Bloodseeker
A downloadable game for Windows
PROUD WINNER OF METROIDVANIA MONTH 4!
In Bloodseeker, you play as a vampire count who has been resting in his coffin for a century after being wounded by a vampire hunter. When he awakens, the count finds that his three wives, the countesses, have claimed sections of the castle as their own in his absence. Your minions now serve them, and only stand in your way.
The count also learns that the vampire hunters have sealed away the castle to contain the evil within. The count is not yet powerful enough to break the seal, so he must track down the countesses and steal the power from their hearts to break free of his imprisonment. Once the count is free, he will make those foolish humans suffer for nearly causing his demise.
This is a little metroidvania game made in two weeks by Luke Pierson and Austen Kinney for the metroidvania game jam 4. During your adventure you can explore a castle featuring 6 areas and over 100 rooms, gain new abilities, fight a variety of enemies, and kill several bosses. We are very interested in hearing your feedback, so please leave a comment! :)
Recently updated! If you’re interested in the update details, you can read the devlog below.
---Controls---
Keyboard:
-A/D: Move
-W/S: Aim Attack / Interact
-Space: Jump
-J: Attack
-K: Blood Arrow - when unlocked
-L: Dash - when unlocked
-I: Heal
-H: Howl - when unlocked
-Tab: Menu
Controller:
-Left Stick/D-Pad: Move / Aim Attack / Interact
-A/X: Jump
-X/Square: Attack
-Right Bumper/R1: Blood Arrow - when unlocked
-Right Trigger/R2: Dash - when unlocked
-Left Bumper/L1: Heal
-Left Trigger/L2: Howl
-B/O = Menu
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- Bloodseeker v1.1Jun 24, 2019
Comments
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Okay, how doesn one defeat the hunter?
I can kind of avoid most attacks but no idea how to avoid the prayer attck that just nukes the whole screen :-/
hello! Sorry I just read your messages. The game is definitely challenging and could use some balancing tweaks. That being said, I’m glad you managed to beat the bosses and discover where to go!
As for the hunter’s full screen prayer, it can be avoided with a well-timed dash. Try to deal as much damage as possible while he’s busy praying. The blood arrow ability deals more damage than your sword attacks, so try to use that as much as possible.
You’re so close! Good luck!
PS: if you manage to get 100% you can fight a secret boss. You can always go back and find things you’ve missed after beating the game. Although I would avoid interacting with the statue that spawns in the starting room because that will restart your save file on the hard mode
secret boss?
I would think that I got everything, going by the map one of the comments showed.
gotta take a few runs through the castle again to check if i really missed something somewhere
Beating the last boss and walking off screen to the right will end the game and let you know what your completion % is. So at least you’ll know how close you are :)
SPOILERS BELOW
If you have 100% and beat the boss, wait on that screen for a bit ;P
Have you collected all of the royal bat blood? (Blue blooded bats). My guess is that is the thing you’re missing. It’s a tough challenge, requiring that you avoid damage. Collect them all and return to the bat statue to receive a reward. You can at least fast travel, so plan your route.
If you’ve already done that, feel free to post a pic of the map you have and I can probably point you in the right direction.
collecting all of them without takign any damage?
I thought they were jsut temporary powerups that you lose upon a hit.
given that the blue heart disappears if you save
oh my, defeating the hunter withouttaking any damage is harsh :O
yeah i got 96% complete (thought it said 96 96, being nonsense and ignored it).
so yeha, gotta collect those bats I guess.
getting them isnt a big issue but beating the hunter without taking any damage is yet beyond me :-/
pretty hard game, I jsut cant manage to get past Frank.
the room already is almost completely electricuted and then we have this big guy whos hitdoes like 2-3 points damage.
fighting him is a nightmare.
let alone mentioning that even getting there through the electricity rooms is quite a pain to do
hm,I am a bit ost on what to do.
I think i explroed everything and beat every boss availlable.
only have the catacomb door left and the door right next to the start. which are both still locked.
At last I was able to make a video with 100% in Bloodseeker and made a complete map of the game.
This is awesome!! :D wow! Wonderful map! Congrats on getting 100%! Honestly this is super cool to see someone create this for my game. Thanks again for uploading your experience with it!
Also, while I'm sure you're tired of Bloodseeker by now, there is one final hidden thing in the game. Just DO NOT mess with the statue as that will reset your progress in a sort of hard mode. Go beat the vampire hunter one more time and just wait around in the arena now that you've got 100% ;)
I quite liked the game, I can recognize references to Castlevania and Hollow Knight to make a pretty good metroidvania. Of course, I got lost for a while in the catacombs for a piece of ground that I did not know how to open and that I ended up opening without knowing how. I loved it and recorded my gameplay even though I had to make a cut in the pile of attempts to open the area that I mentioned before:
Thanks for playing it and leaving some feedback, I’m really glad you liked it!
There are definitely some mechanics and hidden things that I wish I had explained better, but ran out of time. As for opening the wall in the catacombs, if I’m thinking of the correct wall, opening it has to do with how an enemy type interacts with something in the background.
Thank you so much for recording your gameplay! I’m really looking forward to watching your experience with Bloodseeker :)
Friggin awesome game, I really loved it! Like others have said, difficulty is constantly hard, but I pushed through to the end (no, I'm not doing the bloodlust mode)
Strangely, the final few bosses were much easier than the first ones, probably just cos I had a better grasp of the mechanics. I also took the time to get a lot of the hidden stuff, so the final two bosses fell pretty quick.
Hey thanks for playing through to the end! Really glad you liked it :) I haven’t even beaten bloodlust mode haha! I’m curious as to which boss was your favorite.
I totally agree that the difficulty is certainly a bit too high too early. But it does dip down a lot more late game due to both power ups and player skill, like most metroidvanias. If I make another metroidvania anytime soon, I think I’ll have a better idea on how to make a better difficulty curve.
If you do ever want to get 100%, there’s a secret after the final battle ;) If that’s something you’d be interested in doing, feel free to contact me if you’d like any tips on getting stuff you missed during your first play through.
(If you haven’t converted your save file to bloodlust mode, you should be able to continue from the last save right before the last boss)
Arh, noooo, already gone bloodlust just to see what it is! I quite liked the necromancer and shade boss fights. I also really liked the scale of the frank boss fight. My least favourite was definitely the gargoyle, whom was so bloody hard to get to, then brutally easy to beat, cos there's a safe spot. The thing that got really annoying was the journey from the save point to the boss, which often took out a few health. If I took damage, I'd suicide, just to avoid losing blood for the battle. The shade was particularly painful, with the ghosts and random spawns from the coffins making a clean journey to the boss 1 in 10. But I still really enjoyed, it's just a shame that bloodlust mode wipes the previous save.
Bummer! I definitely should have informed players in game before letting them wipe their save. Shoot my bad!
Interesting feedback on the bosses, thanks! Any issues you’ve had with them are totally fair too. It’s neat to see the diversity in opinions on them. A lot of the difficulty is determined by the path players take through the game and the order of bosses they fight. So for instance, the gargoyle can be fought really early on (3rd boss) or one of the last ones so he can be very tough or not too bad. Same with pretty much all of the bosses, which is neat because players struggling with one boss can probably find another to fight.
I think my personal favorites are the gargoyle and the weaver. I especially like how claustrophobic and tense the weaver fight can get if fought early in the game. Though I’ve also heard a lot of people struggle with the weaver, which is understandable too.
There is technically a way of getting your save file back! Though it will probably take some trial and error. If you want, you can go into the game’s files and adjust values until you get back to where you were :) I know it’s not ideal, sorry again about that!
good game but somehow stuff gets too hard too soon
Thank you for the feedback! Glad you liked it, I’ll be certain to reduce the Speed of difficulty ramping up for future iterations and games :)
This is quite good!
Question: Why does the dash just cease to work altogether? At one point it doesn't respond to the button anymore, and I can't find any indicator as to why. I'm finding some obstacles that are clearly meant to be dashed over, so I'm guessing it's a bug?
Also, any chance to have an option to rebind the buttons? I'm not very comfortable with the default layout (I know it's a fairly common one, but I like my weird bindings XD ).
I've been doing some testing and apparently it has something to do with not using the default binding, for some reason the controller freaks out every now and then if I map "dash" to B instead of RT. So yeah, officially rebinding buttons would be awesome.
Just beat the giant spider, that was a great fight!
Thanks checking it out! Glad you’re having fun with it, and congrats on beating the Weaver!! :D definitely a tough boss.
Remapping buttons is definitely something I thought of doing, but simply didn’t have time for the game jam. Now that the jam is over, I’ll look into possibly adding that :) I would definitely like Bloodseeker to be as accessible as possible.
Thanks a ton for the feedback! Good luck on the boss fights to come ;) feel free to update me on your progress.
Timing on first boss seems to be all over the place, loosing too much HP on attacks that go straight through what should be a good parry.
Firstly, thanks for trying it out! Secondly, I’m sorry that you’re struggling with the timing of the boss :(
I’m very interested in doing everything I can to make this game feel fair, so thanks for informing me! Once the judges have finished judging the jam entries, I can upload an update that fixes balance issues.
Just so I can address the correct issue, is the issue with timing because when you attack, the boss recovers from the attack too quickly, while you’re still inside the boss’s hit box, causing you to take damage?
In the meantime, before I’m allowed post an update, if I can suggest you give it another shot with this tip in mind: I find the first boss a lot easier if I chase her to the left side of the arena and use that platform to attack her quickly and duck under it when needed. Hope you’re willing to give it another go :)
the problem lies with the bats she summons, sometimes the green bat's projectile goes straight through a attack/parry and same goes for the red bat itself.
I’ll definitely look into that and see what I can do to get that fixed :) The bats and projectiles shouldn’t have any immunity time, so I’ll see if I can figure out why they sometimes go through your attacks. Does this usually happen when the projectile/bat is very close to you?
it seems to happen mostly when there are two or more summoned bats at once,.
as for how close they are when it happens, they still intersect with the attack animation, so it should count as them being hit by the attack.
I believe I've found and fixed the issue with the projectiles :) I'll update the game asap, once judging for the jam is over. As for the bats, could it be that the attack is only hitting their wings? Their hit box does not include their wings. If not, is there any chance you could send me a quick video showcasing this little bug? That may make this easier to pin down what is going wrong. Thank you for taking the time to tell me! :)