BLOOD PUNK 2. De-Coagulated

It’s been a long time since I have done anything creative or picked up any personal game projects as I have been too focused on work and personal commitments. My life is starting to stabalise again and I finally have the mental bandwidth and spare time to pick up old projects. I have been reticent to work on a personal game project due to the amount of time, effort, and dedication it requires to get anywhere. However, my creative drive has been pulling too hard and this project is something I am very much interested in, so here we are again.

My passion for writing is to blame for getting me back into personal game development work. I can’t help but start worldbuilding when I want to be creative, and the world of blood punk is something I keep coming back to.

I won’t lie that it is somewhat disheartening to see another game called blood punk, with basically the same mechanics was launched this year in the D&D tabletop space. Did someone see my first blog post, steal information from my mind telepathically or perhaps it is an unfortunate coincidence. I’m not going to let it deter me however, as that will require scrapping this entire concept and starting in a new direction, something I am not prepared to do right now.

My biggest hurdle in any sort of personal creative project is that I want to perfectly design and map out everything before I start any work. This is at a complete contrast to my professional work where I am highly efficient at planning just enough to get started with the job. I understand this more about myself and have been forcing myself to do spontaneous writing challenges to just get on with the task of being creative. This is much the same for game development and I need to just get moving and worry about any performance/balance or other issues at a future stage.

I have chosen to carve this game out in the roguelike space. When I mean roguelike, I mean in the traditional sense, drawing inspiration from games like Caves of Qud and Cogmind. I believe the constraints of this genre will enable me to build a large, vibrant world with deep mechanics without the requirement of a vast team or huge budget. This will also enable me to focus on my worldbuilding and writing skills, letting them flourish in this new world that I am building.

I am an old school demoscene/low level C and C++ programmer, so I draw little to no enjoyment out of coding in modern engines like Unity. I have used Unity for a very long time and do so in some of my professional projects, so I am choosing a C++ engine for this project that will hopefully maintain my interest in the many months to come. I read the famous How to Make a Roguelike article by Josh Ge which mentions libtcod, an engine specifically designed for the development of roguelike games. After some further investigation I found that the original developer of this project has further advanced on the base features with a custom engine called umbra and a decent prototype game called treeburner. These repos appear to contain everything needed to get started in developing a 2D roguelike game, with the treeburner code taking care of a lot of the donkey work around systems development such as save/load and windows management. I don’t have the willpower to spend 6 months of my spare time working on systems for callbacks, module management, windows, or interaction events; I just want to get making this game.

The first thing to get started on that makes the most sense is the blood mechanic and how the player can exploit the blood in their own veins. The player has a specific blood type which is generated for their character and cannot be changed through normal means. The blood system is going to be deep and rich, whereby the player can modify their blood with chemicals, replace their blood and lower or raise its quality. I want the player to be able to do surprising things with the underlying mechanics surrounding blood, like the item/skills system in Caves of Qud. A player should be able to temporarily change the type of their blood before selling it to a merchant for a higher value. Or perhaps the player character has some sort of sickly trait whereby the quality of their blood is debuffed. They could knock someone unconscious, drain them of their blood, swap it with theirs to raise the blood quality, then extract and sell it for profit. This system should enable a player to be creative, scheming, cunning and encouraged to explore within the sandbox.