FLEDGLING
You've been given a gift! Your life is now over. There's no going back... In nine days you will be one of us.
For Strawberry Jam 9 and Queer Vampire Game Jam 2025, which ran concurrently.
By Pyrex and Nyeo, with contributions from Kistaro and Bhijn.
Content warnings
The vampires in this game are not nice and you are one. Specifically, this game includes:
- Abuse, kidnapping, and murder
- Addiction and drug abuse themes
- Caste-based servitude themes
- Degradation, extended public humiliation
- Identity loss
- Necrophilia including mutilation of corpses
- Nonconsensual hypnotism and sexual activity
- References to needles
- Sexual activity with non-sapient feral animals
- Vampirism
Completionism notes
There are ten endings (of varying complexity) and six romanceable NPCs. There's a lot of dynamic text.
In general, the skills you have affect the text you see. Failing a Wish has some interesting effects on your subsequent playthrough.
Comments
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I had a lot of fun, but also no idea what is going on.
I seem to be missing a large portion of the content, because the description and content warnings barely align with my experience.
I dungeon around for a bit, find up to 8 friends that I make mindless, very sick or kill and find gifts for them and then get a cryptic ending?
I don't understand the bottom choice when getting a new player character, either. I guess I should experiment more.
Thank you for playing! This is a moderately spoilery post that responds to some of the thoughts/curiosities you are implying you have.
Re the description: things in CWs happen at least once. I am listing them in CWs not to advertise them but to warn people away who might find them disconcerting.
That said, the vast majority are mechanically represented rather than textually -- it would be surprising to me if someone didn't recognize the themes of abuse/kidnapping murder and the identity loss, because they are overtly and repeatedly presented. There are some that are textually represented -- I think the concept of caste-based servitude is repeatedly and specifically invoked in the Lore route and endings.
Here's a few that are easy to miss because they only happen once or have complicated activation conditions:
I'm sad to hear that you were confused!! I think getting all the endings will probably not be revelatory, but I do think that taking the info presented at face value will get you to a pretty good idea what is happening in one or two playthroughs. The ending typically tells you more about your character than about the world, and the world is basically the same in every playthrough.
That said, there's a slightly more revealing sequence triggered by all-skills-unlocked in a wish-free playthrough; that's probably as close as you get to a "true ending"!
Re the wish system, which occurs in endgame: it affects skill costs and ending conditions. Specifically, the ending-selection algorithm is replaced with a binary pass/fail if you have a wish active.
i like this! to reiterate what other people have said, i'd love to see an endless mode
I'll continue contemplating this! There are some design reasons I'm tempted not to do this -- the main one is basically that I think that the current game design creates a lot of "near misses" -- runs ending in 5 thralls but not 6 -- which I think are very compelling.
However, a lot of people clearly like the game and want to play more of it, and I think many people like the feeling of safety that comes with keeping a character.
i played for a few hours and only managed to get 3/6 on my best run :| mainly just never finding them
An enjoyable little roguelike(?), though personal bias in favour of evil undead related games may have coloured my experience~ ;3
While the gameplay loop is a bit lacking in variety, the prose was definitely good enough to keep me going just to see what this game has in store. I love the callous immorality of the player character, it really touches on what is compelling about vampires.
Thank you!
Usually my goal when I make a game like this is to create a situation where evil does not feel specifically encouraged or discouraged. This is pretty hard to do with a scope this small and I don't think I nailed it completely, but one of the prerequisites to do that is to make sure that evil options are there and that they are presented somewhat unemotionally.
Genuinely really cool. Wasted a bunch of blood on the first day because I didn't realized you could click blocks to break them and move around that way, but after figuring it out navigating the maze was a blast. The writing is fun. I'm amazed the whole thing is apparently made in a custom Typescript engine?
That's correct! This was written from scratch. The most challenging part was the graphics engine, but a close second is the movement physics, which Bhijn helped with.
Dang that's impressive! I've always used engines for my games, I can't imagine making everything from scratch, especially in the timespan of more or less a month.
My main recommendations for people who want to do the same, in any language:
I think that once you've done all this, you have an environment that is roughly on the friendliness tier of Pico-8. From there, writing a GameMaker-style event loop is probably your best recourse, although I didn't because I'm used to Pico-8. I didn't include tips about audio because those strongly vary by environment.
I'll probably publish a more detailed guide to some of this as part of the postmortem!
Great game with a fun gameplay loop! Didn't realize that cc was used for breaking stuff too at first, but when I did I had a lot of fun uwu
Thank you for playing it!
I really enjoyed my first run through before i realized there was essentially a 10 day loop, but after my second run went rather poorly, my 3rd and 4th every single skill was so expensive I couldn't get out of the deficit that I was put in, especially as the -8 stats per day meant I could never discount my skills to access the NPCs and locked doors. Until I spent like 5 empty runs just waiting for all my stats to enter the negatives and then find 15 EXP blocks to buy the "repenting" skills
I liked what I got to experience in the first run, and the snowball of accessing an NPC and essentially doubling your time in the maze is really fun.
I think that two things would really make the game more consistently fun
1) make blood not be spent just walking around, I feel like a majority of my blood use went into empty hallways and running to pick up item drops, maybe as an "easy" difficulty mode. I'm pretty sure this is what got me in "repent" mode in the first place
2) cap the "repent" skills at 100 exp cost, that way over the course of 10 days theres a decent chance of finding the required exp blocks and get back to sweet gaming, but you're still punished for failure, once again maybe as an "easy" mode, or just give the option to have the failed fledgling killed after a couple failed "repenting" runs
Once again really enjoyed this game, its fun when it's not snowballling in the opposite direction, I'd kill for an endless mode where I can build up a super vampire and see the dialogue for all the super high stat skills
Hey, thank you!! The judging period starts very soon and I won't make changes before then, but I agree these are reasonable changes to make in principle.
My main suggestions to you in the short run are to be observant of level layouts -- they are random, but in many cases it is possible to determine the contents of a tile without seeing it -- and to play a few more runs -- your character's base stats will be higher with each subsequent run!
Completing the conditions for the final ending in a single playthrough is possible (and usually takes me two to four attempts) although collecting all the thralls in a single run is a matter of pure luck.