Bloodless Dev Diary #1 - Intro

My name is Danilo Freire - Game Director of Bloodless - and I’m speaking on behalf of the Point N’ Sheep team. Welcome to our first Developer Diary!

The concept of Bloodless was created back in 2019, during a period where our team were experimenting with a lot of ideas in game jams, with the goal of creating a nostalgic experience, but with fresh takes on themes and mechanics.

First version of Bloodless, from October 2019

After receiving lots of positive feedback at playtests, we decided to give the project a chance to be more than just a concept and so began pre-production back in 2020. As we kept evolving to become more aligned with some of our game references, the game started to gain some notoriety, especially after winning the Best Brazilian Game award at the Big Festival 2023, the exact same week we met our friends from 3D Realms.

The game takes place in a fictional world inspired by Shogunate-era Japan

In Bloodless the player takes control of Tomoe - a former captain of the shogun’s army - who became a ronin after seeing too much bloodshed and losing her sister in battle while in service to the shogun. She deserted her homeland, Bakugawa, and wandered the world for almost 20 years.

With newfound wisdom and resolve she returns to Bakugawa to confront her past and finds that the problems that drove her away still permeate the land she strives to bring peace to. Tomoe has sworn not to take another life, and must instead just disarm her enemies. Use a combination of counters and disarming ki-attacks to defeat the shogun’s army.

Even though our team lives many miles away from the land of the Rising Sun, we grew up reading manga and watching anime such as Dragon Ball, Yu Yu Hakusho, Evangelion, and many others, including Rurounin Kenshin, which is one of our main inspirations for the story of Bloodless. During Bloodless’ development, we dove into all sorts of media that explores the Edo-Period of Japanese history like the great samurai movies from director Akira Kurosawa and games like Ghost of Tsushima…

As far as game inspiration goes, as people who grew up in the 90’s, we love the classic action-adventures from the SNES and SEGA Genesis era like Legend of Zelda as well as the more recent Hollow Knight in terms of world building, exploration, content variety, and of course the intense Sekiro (and everything coming out of From Software). One of our goals with Bloodless is to build a bridge between the old and the new.

Wishlist Bloodless now to keep up to date on its release date and more devlogs!

Thanks!