a clear deadline for the project, but things do feel more "possible" now that I told myself "Alright, enough adding features, time to get this done".

That's all for now!

First off I'd like to apologize for not releasing anything on February 12, the game was definitely not finished by then and it also wasn't ready to be released in any form whatsoever, from now on I'll work on it without any deadlines. I have no plans to release a demo.

With that out of the way...

There are two playable characters, Erick and Ben. In some levels you'll be restricted to one of them while on others you'll be able to choose which character you want to play as.

As some of you might have been able to tell by now, Erick is a pretty standard character who can select which weapon he wants to start a level with. At the beginning of the game he only has access to a Katana, but he can unlock new weapons (melee and guns) the same way you would unlock a mask in Hotline Miami (that being by either getting a highscore or finding a certain item that would grant you access to that weapon). I'm still uncertain if I want to give him access to every single weapon available in the game on his weapon select menu, but I know that he will at least have access to the big majority of them.

Ben on the other hand can select a style, in order to differentiate them from the masks in Hotline Miami, all of the styles come with their own set of advantages and restrictions. This style system hasn't been implemented on the game yet, but here's a mock-up of what the menu for them would look like:

Don't let this piece of concept art fool you, both characters wear masks to conceal their identities and the masks they'll put on if you select a certain weapon/style will be displayed on the menu as well. They aren't present on this mock-up because I forgot to include them (oops).

Oh hey!, Grenades actually work now.

Took me a while, didn't it.

Grenades behave differently from any other weapon, by this I mean that they won't be laying on the ground waiting for you to pick them up or on Erick's weapon menu, instead you'll start with three of them (this amount might vary depending of the level), no matter what weapon you choose to start with, and you'll have to press [E] on the keyboard to throw one.

Another thing I did is that now you can actually use the skateboard from HLM2 to skate, to do this press [Q] while you have it equipped.

Using the skateboard makes you move so fast you can knock down enemies with it, however it's a bit hard to control and the enemies can still kill you if you stand in place.

Out of the 15 levels I want the final game to have, 8 of them have been finished. That said, it doesn't mean I might not delete a few of them and redesign them again from zero.

Ben is currently missing all of his executions (besides the unarmed one), sprites for some of the weapons, and his styles.

None of the dialogues have been implemented yet, the reason for that? I have not even started writing them. While I have the game's story written down and I know how the characters are, I'm extremely disorganized so I spend most of my time just playing the game, designing levels, making sprites, implementing features, fixing bugs, etc. instead of writing dialogue. On top of that writing is also something that I don't particularly enjoy doing, so it has certainly been the hardest part of developing this game.

Hi everyone, it's been a long time since I created this ModDB page and I made a lot of progress since then, so I think now it's time to give some more details about the mod.

Engine

I ported the mod to Game Maker: Studio, I originally wanted to port it to Studio once the game was finished (so I wouldn't have to deal with the shitty room editor Studio has), but then I realized how terrible that idea was since it would have made the process of porting it much more difficult.

Porting the game to Studio solved a lot of issues (mostly related to performance) but it also created some new ones. I tried really hard to get the music to work like it did in HLM1 (by loading the music files from the game's folder) but I got so tired that I decided to just store the music in the game itself and use GM's audio functions to play it. This comes with the cost of the executable being a bit heavier, but I'm okay with that.

Gameplay

The gameplay is essentially still the same as the one from Hotline Miami, with the most notable difference being that all the masks make you start with a weapon.

I've been working on adding grenades to the game (so far, with not so much success...) but I don't really know if they're worth adding, since they don't seem to fit with the rest of the game and I honestly don't think that they're actually going to be fun to use.

Oh, unrelated, but I also discovered how damn fun it is to play Hotline Miami with a gamepad while I was playtesting the mod on Studio.

Story & Setting

I just started to write the script of the game, so there isn't a lot I can say right now about the story, but the game is set in 2005 and the main character is called Erick.

Release Date

The 12 of February of 2017 is my current deadline, if the game isn't finished by that time, I'll release a demo with 4-5 levels.

Screenshots

Ignore the "[2]: Menu", that's just for debugging purposes.

(WIP Level Select menu)

(WIP Main Menu)

That's all for now!