
Bloodletter
PROTOTYPE
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3493400/BLOODLETTER/
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/nsDKEJV8QV
This is the original prototype from 2023. There are a few known issues, please check out our Steam Page/Discord for up to date content.
Game Loop
You start the game in your bathhouse. Villagers queue up to be treated by the cards you play for them. After treatment is finished, the book opens and you choose a villager who helps you in return with their unique abilities. They will also give you a new Card for your Deck. The day is done and during the night the Entity becomes active, sullying the villagers Purity and spreading sickness. A new day dawns with villagers queueing up once again and the cycle continues. The game ends if the Entity kills the fourth villager or you fill the Villager's collective Purity for the fourth time, defeating the Entity.

You (Player)
In Bloodletter your main possible action is playing Cards. You use your cursor to pick one Card at a time and drag and drop it onto one of the Card Slots. Click the Bell to call in the next Villager. As soon as you are finished with the current villager you can ring the Bell to get the next one.

Villager Abilities
The Villagers also have unique abilities. These improve your deck or help you in treating the villagers. Per evening you can choose one Villagers Ability by clicking on it.
New Cards
In addition they offer you three new Cards of which you can choose one to add to your deck.

Blessing Cards
There are three unique Blessing Cards. You are dealt one of these Cards if one of your Villagers health reaches 100. Blessing Cards have exclusively positive effects.
Curse Cards
There are three unique Curse Cards. You are dealt one of these Cards if a Villager dies or possibly when you hit one of the Entity Trigger Points. Curse Cards have exclusively negative effects.
Entity
The Statue on your Desk houses the Entity. It’s your Opponent and sullies your Villagers Purity during the night as well as spread Sicknesses that lower their Health. Above the Entity hangs a vial containing the All Purity of living Villagers. Filling the vial up to the next Trigger Point damages the Entity. By damaging the Entity you extract a Bloodstone and it’s moved to one of the Bloodstone Sockets.
The Team ALDAMAMI
This prototype was part of our second semester at DE:HIVE Berlin.
Updated | 15 days ago |
Status | Released |
Platforms | HTML5, Windows |
Rating | Rated 4.7 out of 5 stars (100 total ratings) |
Authors | ALDAMAMI GAMES, DavidCafisso, Katharina "Mikey" Müller, A_Schneider, Marvin Braun |
Genre | Card Game, Strategy |
Made with | Unity, Adobe Photoshop, Krita, Clip Studio Paint |
Tags | 2D, bloodletter, Deck Building, dehive, hiveclover, Medieval, Singleplayer, woodcut |
Average session | About an hour |
Languages | English |
Links | Steam |
Download
Development log
- Steam Page and Discord Community15 days ago
- Visual Update and a Restart Button!Jan 22, 2024
- Bloodletter PC build and updated pageAug 08, 2023
Comments
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TL;DR love this game, want to see the good ending. REALLY EVIL TOWARDS BAD RNG. [softlock]
>---
Does anyone have a video of the ending for beating the entity? Reached day 42 and spent a few hours before pc crashed due to being unable to get rid of all the blessing cards or skip the mandatory choice cards.
Genuinely trying to beat the last stage while seemingly getting stuck in a softlock due to bad rng with cards made this fight feel more like a chore to complete. Really want to see the ending but considering the fact getting lucky with cards, handouts and HOPING the executioner, purifier, butcher and minstrel are all alive for that final round is just stupid.
And then there was possible and accidental RNG manipulation. Always started off with the blessing cards which honestly were WEAK compared to the cards you get each round. Like during 2 nights, got the exact same hand layout which means there was something done to likely get that hand or just pain bad luck.
And after getting so much cards that they could not be shown on screen, it made the butcher bad as in order to remove those cards underneath your upgraded cards, you need to remove.. your upgraded cards which were better than the ones you want to remove. Not to mention removing 2 cards despite being forced to get another one plus getting blessings which might kill you if you don't play something else makes the butcher a means to delay the game crashing from too many cards in your deck.
>---Like maybe there is an easier way since people are getting wins under 30 days but trying to beat it by yourself is a lot more nicer. So please, does ANYONE have a video of the ending?
Oh we are really sorry that you got softlocked in your run. We already changed this for our upcoming demo.
This is our very first prototype of the game and there were some bugs which are really bad in special cases.
So if you are interested to become a playtester for us you can definetly join our discord and see how the game developed since.
In this playtest there is a tutorial you can play, to understand the game system. A lot of these old bugs are already gone. :)
Thank you for writing down the problems so precisely (of this itch version) and helping us with your feedback about the game.
<3
I really enjoyed your game. It's promising ! It took me 1 run to be familiar with mechanics, and, on my second run I win in 13 days. Some character's abilities are broken in combo. Take a good card, buff it in purity and health, clone it and remove bad cards and enjoy your run. The game could really be more difficult ! But I guess you already saw this. I hope you'll add a campaign mode, with more lore on the game, which has a good difficulty curve. Great work !
Congratulation. Nice that you figured it out that well. This is just our very first prototype of the game. We rebalanced a lot of the game already. But for our EA release there will be different difficulty levels where you can unlock to have a challenge. But first we are going to release the real demo later this year on Steam.
Thank you for your feedback and if you are interested what else to come, keep an eye on our Steam page. <3
I really enjoyed the game! I won on my first try, 18 days had passed and I only lost one villager! It was very fun trying to figure out what cards would be best to upgrade as well as managing the abilities so you can not be in a stalemate with the entity for a while! It was all about balancing the purity with the health the further in you got!
Congratulations! Nice that you found a good way to defeat the evil entity.
It was... a real battle ToT
In all seriousness, it took me, what ? Probably 4 gameplays and 31 days to manage a single win ? Still with 2 villagers dead (heyy, taking a month to exorcise the thing wouldn't be so bad if it was in real life) ? Well, I can say that in the end lots of errors were made and lots of discoveries as well- those blessed cards really saved me when i absolutely wasn't expecting them, wish i had known about them before my fourth trial but oh well
Very fun game, easy enough to understand and with the possibility to establish a strategy and go in a certain way with the choices possible after each day, super neat artstyle and general game design
I absolutely loved playing it despite my despair lolol (also maybe i should've read the rules hmmm... but thanks to have included them, truly, I'm sure it helped a lot of us :), having a bit of a challenge is always nice and the game was just too good (playstyle-wise and design-wise) to stop half-way there.
Hey thank you for your nice words and the feedback.
This is just our very first prototype of the game and in our upcoming demo there will be a tutorial for better understanding the gamesystem.
It is very cool that you hold on and try to manage it by yourself. Hope you had fun along the way <3
Our demo is going to be released on Steam later this year.
I don't usually play card games but this was really fun. I don't know why I got a game over though. Maybe there's only a certain amount that can die? I still had plenty of villagers
Thank you. There is a total limit of 4 Villager deaths and then its game over.
Maybe you try another round and keep an eye on your community :) <3
first gameplay and managed to win in 12 days with no deaths! cured sickness as much as possible and purified these disbelieving villagers /lh
this was so much fun and the artwork is gorgeous. thank you for the game!
Thank you for your comment, it means a lot for us that we get so much positive feedback.
Really glad that you enjoyed the content!
Keep an eye on our Steampage or Discord. On Discord there will be from time to time playtests where you can sign in for. And on Steam there will be a Demo Release later this year! <3
Beautiful game, loved the artworks
Thank you! Hope you had a nice experience. <3
Where did you get the artworks? Do you mind telling us that and also if it cost a lot?
Hey thank you for your interest. We did the artworks by ourself and we are 3 artists in the team. So there is not a number I can tell you. All of the linked creators except for Marvin worked on the artworks. <3
Awesome, very impressive!
Thank you thats so kind of you <3 There is a lot more to come.
There should be an endless mode or something
Thank you for the input <3
Even without anything like that it is still a really good game
<3
Show post...
good game
<3
A fantastic demo! I got hooked on the gameplay, and was able to get the hang of it after losing twice and played for a few hours after. I saw in another comment that there will be a tutorial added later on, and I think that would be a good addition. The look and feel of the game is great, and I think you have something really special here.
A few notes:
The text size of the effects of the cards could be bigger, to help with ease of reading
After you fill up both book pages with cards, any additional cards on the buff/destroy phase become zoomed and are displayed either outside the page or under other cards. This might be a browser issue (Firefox) but I figured I would let you know. Maybe having the ability to turn the book page or scroll down the page to buff/destroy cards would fix this issue
If villagers die, maybe there could be additional villagers that can take their place, to prevent issues with having enough purity to eventually win, but that issue could also be avoided with other balancing factors
Overall I think this is a great demo and I hope you keep working on it :)
Hey this is right we alredy have a tutorial where we still working on to make it better.
Thank you for your konstructive feedback!
We are definetly worked on the textsize and the generall UI in the book to make it better readable and understandable.
Yeah the web build is not the best solution for playing the game but we are definetly working on this issues to polish the game.
We found a sollution for the villager problem with rebalancing the entity threshholds.
Hope you are able to check out our demo if we release it to gather more feedback.
If you want to playtest you can join our discord to test the newest features in the game.
<3
Awesome game, I really enjoyed playing it.
Thank you <3 Glad that you enjoyed the game!
It's pretty good, I've got to play more. I don't know if it's me, but the blue-ish filter that gets the screen when you put the first card doesn't go away and it's kinda annoying. Aside from that, it's immersive, the art is super cool and I want to understand and beat it.
Oh sorry to hear that. We dont actually now where this comes from. Do you played the web build?
Yes, it was in web build
Cool game, beat it in 15 days. I hope the game will be expanded. :)
Oh cool good job! Yeah we are working on that to bring this project to the full release! <3
Enjoyed this, but when you increase your hand too much it blocks you from selecting certain cards. Being able to use keystrokes to cycle through your hand would be a good solution I think.
Thank you for the feedback. We definetly keep an eye on that <3
took a while to get into it but interesting concept.
Thank you. <3
One bug: Game gets stuck if last character in list (Butcher) is dead. Button to continue doesn't show up.
I also got this bug
Sorry to hear and thank you for the bug report. <3
Very unique and interesting concept! The fact this is is a prototype definitely shows, I won on my first attempt (22 days, 2 villagers dead) but it was a bit of a drag, it probably took half that time just to get the first bloodstone and in the end I was practically just grinding until my low purity villagers showed up. I'll be keeping an eye on the steam page though, this has the potential to be something really special!
Thank you thats super kind of you!
Hehe we know this problem and did a lot of balancing to change this.
Yeah keep an eye on the steampage the new demo will be released this year there and hope you can see check out the demo and tell us how it is after the glow up <3
I look forward to it!
Additionally there could be an overflow mechanic where additional purity and health beyond 100 decreases over time, but provides a small buff depending on how much.
Hehe hey there will be a new entity where exactly that is the new win condition :)
I feel like there needs to be an overall time limit, or restraint that can help break deadlocks in the mid-game when there are at least 2+ villagers dead. I keep getting stuck trying to meet 660 purity, with only 6 villagers of 100 purity each, and I'm pretty sure its impossible.
Thank you for your feedback, we already thought about a time limit. We are not shure if thats the call to make it better but we aready tweaked a lot in balancing for our upcoming demo.
Feel free to join our discord or keep an eye on our steampage. The new demo will be released there :D <3
I don't know how the other player completed it in 3 days while I used 60+ attempts to do it in 4, and yet barely. Otherwise 7 or 8 with an average RNG luck.
Thank you for such a nice game! Honestly, I wouldn't mind if it was a tad longer. Also, purity gain is much more preferable to any other kind of choice or action, so everything else just becomes secondary. Great art selection, btw.
Haha we don´t know either haha :D
Yeah this prototype is just a vertical slice and in our full release there will be different win conditions for each new entity.
Thank you for your feedback and keep in touch to see what else to come. <3
I don't play card games, neither do I get attracted to these kinds of art styles, but through the magic of itch.io's random game selector, both of these personal biases was put aside to gladly witness this gem.
Great game! Got hooked on the second run.
This is me whenever someone starts disbelieving with 20 purity left.
Hehe it is nice to hear that the game had this kind of inpact on you. <3
Haha I love that meme it is a excelent match for our game :D
Unable to start the game. It loads, I can read the manual fine but when I try to get into the game, I only get a black screen with a sad looking red folder in the center.
Oh I am really sorry to hear that. Sometimes it can be a web brouser issue. But heard this case for the first time.Did you played it via web browser?
I did indeed play it in firefox browser on linux. I was, however, able to start the game fine on another operating system so might be something off with the setup on my laptop.
oh my gosh.. this game is amazing. i have been hooked on this game for a few days now. everything about this game is an absolute win!!! the design of the villagers is really insane! every detail is so creative. i haven't won a single round yet (mainly because once i lose 2-3 villagers i just quit) but i have belief!
Thank you it is really nice that you like the game that much! :D
Hope you are able to win a round soon <3
neat
<3
Cool concept and gameplay but it froze mid session and I lost all my progress
This is our very first prototype we are sorry that it froze. Thank you for the feedback! Keep updated till we puplish our ready demo on Steam. <3
Design is pretty nice i would love it but its pretty hard to find out what exactly to do. I would recommend to add some tutorial for people like me :D
Hey that is definetly understandable, we already worked a lot an the tutorial. So there will be one in our upcomming Steam Demo :)
BBRO! IT IS THE COOLEST GAME I HAVE EVER SEEN, cool web design, I can play this game THROUGH THE BROWSER!
Cool gameplay! AND IT IS FREE
Good luck in development!
Thank you for your nice words. <3
:)
Cool game, I won and I enjoyed it.
The game seems a bit too easy right now, because if you don't die imidietly you can just stack enough bonuses to garantee a win eventualy. So maybe the dificulty should scale with time, or as you get more bloodstones.
I liked the villager system where they have their own abilities, very cool!
The cards effects were also prety nice and varried enough to allow for impactfull decision making.
I liked the graphics and sound effects.
I only saw 1 gameplay issiue, and that is that the vilagers you get seems to be random, so sometimes you get only healthy vilagers and not the ones you need to cure, I think I lost 2 vilagers to this, because I am prety sure I was keeping everyone I got healty enough to not die.
So maybe you should get the unhelthiest vilagers to come to you, or there could be cards that change which vilagers come next (come next time, dont come next time, choose which vilager comes nexttime etc).
All in all great prototype.
Oh nice that you managed the village to win this game, congratulations! This vertical slice had a lot of balancing issues but we are definetly on that and we reformed a lot of balancing already.
For the villagers who are visiting you, there will be a new mecanic in the villager abbilities, where you can manipulate the queue for the next day. You can prevent someone from dying if he would not visit you the next day. Overall thank you for your detailed feedback. <3
I'm a long time downloader from itch io, but I just made an account tonight so I could say how much I loved this game! It's truly so fun, and the music and visuals make it so atmospheric. Since this one is a demo(I think?) I can't wait to play the final version!
Oh thank you, that is an honor that our game encouraged you to write a comment for the first time! We really appreciate that. This prototype is our first vertical slice, what was the foundation to found the company and apply for funding and stuff.
So keep updated we are going to release our steam demo later this year. <3
Awesome. Super fun and creative. Aesthetically its awesome. I know this is a prototype so Im sure youre on top of some of this already, but heres some constructive criticism:
- Id recommend putting card names horizontally at the top of the card. Its atmospheric with all these medieval superstition cures, but when you have to read medieval font sideways its more natural to ignore the name and just stick to the mechanics. I couldnt tell you after playing and enjoying the game what the name of any card is or what its meant to represent, which is a shame.
- In game text is too small. I have good eyesight and have to really focus to read the text. Between that and the font I first read "health" as "death" and thought it strange that high death was good.
- In order to see some reminder text you have to hover over it with the cursor, but the cursor obscures the text.
- Its not clear as far as i can tell when you get more villagers. I lost 3 on my first playthrough. As far as I understand that puts you in a no-win state since you cant go above 700 purity. So if its possible to get a new villager you should know, and if not you should lose the game for losing 3 villagers, not 4.
- Losing and gaining health is super OP once you get to 100 health for the first time. You start snowballing Blessings real fast. Maybe once youve gotten a blessing from a villager reaching 100 healths you cant get another blessing from that villager unless their health drops below 50 first and that resets them? Youll figure it out better than me, but some sort of balancing there Id recommend for sure.
- Maybe the entity should either get stronger after set number of days OR when you reach a health+purity treshold? The way it works youre incentivized to focus completely on health, belief and sickness and just make sure purity is high enough that you dont lose villagers. So the game encourages you to play an anti-immersive strategy.
I wish you luck with the upcoming steam release. Criticized it because I think its fundamentally awesome and I want to help make it better. I hope youll take it like that. I think you have a winner here.
Hey thank you for your detailed feedback and thank for taking the time for it! <3
We are definettly go through all of your feedback and look for things to improve the game continuously . Thank you for your kind wishes and we are hoping to create an interesting and immersive impression for all of you guys!
Much love from all the team!
ALDAMAMI
Love this game but MAN is it difficult to deal 1 bloodstone damage.
Cool font, design and mechanics but it is REALLY brutal if you get unlucky with cards, sickness or don't constantly add purity to normal cards and forced to focus on those -10ish purity cards.
Saw you in the comments talking about difficulty settings and can't wait for that update. 8/10 prototype.
Hey thank you we are definetly aware of, that everybody experience the difficulty different. In the upcoming demorelease there will be a tutorial and everyone starts with the easy mode.
For the full release there will be three difficulties for each entity. We want that most of the players can enjoy the content from beginning.
For the big brains and strategic masters here there will be the hard mode where they can ponder :D <3
If you missed it in our devlog, here’s our new game trailer!
Team ALDAMAMI
Really nice job! Rare to see such a creative set of mechanics, really required some thinking to create a strategy.
For me, it was somewhat easy (won on first try), but I did lose a few villagers. It *felt* hard, but actually losing was difficult.
It might be worth laying out how the sickness mechanic works. The text was really hard to read (on my browser, the mouse obscures the explanation text no matter how you move, Safari OSX), but also I don't think anywhere explains how the sickness is distributed. Same for disbelief. Even if it's random, it would be nice to know what kind of random. Randomly in the night? Randomly upon losing faith?
Also, the nights were confusing. Why did some villagers not come to see me during the day? I often had someone die because they did not come to see me (maybe for multiple days in a row? Unclear).
Oh, and really good job on winning on your first try! We’ve done a lot of balancing in the meantime because the difficulty on the strategic side can change very quickly if we tweak just a few numbers. Through playtesting, we discovered that players experience the game quite differently depending on their playstyle. So, for the final game, there will be three different difficulty levels for each entity. That way, everyone can have an interesting experience and learn the game system step by step.
The sickness spread and distrust mechanics will also be explained more clearly.
The game system is designed so that only 5 out of 10 villagers can visit you each day—but you have to check who shows up. We’ve also added a new villager ability that lets you manipulate the villager queue for the next day, so players can avoid certain villager deaths using strategic skills.
If you want to check out the new prototype, we’re currently looking for playtesters through our Discord. If you’re interested, you’re more than welcome to join and give us feedback about the game anytime!
<3
So impressed with this prototype! I LOVE the art style and overall vibe here. The cards need a little bit of balancing and there's some readability issues with the text, but I'm sure you're already working on those. For a prototype, this one held my interest very strongly--I'm excited to see what else you add to this before release! Well done!
Thank you for the feedback. Indeed we changed already the font to a better readable one. It’s nice to hear a lot of feedback from different angles.
<3
Fun game, tricky until you can get the first few days right but then it kinda snowballs
<3
This was a ton of fun. I love the style and the designs and the game loop is very gripping. Sick game (haha).
Thank you! It makes us happy if the game brings fun to others <3
It took me 18 days to win.
hehe nice! Each run is different because of the cards you can choose and how you play. <3
Cool game has great art. Wanted to let you know if you click the books while placing the cards it will get stuck on the book page.
Thank you for your feedback and reporting the bug! And we are really happy that you like the idea of the game and our artstyle.
We develop our Steamdemo at the moment and if you are interested to be a Playtester you can join our Discord for more information.
<3
The game is really interesting and the artwork is so good. Congrats!
Thank you very much! We are happy that you enjoy our game! <3
Damn I think I have never seen someone finish it in 3 days congratulations!
Join our Discord if you are interested in playtesting. We work on our Demorelease and there are a lot of new features already in, ready to test!