DevLog 7 – Blood and Gore

Hello, Cultists! It’s Byte Barrel here with another DevLog. In the previous ones, we covered topics like creation of the Cathedral location, changes to the artstyle of the game, or the process of designing weapons; now it’s time for something a little spicier — and definitely more gory! In today’s article, we would like to talk about gibs, headshots, weak points, and everything else that makes Forgive Me Father 2 so bloody delicious!

But let’s start with the basics. Depending on where you shoot an enemy or how much damage you deal, there are at least 3 different results whenever the enemy is killed: normal death, headshot and tearing the enemy into pieces.

The first two of those are quite straightforward, and probably don’t need any additional explanation, but the third one? That’s a completely different story.

As we mentioned, there are different animations depending on the way you kill an enemy, and one of them is tearing them into pieces. But how can you achieve that? All you need is to deal enough damage — just a bit more than for a normal kill. The more injured the enemy is and the more powerful your weapon, the easier it is to turn them from a formidable, scary adversary into just pieces of viscera flying every which way.

Instead of the basic death animation, the enemy, when killed, drops tons of that sweet, sweet gore and gibs that scatter around the player. So, if you’re a fan of bloody games, then you will definitely find joy in fighting hordes of enemies in Forgive Me Father 2.

We would be remiss if we didn’t mention the special weak points; Some of the enemies you will encounter in Forgive Me Father 2 have this cool feature that triggers a unique interaction if you hit a particular part of their body.

The most iconic of these interactions from the original game are making a comeback in the sequel – including zombies reloading their spare heads after a headshot and Liquidators, who can be molten with a single shot, transforming them from ranged opponents into melee ones. As you can see, some of these unique effects are added purely for your amusement, while others have a more profound, tactical impact on gameplay.

While we got gibs, weak points, and death animations in general covered, let’s move on to the substance that flows through it all, makes the experience feel complete and look even better: blood!

Comic-like blood splashing everywhere is one of the distinctive characteristics Forgive Me Father is well-known for. When creating the blood system for the sequel, we wanted to not only keep it similar to the original and instantly recognizable, but also upgrade the way it looks, and even add some quality of life changes. The most important goal was to maximize the players’ vision, while keeping these juicy blood splashes as flashy as possible. So, how did we manage to achieve that?
Blood splatter animations are definitely faster, and the direction of the splash depends on the angle from which you shoot. That prevents the player’s screen from being entirely covered in blood, improving their vision on the battlefield significantly. The amount of blood when hitting an enemy is defined by multiple factors, of which the most important is the used weapon’s power. The harder you hit, the more blood you get.

Oh, and if you’re not a fan of rivers of blood in your games, or perhaps you want to create more family-friendly content and show it to the world, then we have good news: you can always turn off the blood effect in the settings.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading and make sure to get yourself a copy of Forgive Me Father 2 if you haven’t done it already – and if you have, leaving a review of it here on Steam would be really nice! And don’t forget to drop by our Discord to chat with us and other players!

Until next time,
Byte Barrel Team