Vampire Death Party

The Concept

She never comes back right

Every enemy family in town drops a different part. Haul them back to the funeral-home lab, stitch Donna together, throw the switch — and deal with whatever shambles off the slab.

Because she never comes back right. So they try again. Five times, with better parts every time, until the last one is built from the best of everything the town has — and she's flawless, and she's still not Donna.

Living tissue was never going to hold her. Being dead, on the other hand, has worked out fine for Herb for four hundred years. That's the Blood Rite: Donna comes back a vampire, stays together this time, and the Vampire Death Party is finally a party of three — immortal, and loose in a town that absolutely deserves them.

Tone

Hard-R campy horror-comedy. Evil Dead 2, Re-Animator, Frankenhooker, Elvira. Enemies burst like overfilled water balloons in showers of neon gore and flying novelty parts — outrageous rather than grim. The game never takes a single thing seriously, including its own title screen.

The Town

Mercer Falls

A normal town until the meteor hit the pageant grounds — the same meteor that made the lawnmower go haywire, a fact the lawnmower has never adequately apologized for. Now the townsfolk are mutated freaks, the town is quarantined behind a military fence, and the only residents unaffected are the ones who were already dead.

Six districts, one seamless map, played over the shoulder — you're down in the streets of it, not looking down at it, tight indoors and pulled back a step outside: the Suburbs, the Mall (no windows — daytime-safe, which matters), the Woods, the Track & Rec Center, Downtown and its rooftop routes, and the Fairgrounds crash site, whose sickly glow bleeds into the sky from anywhere on the map. Fast travel is a network of repaired hearses, because obviously, and yes, you can drive them.

The Cast

Two heroes, one karen

Concept art of Herb: a gaunt, pale vampire with wild white spiked hair, sunken staring eyes and a tattered layered black coat. — **Herb**412 years old. Still learning.

RoxyDesign not settled. Heels or boots, earrings, tassels — all still open.

Donna in the mutant ham: a squared-off loaf of raw meat with two mismatched eyes — one large and lashed, one small and low — a slot of exposed ribs, and a small crooked mouth. — **Donna**The ham. In-game asset, lashes included.

Herb: A 412-year-old vampire who has somehow never gotten good at it. He falls down. He stakes himself with some regularity — the fence he was climbing was only the most public occasion. He passes out. He cannot drive. And he falls out of his coffin every single time he wakes up, which four centuries have done nothing to improve. He is, understandably, miserable about all of it. His lane is gadgets and old-world nonsense: the tesla mitt, a blunderbuss that fires silverware, and a very long memory for grudges. He is the player who prepares the room.
Roxy: His niece, turned three years ago in the only documented case of vampirism transmitted by archery — she was bowhunting bats in the caves, her arrow passed clean through a vampire in bat form, ricocheted off the wall and caught her in the neck. Secondhand, still warm. The vampire was mortified and sent an apology card; Herb had a plaque made. She is already better at this than Herb has managed in four centuries, which she brings up constantly.
Donna: The only living human who knew what they were and didn't care. Pageant queen, demolition derby champion, maker of the county's most dangerous chili. Her brain survived the accident, and Herb put what was left of her somewhere it would keep: a mutant ham. She is conscious in there, she is furious about it, and she is present for the entire game as quest-giver, backseat driver and heckler of her own resurrections. She speaks gibberish with subtitles, and the subtitles are where the filthiest jokes live. Her opening question, roughly: why did you put me in this fucking mutant ham?

Two Players, One Rulebook

Herb and Roxy differ in kit, not capability. Herb prepares the room — gadgets, area control, four centuries of grudges and a blunderbuss he hand-loads one fork at a time. Roxy springs what he sets — speed, traps, and the ability to drive anything with an engine. Neither is the support character. Whoever you pick, you get the whole game; you just get a different job in it.

The Campaign

Five wrong Donnas

Every resurrection works, briefly. Each wrong Donna runs a chapter, delivers some of the game's best jokes, then dramatically collapses into a parts pile. The material through-line is filler steadily replaced by anatomy — straw and pool noodles at the start, pageant-grade everything by the end.

It's one body, built across the whole campaign. Each chapter opens a district and adds one new part; everything already in her stays in her, at whatever grade you found it. So she attempts things at the level of her best part and breaks at the level of her worst — which is why upgrading one thing is never free. Give her wolf legs and the hips you improvised four chapters ago become the problem. Whatever survives a collapse goes into the next one.

And the parts bring their donors with them. A cheerleader's arms come with the school spirit still in them. A mall Santa's torso comes with compulsive generosity. Every wrong Donna is wrong in the exact shape of whatever Mercer Falls was made of that week — which is the joke, and also the warning: you are choosing her personality at the same time you choose her parts.

Spirit FingersPom-Pom arms · pure improvisation

Grimy-tier cheerleader arms, and the squad's pom-poms are fused to their hands like tentacles — so the arms come off the Wraiths with the pom-poms already attached, and Donna has them from her very first body onward. The rest of her is scarecrow straw, pool noodles and one couch cushion. Herb calls the filler "provisional anatomy" and insists quantity is a kind of quality. Donna #1 is ninety percent gesture by volume and cannot simply point at things — she presents them. She wants her varsity trophy back from her former squad.

Collapses attempting the victory pyramid solo, as both the top and the base, which is ambitious for someone whose legs are pool noodles. Parting subtitle: "worth it."

The Giving SeasonKringle torso · fresh tier

Roxy's pick; she wanted something that would hold. The Kringle Kreatures are what became of the mall Santas, and the mall hired so many. A Santa torso is built like a chimney, and it comes with a chimney's worth of compulsive generosity. Donna #2 wraps things. All things. She gift-wraps the slab, the vats, and a visibly uncomfortable Herb, declares Christmas in July for the entire quarantine zone, and sends the vampires into the deepest Kringle den after the Mall's grand tree topper — the only star she'll accept on a tree of that magnitude.

It's the two-player carry tutorial wearing a bow: one vampire on each end of an enormous ornament, down through exploding presents and flammable beards. The Mall has no windows, which makes it the first place you can work in daylight.

Ho-ho-hos so hard at her own tree lighting that the torso's seams give. Gift-wraps herself before falling apart, "to save you two the trouble."

Moon HungerHowler legs · pristine tier

Legs harvested across three genuinely scary nights in the Woods. Donna #3 is night-coded, magnificent, awful — and fast now, which everyone realises is a mistake at the same moment. She chases the mail truck. She catches it. Then she asks for a shard of the meteor itself, and won't say why.

Dawn catches her mid-howl on the crater rim. Wolf legs clear it in one triumphant leap; grimy-tier hips were never rated for the landing.

More Hands Make Light WorkFour cheer arms · a runner's heart

Herb's masterstroke, reasoning verbatim: "the failures are structural, therefore, redundancy." Four arms. The chapter also crosses from chassis to contents — the first internal part, the first extraction that's surgery instead of demolition. And here's the trick: she's the best one yet. She fixes the hearse in an afternoon, wins arguments by gesturing in stereo, and makes chili while holding both a beer and Herb's collar.

Takes the checkered flag with all four fists up — one arm too triumphant for pristine-tier shoulder seams. Makes them promise, solemnly, while collapsing: "the arms stay."

The Perfect OnePageant-grade everything · no filler left

Banshee lungs for the pageant voice, Manicured Menace nerves for the parade wave, a heart already proven at the derby. Every family's rarest drop. She is flawless, and it's horrifying. Posture like a closing argument. Remembers everyone's name and nothing that matters. The tell dawns slowly: she makes the chili mild. Donna's chili has a body count.

Stops mid-perfect-wave, like a wind-up dancer finishing. Donna, who has been listening from the ham all game, sets the finale: "then stop building bodies and build ME, dipshits."

The Finale

The Blood Rite

Living tissue won't hold a Donna. Dead tissue, Herb notes while staring at his own four-hundred-year-old hands, has an excellent warranty.

The rite needs meteor ground, a storm, and both vampires bleeding into the circle in sync — while Chad Van Helsing III and the full membership of the HOA assault the Fairgrounds mid-ritual. One player anchors the rite, the other repels crossbow real estate agents, and the roles swap as the storm phases shift.

Donna rises. Four cheer arms, because a promise is a promise, and on the end of each one the pom-poms she has worn since her very first body — soaked through by the rite now, and permanent. They were always going to be her hands. Her first act as an immortal is to walk over to the lawnmower, players braced for violence, and shake its handle. "We're good."

The Systems

Being a vampire

Vampirism is the game's central resource system, not a costume.

Blood is the everything-meter: Powers, healing and revives all spend it. Blood comes from draining downed enemies — and the duo drain (one player holds the flailing Kringle, the other bites) returns roughly double to each, plus a style bonus for creative restraint. Bottom out and you're Parched: powers lock and your stomach growls loudly enough to aggro enemies. Overfill and you're Blood Drunk: damage up, powers discounted, and your controls develop a gentle insistent drift, like driving on ice with confidence.
Sunlight is the clock: Night is playtime. Day is a heist — direct sun ticks health fast, so you run shadow routes, sewers and the funeral home, with umbrellas that degrade like shields and industrial sunscreen sold by Phil, the town's one remaining vendor, who has seen everything and sells everything.
Powers are toys, not stats: Bat form, mist form, hypnotic gaze, wall-crawl — and the shared ultimate, Death Party: both players activate in sync, surf rock kicks in, the screen goes purple, and for fifteen seconds everything in range has a very bad night. It only works in sync. Desync just makes your vampire strike a pose alone, which costs blood and dignity.
Weaknesses are the difficulty system: Garlic sours the blood meter until you purge it on something fresh. Running water can't be crossed in bat form, so bridges are chokepoints the HOA learns to stake out. Rice triggers genuine arithmomania — a real stun, broken only by a partner slap on a dedicated button with a disproportionate animation. And vampires cannot enter homes uninvited, which turns every house quest into a social encounter.

The Bestiary

Everyone in town is made of parts

Quality runs Grimy → Fresh → Pristine → Pageant-Grade. Pageant-grade drops demand genuine two-player tactics.
Family	What they were	Drops	Behaviour
Pom-Pom Wraiths	The varsity squad — pom-poms fused to their hands like tentacles	Arms	Attack in pyramid formations, collapse hilariously when the base is tripped
Kringle Kreatures	Mall Santas (the mall hired so many)	Torsos	Slow tanks, exploding presents, flammable beards
Moonlight Howlers	Werewolves — the meteor just made them jerks about it	Legs	Night-only, hit hard, comically distractible
Cardio Ghouls	The 6 AM jogging club	Hearts	Never stop moving; must be trapped, clotheslined, or led into wet cement
Aria Banshees	Choir and community-theatre people	Lungs	Ranged sonic attacks; can be defeated by bad reviews
Manicured Menaces	The hand-model convention, in town one fateful weekend	Nerves	Precise, thieving, vain — shatter when shown their own reflection
Garlic Golems	The farmer's market	Nothing	Daytime-only, poisonous, guard the best daytime loot
The Coif	An entire salon fused into one sentient hairdo	Hair	Roaming mini-boss. Judgmental
The HOA	Vampire hunters led by Chad Van Helsing III, real estate agent	Bounty	Hunt the players, escalating like a wanted system

The Blood Business

Somebody has to pay for all this

The economic spine, run out of the funeral home basement. Schedule 1, but for blood.

Welcome to the Blood BankMr Cole works behind the glass. The window has been making replacement blood all along — it just didn't know its own name yet.

Supply
Source
Tend
Harvest
Incubate
Package
Distribute

Mr Cole standing behind the Fresh Blood counter: bottles of blood, a platter of blood cells, and a price board listing red cells, white cells and platelets. — **The Fertilizer Line**Platelets, white cells, red cells — additives that speed the process and raise quality.

The secret is live blood. Blood from a living donor carries something that is lost the moment it comes from a dead person. That something is the operation's edge — and what it actually is stays unnamed.

Which creates a problem, because in a quarantined town crawling with nine enemy families, clean humans are the scarce resource. So the crop is people: the uninfected, conned into the back of an ambulance. They aren't grabbed — they're talked into it. Back in the basement they're kept hypnotised and occupied while the draw runs, and if the trance slips or the magazines run out, your crop gets up and walks.

The Pit

Intake is a hole in the ground

The procession belt's terminus dumps into it. It fills with limbs. A dedicated worker in the cold room organises, categorises, tags and hangs what lands there.

Mr Cole

The blood cleaner

Dead parts ride the belt into his pit; his work behind the glass cleans dead blood into replacement blood — the supply that keeps donors alive while you take all of theirs. Cleaned blood drips in as live blood drains out.

The Product

HyperBlud

Live donor blood plus the special ingredient, mixed in the vats, makes a wild new infectious pathogen that takes over your blood. It is addictive. It makes people go crazy. Demand isn't demand — it's addiction.

Which is why the law exists

The HOA's checkpoints and bridge stake-outs aren't fussy-neighbour comedy — they're prohibition, because the stuff genuinely makes people crazy. Two idiots in love with their dead friend, funding her resurrection by getting a gated community hooked on vampire-processed blood. Donna, watching from the ham. Taking notes. Commenting.

The Lab

Cadwallader & Sons, Est. 1911

Everything in the Bickerstaff funeral home comes from one of three places, and knowing which is half the comedy.

Concept art of a Cadwallader & Sons Perpetual Circulation Cabinet: a riveted iron-and-copper cylinder with brass pressure gauges and a green-glowing glass chamber, in which several small indistinct figures are suspended. — **Perpetual Circulation Cabinet**Parts go in, decay stops. The contents beyond the parts are never explained.

Genuine mortuary equipment: Real, professional, and rated for exactly the wrong application. The Slab — porcelain-over-steel, drain channels, a foot pedal because 1911 assumed you'd be working alone. It has a chip in the corner shaped like Florida, which Donna comments on constantly. The Vats — green glass cylinders where parts go in and decay stops. Their contents beyond the parts are never explained, and Herb changes the subject with escalating panic.
Estate-sale garage junk: Because Herb has been buying dead relatives' tools for four centuries and cannot stop. Jumper cables. A chest freezer that smells like 1994 and browns out the lights every time the compressor kicks on. An electric carving knife from a 1987 Thanksgiving, with two speeds, both of them wrong.
Herb's own inventions: Built badly, named grandly, labelled with brass plaques he engraves himself. In cursive. Sometimes in Latin. Always slightly misspelled. The Magnificent Reknitter is a sewing machine threaded with fishing line; its second word is engraved noticeably smaller because he ran out of room. Roxy uses a label maker. Her labels say ARMS (GOOD) and ARMS (WHATEVER).

Two Players

Built for exactly two

Mechanically, not just spiritually. Pageant-grade enemies require bait-and-strike coordination. Torsos take two carriers, one per end, with physics-driven stumbling. The resurrection sequence needs the switch and the lightning rod thrown simultaneously in different rooms while a storm timer runs. Rice-counting requires a partner slap.

Revives are unlimited and fast — a downed vampire collapses into a grumpy bat that flaps in circles and swears until scooped up — because this is a game for cackling on voice chat, not friendship-ending difficulty.

The Prime Directive

If the process isn't fun, the project dies. This game has two developers or it has zero. Scope is the first thing sacrificed — never enjoyment.

Development Build

Get it running

Everything needed to set up a machine and play: the game, the art packs, the pinned engine, and the two-player connection walkthrough.

Enter the lab

Password required.