Bloody Brief #1
HELLO, EVERYONE. WELCOME. TO THE FIRST VAMPIRE THE TASKERADE NEWSLETTER: The Bloody Brief
I spent a bit of December and the first week plus of January, trying to create a master doc for our marketing and social media plan, poring over a template, while agonizing over the fact that the first newsletter I wrote would have to break from the proposed template to onboard people. But then I realized that I did not want to fuck around with words like “onboarding” and “templates.” That’s for corporate types to deal with. This is a fun newsletter to remind you once a month that:
We appreciate you being interested enough in our game to sign up for a newsletter, wow, cool
The game is being worked on
The game is cool and
The game will be released.
We’re not a corporation. We’re wacky people interested in making fun of capitalism and corporate bullshit with vampires and bloody corporate mergers via the exciting medium of video games. If you did not know that about us yet: SURPRISE.
Vampire the Taskerade is a fun little rogue-lite JRPG where you’ll get to play as this individual:
In the game you will:
Maneuver office politics with vampires of various vicious temperaments
Perform mini-projects to grow in power and keep your team project on track
Explore the corporate hunting ground that is your workplace
Survive chit-chat with your undead colleagues and maybe learn their secrets
Battle your co-works to the DEATH.
I mean, many of us do 4/5 of these things IRL, but with other humans. It is the vampires that make this cool, and it is the fact that it is a video game that will make it fun.
You know what else makes this game cool? The team. If you follow us on itch dot io you may already know but just in case, the rest of the team creating this game consists of
Andi Santagata: Andi is making the game. Like, making it work, in Wolf RPG Editor. Andi is also the one who performs sanity checks on me when I say things like, Can we have cats deliver messages to Vesper in the game? He is an amazing game dev with his own impressive portfolio and I am super stoked to be working with him. If you don’t check out Slasher U, what are you doing with your life?
Danielle Taphanel: Danielle made an 8-bit game with a jumpscare, as well as other games that are cool. You can play them in your browser! Among other things, Danielle is designing the characters and creating their various sprites. When I asked, please give the chibi sprites butts, they did it. They nailed it. Their skill in visual storytelling is superb and I’m so happy to have them bringing these characters to life, or unlife as the case may be.
Eve Juneau: Eve is the person I watched stream the most last year. They’re also working on the sound and music for the game, as well as helping with visuals and marketing assets. Eve can do a lot of things well. She’s also making her own games that I hope see the light of day, so other people can be scared of them. Please don’t leave me alone in this.
And in case you didn’t know, uh, the person writing this is me, Tristan J. Tarwater. I am the Writer and Biggest Blocker on the game. It’s true. Did you know that in order to make one video game, there are roughly 8 gajillion steps? I knew, but I still hit up Andi and Danielle and Eve anyway. Well, once I send out the newsletter, that will be one more step towards the game coming out.
If you aren’t already, please follow the game on Bluesky, where we’ll post fun stuff about NPCs, the game and more. The plan right now is to have sneak peaks and big announcements hit our newsletter subscribers first so we MAY send a bit more frequently than once a month, if we have something very cool to share and we just can’t wait.
Also, future newsletters will not be this long, we just, you know, had to onboard y’all and- DAMMIT.
ANYWAYS. BEFORE WE CLOSE UP:
Attention/Dinero
Every newsletter is going to talk about game or org or event that we think you might be interested in giving your attention or money to. With the crumbling of social media, word of mouth is kind of best so here is this month’s shout out!
This month’s Attention/Dinero has to be Dreams on a Pillow. This is frankly a breathtaking game and undertaking by Palestinian game dev Rasheed Abu-Eideh, the creator behind Liyla and the Shadows of War. We could say that things in games are rough right now, because they are. Getting a game made about a genocide during a a genocide is extremely hard, to the point where Rasheed had to crowdfund the game on Launchgood, one of the few platforms available to Palestinians in Palastine. If you’re interested in hearing more about the game and campaign, I would encourage you to check out this interview Game Devs of Color Expo did with Rasheed. It’s hopeful and I think games needs hope right now.
The campaign has actually already funded but the amount raised will only push the game into production, not sustain production until release. Every buck, euro, peso and toonie gets this game closer to being made, and this is a game we need to see. This is a game being made because someone really wants to tell this story. It is not greed, but cultural preservation and empathy that is driving the development of this game. To be honest? YES. MORE OF THIS. There are like, two days left! Jump on it!
Okay, and now:
Upcoming Events
Steam Store Page Launch: TBA
GDC: March 17th-21st. I (Tristan) will be at GDC, thanks to Pixelles, an org out of Montreal that helps game devs of underrepresented genders do lots of things, and one of them is helping people get to GDC. GDC costs a lot of money. A LOT. It’s wild. BUT I AM GOING.
OKAY. That is all for now. The newsletter will go out at LEAST once a month, on the 11th, with potential micro-updates if cool stuff happens. That’s all. FANGS a lot for reading.
In battiness,
Tris