Planned Release Date: Jan 12, 2026

About This Game

Alone.  Lost.  Cursed.

You wake near a quaint little town full of happy people living normal existences.  They are completely unaware that you are a tormented vampire, forced to feed on their lives or let your own end.

Explore an infinite world full of yummy townsfolk, limited only by your constant hunger.  If people see you killing their friends, they'll panic and call for the guards, but each kill will make you stronger.  Plan your feeding out of sight, or choose to only bite your victims a little so no one is the wiser.  But beware: anyone you don't finish becomes a vampire too, stricken with your same curse and hungering for their former friends.

Vampire Instinct is a small, focused, single player action game with fun top-down, pixel-art graphics.  Gameplay is an action/stealth/outbreak hybrid: fight the guards or hide your deeds or deal with the consequences of unleashing an army of vampires on unsuspecting villagers.

Features

• Top-down world with pixel art graphics.

• Slowly depleting health bar: ~75 seconds to live!

• Vampire action: press and hold the action button to dash and grab NPCs and drink their blood.

• Unique level up system: after killing an NPC, choose from one of two level up options, each of which increases your abilities and the abilities of the guards who can chase you.

• Test yourself: at the end of each run you'll see how long you survived, how much blood you drank, and how much blood spilled which you didn't drink.  These records persist and your totals and best of each can be viewed from the main menu.

• Stealth: hide your kills out of sight of other villagers, or don't fully kill your victims so no one is aware.  Hide from the guards if they show up.

• Action: if someone sees you kill, they'll summon the guards who will try to kill you.

• Outbreak sim: bitten NPCs become vampires with no self-control who will kill when hungry, depleting your available food sources and causing guards to show up.

• Procedurally generated towns: every town is different!

• Infinite procedurally generated world: when there's no food left, set out into the world to find a new town to terrorize.  Make sure you have enough health to survive away from the only thing that keeps you alive.

• Dynamic music responds to game state: things get exciting when guards show up, and the music gets more distorted as you get hungrier.

• Liquid physics: blood sprays onto the ground and drips down the walls of buildings (if I'm being honest, it's both my favorite part of the game and also probably not that impressive).

• Banter: while you starve, the NPCs will muse about their life and the things they have seen since you showed up.

• Remappable keys: remap the movement and action keys.

• Controller kind of supported: I only own Xbox controllers, but as far as I've tested they work (thumbstick or dpad for movement, a for action, three-lines for accepting menus, and back to exit).

• Indie game dev: support indie development, and indie art!  Most of the art in the game was purchased from content packs made by Seliel the Shaper; if this game does well, you'll support me and in turn I'll be able to continue to support other indie content creators like that.

• No generative AI!  As far as I know, none of the art and sound assets were created with generative AI, but if you see something suspect in the credits let me know and I will look into it.

Mature Content Description

The developers describe the content like this:

You are a hungry vampire, and people bleed a lot when you bite them. Guards will hit you with their swords if they catch you. It's all done in pixel art graphics.