As I mentioned a while back, we’ve thought a lot about what game to make next. One of our ideas has the working title ‘Little Vampire’ and is gameplay-wise kind of similar to Secrets of Grindea, with it being an action RPG in the same type of pixel art style you’re familiar with. But with this idea, we’d definitely take steps to make sure development wouldn’t have to take anywhere as long.

One of the main issues with the production of Grindea was that we designed the story based around travelling to many different locations, meaning each location had to be made from scratch with all new enemy designs, new puzzles and a progressing story to match every area and dungeon.

With Little Vampire we’d try to make it so that we can complete the story within a very small amount of locations, making a short, polished game from start to finish with the option to expand on the middle section (and add more areas) for as long as we want. All while, imporantly, being able to release it whenever we need to.

As for the actual gameplay the idea is that the player, a young vampire prince or princess, takes on the task of taking over their uncle’s abandoned castle. The ultimate goal is to become a powerful vampire lord and rule over the land that is currently being harassed by one (or more) other rival lords. Our idea here is to be inspired by the old classic horror genres involving vampires, zombies, ghosts, werewolves – but with a cute twist.

The player will need to explore the world and complete quests to help the people in their village and castle, and as they do so they will earn rewards such as new skills, potions and the ability to recruit NPCs and expand and clean up their castle. Essentially, pretty inspired by the Arcadia portion of Arcade Mode.

The game would feature a world map with map markers to different locations that the player can access instantly from the map section. This way we could add as many or as few map markers as we’d like, and locations could be added without them having to be actually physically connected to each other (although we’d certainly consider tying everything together if possible, if there’s enough time). The various areas could be classical settings such as graveyards, ruins, haunted houses and other classical horror settings.

To make the game even more immersive, we’d like to incorporate customization options for the player’s castle, including a garden where they can grow and cultivate unique plants, a large hall where people come to ask for help with quests, a bedroom that can be customized, and possibly a prison for captured enemies.

These are all simply brainstormed ideas for now, but we’re definitely interested in the setting and overall idea and will continue to think about concepts relating to it at least for a while to see what we can come up with! What’s your thoughts? And what sort of setting would you prefer?