bloodboundsiege - Tumblr blog

[bloodboundsiege]

dawg is villainous valentines about to fumble my entire bag

[bloodboundsiege]

what kind of music does the LIs listen to?

this ask has been sitting in my inbox for like a month bc i haven't been totally sure of the answer, but since I'm currently ill and lowkey bedridden, i've had time to think about it. sooo i made them all playlists!

carmen - a lot of post-punk, dark wave, and emo.

finn - dude has not gotten the memo that they kept on making music past 1989, so it's a lot of eighties new wave and some old school punk.

lauren - a combination of music that was popular in the nineties and mid 2010s synth pop.

priya - if it's synthy, she loves it. it's a combination of "chill" music and the type of music she's playing at the crimson veil

wes - he's fully that guy that's like "oh, I listen to everything!" when you ask him, but a lot of his favorites are from the mid nineties.

as a bonus, being that gaius has spent the last 100 years in a coffin, his music consumption habits wouldn't be super conducive to making a playlist, so here's a general *~*gaius augustine vibes*~* playlist i made.

[bloodboundsiege]

so i just finished playing the new chapter. did not enjoy lauren yelling @ me but i did enjoy learning more about her human life.

both of those scenes were sooooooooo fun to write, but I'm sorry lauren yelled at you anon 😭

[bloodboundsiege]

hello! i did a quick run of the first two chapters to see if ch 3 would load up automatically after downloading the update (and it does)

but upon replaying ch 1-2 w the update- i noticed a bug where some text is not accompanied w the dialogue box (for ref- i downloaded the latest android version)

thanks for checking and thanks for letting me know! i just uploaded a new version with the textbox issue fixed for android users (:

[bloodboundsiege]

BLOODBOUND: THE SIEGE CHAPTER 3 NOW AVAILABLE

(with the disclaimer that just like the first two chapters, it is subject to change and should be viewed as a continuation of the demo, not an official release)

AVAILABLE ON ANDROID, MAC, AND PC. DOWNLOAD HERE.

happy new year! I hope your 2024 is off to a great start. my belated holiday gift to you all is a new demo chapter of Bloodbound: The Siege. I originally wanted to drop a revamped demo, but realized that for a lot of people, replaying the demo with new features wouldn't be all that fun, so I decided to drop a new chapter instead!

a couple of notes:

if you played it lives within, this works the same way (i hope lmao). in order to play the new chapter with your old save file, you need to still have that save file on the device you're using.

If one of your bug notes is that a character doesn't remember a previous interaction (i.e., anyone acting like this is the second time meeting you, not the third), this is because ren'py doesn't load new variables into your old gameplay. I'm not really sure how to explain it, but the issue will certainly be addressed by the time the full release rolls around.

This is kind of a test to see if you can redownload the game and pick up where you left off for future releases. if that doesn't work for you, please let me know--the more detail, the better.

I still haven't been able to crack additional GUI features (i.e., the closet, the dialogue "bounce"). Expect these with the full release.

It's still a work in progress, and like the first two chapters, is subject to change, but I hope y'all like it. Happy new year!

[bloodboundsiege]

Will there be any nudity for the girls during the dirty thirty? Super excited for this to release!

nudity is a feature that i'm not super pressed about including just because i don't think the scenes need it per se (though I did think it was great that ILW offered it), and right now, my energy is just focused elsewhere on this project. i'm not ruling it out, but right now, i'm most likely not planning to include it. still, i hope you're able to enjoy these scenes once they start releasing.

thanks for stopping by, and i'm excited for you to play the full release!

[bloodboundsiege]

Apologies if this was already asked, but does the game solely take place during Gaius's reign in New York? Or does it go a bit further than that too?

I want to answer this question esp bc i just firmed up how the endings are going to go for each route and i want to talk about it, but doing so would kind of spoil the ending

so all i'll say is "yes"

[bloodboundsiege]

i love my undead gay sons

[bloodboundsiege]

I don't think you ever gave us Carmen lore

you're so right, and it's crazy you're the first one to ask bc i love her.

carmen does not like new york. like, circumstantially, she's fine with living there, but it is nowhere near even her tenth choice of places to live.

ideally, she'd want to go back to atlanta (in part because it's where she was born and raised, but at this point, she doesn't feel like she can go back because she doesn't want to endanger her family) or new orleans (which, alas, is now way too expensive, and it's nearly impossible to just sneak in unnoticed there).

although she definitely likes the stability of the shadow den, she really doesn't feel like she fits in there. this is in part because she spent most of her life living in different parts of Georgia, and New York vampires, regardless of Clan affiliation, still are a bit too weird for her.

this is the person you want with you in a zombie apocalypse--she was in nursing school at Emory when she was turned, and had to spend a lot of her early years as a vampire living off the grid.

growing up, carmen always had an interest in weird, spooky things (she could talk for hours about all of the supposed hauntings/supernatural phenomena of the southeastern united states if you let her) but never really got on the vampire hype train.

part of why she wanted to become a nurse is because she's never been that squeamish, thought going to med school would be way too stressful, and figured it was a more socially acceptable career path to go down than the mortuary industry.

her paternal grandparents immigrated to the united states from Colombia in the late 1940s, ultimately settling in florida.

some *~*additional*~* character creation lore is that she was probably the hardest sprite to nail down, and took me the longest to create. there's an alternate universe where she'd have a modified version of gigi from loa as her sprite, but gigi looks so young compared to the other sprites I was using for the LIs, that it just looked really weird to me, and then I had an a-ha moment about 14 chapters in CoP about reworking Ruby's sprite for this character.

[bloodboundsiege]

*~*officially*~* done with the semester which mean i get to finish up my lil surprise for y'all

[bloodboundsiege]

I'm glad you're happy with this, and I hope you got to make a cool MC with the options! Thanks for checking out the demo (:

I'm so happy just with this inclusion... I love Bloodbound with all my heart, and I remember being a little sad we couldn't choose a male MC for this one (Book 3 explains why, but still...) Being trans or genderfluid could've worked.

I also have a Trans Bloodbound OC, so I'm grateful to the fan developer @bloodboundsiege for adding this.

[bloodboundsiege]

i made this poll without realizing that putting in the new stuff would absolutely obliterate everybody's save files so the verdict is that there won't be any new mc assets until the full release lol

in the meantime--

[bloodboundsiege]

Reunification

Or, the brief life of Iola Apostolous Summary: A young woman considers the visions of the Goddess of Blood she's been plagued with. Wordcount: 1,983 Rating: Mature Content notes: Canon-typical violence Read it on AO3

They must have taken her because she was in danger.

There were moments of her mother that Iola remembered. The warmth of an embrace. The smell of crushed sage and ceremonial incense, mixed in with something metallic and raw. Learning how to swim in the ocean. Laying outside, her head resting against her mother’s chest, looking up at the stars. Fingers brushing through her hair. A scolding because she’d run outside to play on her own.

She remembered her father too. A man who could make her laugh, often joining in a lower, booming timbre. A man who would pick her up and swing her in circles until he got tired. A man who would sneak her dates, all don’t tell your mother. A man who would carry her whenever she was tired. A man who loved her unconditionally.

And then, a fire. Screaming agony from burning bodies, the smell of smoky flesh, the pounding boots against the ground, getting carried onto a boat. When she was out on the water, begging the people who claimed they were taking her to safety to bring her back to her mother, she heard a piercing scream, haunted and broken.

There were other bits and pieces, things that didn’t always make sense. She remembered a large stone room with a throne, stained with something rust colored. She remembered a spacious courtyard, grand parties full of laughter. The Sons of Ares had rescued her after The Goddess of Blood murdered her mother and father, and the memories of who they were, where they fit into Mydiea began to fade.

Iola always knew there was something different about her. People were wary around her. But she wasn’t sure what made her different until the dreams started.

She was fifteen years old, ten years after her rescue. There were dreams of a striking, willowy woman with dark hair, tawny skin, and full lips, eyes glowing iridescent red. Sometimes, she swam in the ocean, traversing down to the bottom, just as Iola liked to do. She’d sit at the bottom of the sea and scream, the sound muffled by the water. Other times, it was snippets of conversation, between a tall, muscular man with long, dark umber hair and an infectious smile and an increasingly sullen, lanky man with dark curls and dark hair. A soldier and a prince. The woman’s soldier and prince.

They felt familiar somehow. She could swear she’d seen their faces before—the soldier carrying her on his back when she was three years old, the prince trying to mask his obvious discomfort with her.

It was impossible. She was trying to fill in the blanks of her past, trying to understand who she was before she was brought to a village on the Greek coast, adopted by a fisherman and his wife, taught to pray for the downfall of The Goddess of Blood.

But then the dreams began to change. There were visions of violence, of the woman tearing out soldiers’ hearts—Sons of Ares soldiers. Visions of an underground cavern full of women in white. She’d bite into their necks, draining their blood until they died.

The Goddess of Blood. Iola wanted to tell somebody about her visions, but she knew she couldn’t. She didn’t know what it meant. Did the Goddess of Blood have a psychic connection with her? Could she control her? Worst of all, what would happen if Iola told anyone about the things she saw? They’d see her as a liability, tie rocks to her feet and drown her in the ocean. Her lungs would give out eventually. She’d rot at the bottom of the ocean until the end of time, if the creatures that lurked beneath didn’t get to her first.

The most terrifying dream of all wasn’t of carnage and bloodshed. It came to her a year after they started; a dream that began pleasantly. She was playing in the ocean, a child again. Not even a child. A baby. Her father, dark haired and smiling, lifted her up, arms outstretched.

She understood this was a memory. Not hers. She’d seen things through the eyes of the prince or the soldier or the Goddess of Blood in her dreams, things she understood to be memories. This felt like that, like she was simultaneously looking down and viewing the scene, detached from above, and like she was seeing this through her father’s eyes.

And then, she was reaching for somebody, a figure out in the distance, swimming towards them. As the figure got closer, she recognized her: the Goddess of Blood. She was smiling, at ease and happy.

She reached for Iola, scooping her in her arms.

“Did she cry at all?” The Goddess of Blood asked.

“No. She was perfectly happy here.” Her father said. “She’s just like you. She loves the ocean.”

And as The Goddess of Blood took her in her arms, cradling her close to her neck, Iola smelled that familiar scent: crushed sage and incense, something slightly metallic. Blood, she realized.

Her mother was The Goddess of Blood.

They must have taken her because she was in danger, Iola eventually concluded. The Goddess of Blood must have killed her father. She must have killed the other villagers too, feasted on their blood. The Sons of Ares had been lying in wait, and they intervened. The story added up. She’d tried poking holes in it, wondering if she’d been kidnapped or rescued.

The Goddess of Blood may have birthed her, but she wasn’t her mother. Something had to have happened to her, something that twisted her and made her into the monster the Sons of Ares and everybody within a two hundred mile radius of Mydiea fear her, not even dare to utter her given name. Iola was pretty sure was one of the only civilians who knew her true name, who had heard it hundreds of times: Rheya.

There were dreams and memories that altered this perspective; moments of peace, of the sort of domesticity Iola hoped she would have whenever she had children, but they were always starkly juxtaposed against visions of abject horror: a human sacrifice where The Goddess of Blood would rip out a heart, she would bathe in blood, she would terrorize innocent civilians and children. She would urge her soldier to do her bidding, telling him that he would have nothing and nobody if anything happened to her.

Eventually, Iola learned to live with these dreams, viewing them as nightmares. She tried to live a normal life, silently vowing to herself that she would never tell anybody about her connection to The Goddess of Blood, not even Ajax, the soldier she’d found herself falling in love with.

He was the son of a merchant, descended from East Africans who’d ended up in Greece several generations back. She didn’t hesitate to say yes when he asked her to marry him. They were lucky; Iola would be well looked-after with Ajax, and she loved him. She could see herself spending the rest of her life with him. Her parents didn’t have to worry about arranging a marriage.

They had Miranda nine months after their wedding. Iola thought she knew what love was when she met Ajax; she was wrong. She loved Miranda beyond reason.

She feared for her too. She hoped Miranda wouldn’t inherent the same propensity for nightmares that Iola had. She was going to have to tell Miranda the truth at some point, explain what she was to her, where she came from. But until then, she’d enjoy the fact that during the day, when she wasn’t asleep, all was well.

Until it wasn’t.

The Sons of Ares had anticipated this attack, had known that eventually, The Goddess of Blood was going to find them. It was why they’d opted to set up their base of operations in a remote fishing village, far away from Mydiea. The key to their success was the way they were able to keep a low profile.

They’d had a plan in place in case they had ever happened: every few months, they’d bring the civilians out of their homes, line them up in the village square, and remind them what they needed to do: run. First and foremost, run. Head to the docks. Get on the boats. Get as far away as possible.

And then, they’d run through it, make everybody go through the motions of what they needed to do if she ever came.

But there were things they failed to take into account: first, her soldier and her prince were quick on their feet and bloodthirsty. Second, there was a difference between running because you were told to and running because you would get your spinal chord ripped out of your body and your heart devoured if you didn’t.

It was chaos. The village streets were strewn with corpses and red with blood when Iola and Ajax came out of their home. Iola told Miranda to close her eyes and keep her head down. She had her face buried in Ajax’s neck. She was only five years old, only a little bit older than Iola when the Sons of Ares had taken her. She didn’t need to see these things.

“No matter what happens, you keep running.” Iola said to Ajax.

“But—”

“Promise me. Miranda is your priority. Not me.”

“I…I promise.”

They began to run, heading towards the fishing docks. They wouldn’t try to get onto the larger boat that had been built for this very situation. They’d take Ajax’s fishing boat. Ajax could navigate the waters, take them to safety. They weren’t going to leave Miranda’s fate in somebody else’s hands.

They made it to the docks. Ajax jumped into the boat, Miranda still in his arms.

Just as Iola was about to get into the boat, she felt a hand on her shoulder, pulling her back.

“Go!” Iola yelled.

“But—”

“Now!”

She smelled crushed sage and incense, masked under layer upon layer of blood. She knew who grabbed her before they spun her around.

There she was, face to face with The Goddess of Blood. Her face was twisted into a mask of cruelty, her white, flowing dress stained with blood, clumps of flesh and gore clinging to her hair.

Iola froze. She wanted to ask her why she was doing this. She wanted to ask her what happened to her, why she’d killed her uncle and all of those villagers. She wanted to beg her to stop. But her voice was stuck in her throat. She didn’t want to be afraid. She shouldn’t have been afraid of her own mother.

The Goddess of Blood seemed frozen too. She reached out, stroking her thumb along Iola’s jawline, her eyes boring deep into her.

“Pathetic human.” She murmured.

Iola found her voice. “Wait—”

Things would have played out differently if her mother had found Iola earlier in the night. She would have fed on her, and she would have recognized her own blood, realized how it tasted just like her brother’s. She would have stopped then. She would have ordered her soldier and her prince to retreat. She would have held Iola in her arms. She would have spent eternity atoning for what she’d spent the last twenty years doing.

But it was late in the evening. Her mother had gorged herself on innocent blood, and she’d had enough. She was just killing now, trying to make the humans that occupied this small village feel the pain that she’d had to live with.

It was over before it even began. Her mother swiftly broke her neck, nearly tearing Iola’s head clean off. Iola barely knew what was happening before it was over. She didn’t hear Miranda scream, the sound traveling across the water because at that point, Ajax was a hundred feet from the dock.

It was a quick death. A mother’s final act of unintentional kindness.

[bloodboundsiege]

in the meantime--

[bloodboundsiege]

aight y'all i'm finishing up my nightmare finals project from hell (it's actually not that bad lol) and then I should have a lil sumthin for you soon since i'm maybe like three more scenes and 8 playtests away from it being done. it's not a big thing. but hopefully it will hold you all over until the full release (:

[bloodboundsiege]

I already played the two chapters available, ​ and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next. I've been writing fanfic for Bloodbound, and I would love to add this to the story I've written when it's done.

I love the sound design of some of the chapters; clearly, it's new sounds that are not from the Pixelberry books, mixed with soundtrack players of Bloodbound, and I love that choice.

I also love seeing Kamilah and Priya again, adding more complexities to their characters than we saw before, especially for Priya.

I would love to see more access to the wardrobe UI between chapters so we can change our character's outfits, but I think that's such a small thing right now.

This game demo is so good; I can't wait to play the whole game.

I just wanted to let you know 😄

Thank you! That's really dope to hear.

While I am quite flattered by the sound design, all of the music, except for the very beginning, are from the Pixelberry library. I'd love to add my own music for some scenes if I have the time, but that's a ways a way (and contingent on me having more free time).

As for the UI wardrobe--definitely working on it. Buttons like that are the one UI thing that continues to elude me.

Thanks for stopping by, for the kind words, and for checking out the demo! (:

[bloodboundsiege]

i played the demo when it first came out and then deleted it recently to clean my computer SO i just redownloaded it to play it again.

did the, like, lil personality quiz near the beginning get removed? or is that just a bug on my end? bc im only getting the genie question and i swear i remember more

the quiz got shortened to fix a bug--the sorting worked just fine if you were heavily picking answers designated to a specific clan, but if you scored in the middle with two clans, the code got confused, and so there was a bug where some players would be sorted into one clan and then get scenes with another clan. that bug also made the game completely unplayable for a few of these people, so i decided to just make it a single question as a quick, inelegant fix until i find a workaround so everyone can check out the demo. i'd definitely like to bring back the longer quiz once i find a workaround.

since to me the genie question felt the most significant (insofar as it references the original bloodbound and i think a lot of us thought how we answered that question in the beginning was going to affect the outcome of the plot in some way), i decided to keep that in as the way that players get sorted into their respective clans.