By our Blood

By Our Blood is a top-down Dungeon Crawler where you put other players first. Push forward through dangerous traps, create a safe path and ultimately sacrifice yourself for the ones that come after you.

Semester project, team size of 8.

Role: Game designer

Focus: Level and content designer

Engine: Unity

Development time: mar. 2024 - july 2024

Link to Steam page: TBD

The goal of By our Blood was to create an experimental game, so we designed a game that, to be completed, needs to have its save file shared to other players.

About the game

By our Blood is a multiplayer game but only one person can play at a time. As cultists, players delve into a harrowing dungeon filled with traps, until they inevitably die. This concludes their time in this dungeon and they must share the save file with a friend, so they can attempt to reach the goal using your progress and sacrifice.

The goal of the game is to, in a group of people, die so the next player can reach further into this dungeon. Lighting up paths, disarming traps, creating corpse bridges or writing blood symbols, no matter what you do, your sacrifice is appreciated.

My contribution

Core idea and goals

The theme of the game is "Altruism through sacrifice", so we designed all of the game's features around helping the following players to finish the game. The goal was to have one save file played by multiple people until one player finally reaches the end. The game has an interactive UI that uses Steam's friends list to easily share the file with other players. In its current state, the game allows for a minimum of two people to share the file back and forth to complete the game - this might change when the game gets officially published.

I was in charge of designing the multiplayer elements, the level and some of the traps.

Multiplayer design

As a player walks thought the dungeon, they will leave information of where they have been blood, torches or marks. Those create the "blood path" that the following players are incentivized to follow and build with their own blood.

Torches - Cultists carry torches and they can choose to light up other torches in the dungeon.

Marks - Each player has 50 Health points, and they can use one of their points to create a blood mark on the dungeon's floor or walls. The marks are multiple symbols that the players can use however they want, allowing for player expression.

Blood - Even if a player does not want to cooperate with building the "blood path" with voluntary actions, they will eventually leave a trail of blood, as whenever they take damage from traps, they bleed for a certain amount of time.

Following is some concepting I made for the marking system.

Trap design - "Lock and Corpse"

Traps are the main challenge of the game. Some traps are hidden, like pressure plates, while some are very clear, like big saws. Traps were designed with two objectives in mind: make players take damage or make players consciously kill themselves.

More hidden traps incentivize players to use their markings to signal to other players that there is a trap there. If they fail to do that, there is a chance they will get hit by the trap and leave some blood trail anyway.

Other traps follow a "lock and key" system, but instead of key, players must use their corpse - thus "lock and corpse" mechanisms. Those traps were designed by players choosing to kill themselves in spike pits or in sacrificial altars, turning into bridges or unlocking doors.

Following is a picture of most trap assets, as well as a pentagram, in game.

Level Design - Necessary Bottlenecks

The dungeon was designed around the already explained "blood path" and its destination, meaning that the dungeon has multiple paths players can take, but those all lead to a death that will aid next players by unlocking new areas. All paths have death bottlenecks that one player needs to take to open the area for the next.

I designed the entire level by creating 2D top down sketches that, after multiple iterations, I transferred to unity. The images show some of my design process, using icons and notes to create a mock up of the level. The same process was done to unique rooms, such as the library and dining room.

At the moment, players can only explore the one hand-crafted level, but we have plans of making the level proceduraly generated.

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