Blood_Cells

The Game The Idea: "Blood Cells" or "Blood Bank"

It's a "reverse" Vampire Survivors rogue-lite, where you are the monster. The entire game is a fast-paced, high-tension loop of managing your single, most important resource: your own life force.

• The Vision: The gameplay of Vampire Survivors (waves of enemies, XP, upgrades) combined with the 2D isometric "room" perspective of Knight Lore.
• The Scene: You are Patient Zero. You've just killed your squad in an isometric factory/lab room. Alarms blare, and waves of soldiers now flood in from doors to kill you.
• The Goal: Survive as long as possible by consuming your attackers.

The Core Mechanic: The "Blood Bank" Loop

This is the single mechanic we're perfecting. Everything is built around your Blood Bar (your health).

1. It's Your EVERYTHING: Your Blood Bar is your Health, your Stamina, and your Hunger Timer.
2. The Drain: Your Blood constantly ticks down. This is your "hunger." If it hits zero, you die.
3. The Risk (Attacks Cost Blood): You have manual attacks, not auto-attacks.
   • Light Attack (Punch): Costs a tiny amount of Blood (e.g., 1 Blood). Low risk, low reward.
   • Heavy Attack (Claw Sweep): Costs a large chunk of Blood (e.g., 15 Blood). High risk, high reward.
   • Getting hit by an enemy also costs Blood.
4. The Reward (Eating): When you kill an enemy, they leave a Corpse.
   • Walking over the Corpse makes you "eat" it, instantly restoring a large amount of Blood.
5. The Upgrade Loop: Eating a corpse also spawns Red Cells (your XP).
   • Collecting these Red Cells fills your "Mutation" bar.
   • When the bar is full, the game pauses, and you get to choose a new Mutation (e.g., "Tougher Hide," "Spit Acid," "Faster Lunge").

This creates a fantastic core loop: You are literally spending your life to kill, so you can eat and get your life back, which makes you stronger so you can kill and eat more.

The Plan:

Our plan is to build this in Godot 2D using a TileMap (in isometric mode) and a YSort node. We are prototyping the entire game loop first using only simple squares ("grey-boxing") to perfect the feel of the Blood Bank mechanic. Once the "squares" version is fun, we add the art.