Bloody Hell Hotel Developer on Making a Vampire Management Sandbox

Please introduce yourself to our readers. What projects have you contributed to before Bloody Hell Hotel?

Hey, my name is Wlad Marhulets, also known as Mr. Dev to the audience of Bloody Hell Hotel. I've worked on projects across a few different industries over the years. The game that started it all and paved the way for Bloody Hell Hotel was DARQ, which I developed almost solo, with virtually no budget. It went on to accumulate over 7 million downloads across PC and consoles (most of those came from a free Epic Games Store promotion – not direct sales). 

Bloody Hell Hotel is a very different beast, though – it's an AA-scale production involving over 150 collaborators from around the world. But DARQ did sell a copy or two, so during the COVID lockdowns, I decided to write a book, "GAMEDEV: 10 Steps to Making Your First Game Successful" – given the cheesy title, I honestly didn't think many people would read it. To my surprise, it became an Amazon bestseller, and some schools even use it as part of their game design curriculum – still pinching myself. 

Before getting into game development, I worked as a film composer. I was lucky enough to collaborate with Bob Shaye, the executive producer of The Lord of the Rings, and contribute additional music to films like The Giver, Hitman: Agent 47, The November Man, and Sabotage. And yet, one of the most widely heard pieces of music I've ever written was for a cat litter commercial. Really. It ran on TV for so many years that it serves as a much-needed reminder that my career as a film composer wasn't as glamorous as it might sound.

How did your background in film and music influence your approach to animation and audio?

A strong understanding of video editing, cinematography, lighting, color, and music transfers to video game development in unexpected ways. I don't think many studios approach audio the same way we do. We don't just cut a trailer and then look for good background music. Our trailers are essentially music videos – which might not be immediately obvious.

For Bloody Hell Hotel's announcement trailer, the music was written first, recorded with a live orchestra, and then used as the structural basis for the footage, which often had to be sped up and edited quite heavily to match the music. I don't think larger studios would be willing to take such a creative risk, but doing so landed us a Golden Joystick Award nomination for Best Trailer, alongside AAA titles. 

Of course, taking creative risks can also produce unpredictable results. While our most recent trailer was praised for gameplay, the way we used the live choir was so experimental that the internet wiped the floor with us in the comments – and I think rightly so. We'll take it easy next time. 

As for audio in general, needless to say, we pay enormous attention to it. For DARQ, all sound effects were created by Bjørn Jacobsen, known for his work on Cyberpunk 2077. He deserves all the credit for the sound awards DARQ has received. Bloody Hell Hotel also features extremely detailed sound effects. It's no longer the vision of a single sound designer, because the game is simply too big for that to be feasible. But our obsessive attention to detail in sound design has only increased since DARQ. 

Similarly, musicality and rhythm carry over into animation. In Bloody Hell Hotel, we treat the movement of the player's hands almost like dance choreography. Whether you're interacting with an object, casting a spell, or smacking a guest in the face with a baguette, there's a surprising amount of choreography behind every gesture – as ridiculous as it sounds. 

The goal is to make it all look effortless and spontaneous, much like a fight scene in a movie, where every gesture is deliberate, but the audience is never supposed to notice.

Please tell us about your unusual studio structure. Why did you decide to not hire full-time employees? How does it help develop Bloody Hell Hotel?

We've worked with over 150 contractors from all over the world on Bloody Hell Hotel so far. The main reason behind this structure? The game has so many interconnected systems that our development priorities naturally shift from one area to another. At times, we might be heavily focused on assets for the furniture system, which requires artists with a very different skill set than, for example, creating assets for procedurally generated dungeons, where the emphasis is on modular design and reusability. Some periods are animation-heavy, while others focus more on programming or VFX.

It doesn't always make sense to have all these specialists working full-time throughout development, even though we tend to collaborate with the same people over the years.

At any given time, we have about 15-30 contractors actively working on the game. The amount and variety of work that goes into Bloody Hell Hotel might suggest a much larger team, and in a way, that's accurate - just not everyone is working at the same time.

Many of our collaborators have been with us since the beginning, but their involvement naturally changes depending on what stage of development we're in or their own availability. This also gives us the luxury of not having to put unnecessary time pressure on our team members. There's no crunch time, because we can expand the team in any given department when needed. Instead of "Get this done by Thursday or we're screwed!" it's "So, when do you think you can get this done?" This allows us to plan ahead while keeping the team free from the pressure of internal deadlines. 

Remote session with the VO actress, Madison Mitts, recording gibberish lines co-created with the BHH community

Different tasks also benefit from different approaches. Some call for the expertise of AAA veterans. Others benefit from someone equally talented who hasn't spent years working within established industry conventions, someone who's not afraid to experiment and run with bold ideas. 

Of course, preserving a consistent creative vision in a structure like this requires extra effort. Detailed documentation helps a lot, but so does actually traveling to meet and work with key team members in person, often thousands of miles away from our studio's home base in Los Angeles.

Could you discuss the mechanics of the game? What makes it unique? What types of players will enjoy it?

OK, elevator pitch time! Bloody Hell Hotel is a first-person sandbox where you play as a vampire! Imagine waking up in your cozy coffin after centuries of captivity, discovering that your mansion is in ruins, and your vampiric powers are drained from... well, intermittent fasting spanning hundreds of years. What do you do? Turn your mansion into a hotel, obviously! Why? Because it's a lot easier to lure potential victims in and restore your vampiric powers than to run around hunting villagers like a goof. There's hotel management, farming, cooking, crafting, dungeon crawling, combat, and a whole bunch of other interconnected systems. 

But here's the important part: almost everything is optional. You can run a perfectly peaceful hotel, spend your days farming and cooking, or close the hotel altogether and focus on forging weapons and exploring dungeons to become a ridiculously powerful vampire. You don't even have to kill anyone to survive – blood is separate from HP; it's needed to use vampiric powers, and you can simply buy blood from the Vampiric Council if you're one of those pacifist vampires. Or... you can unleash absolute mayhem in your hotel and feel ridiculously overpowered while delivering the last customer service experience your guests will ever have. 

What excites me most is giving players the freedom to find their own ways of doing things. There are multiple ways to accomplish almost anything, and no single playstyle is the "correct" one. That's where most of the replayability comes from – well, there are also six vampiric classes with 270 skills in total, including upgrades, leveling up across five disciplines, countless perks, mutations, pets, upgrade trees for every major area in the game, and a variety of bat species to choose from. 

Someone who loves cozy management games might have a completely different experience from someone who enjoys combat and exploration, even though they're playing the same game. And of course, if you enjoy a little bit of everything, you can do that too. But this isn't a game for everyone. There's combat, but it's not trying to be the next Dark Souls. 

There's an in-game clock, but the gameplay is meant to be relaxing. Build a hotel, decorate it, furnish it, level up, unlock new skills, explore new areas, farm, cook, stare at the guests for too long and enjoy them expressing their discomfort in our custom-made gibberish language, and be ridiculous – that's the spirit of the game.

How did you set up procedural dungeon generation? What had you tried before settling on the final system? What worked and what didn’t?

We tried a lot of things that didn't work. It felt like inventing the lightbulb all over again – we got very good at discovering all the wrong ways to do it! We knew we wanted to generate a lot of content without giving players that "I've been here before" feeling. We also didn't want to rely on a minimap, which otherwise isn't needed in the game, just to keep players from getting disoriented. That made us realize that even a simple 90-degree corridor turn was a no-go. So, there are literally zero corridor turns in the dungeons. 

Instead, every turn leads through an antechamber with memorable props and elevation differences between the connecting corridors. We also wanted to give players freedom to explore without forcing them to backtrack, so we kept tweaking the algorithm until we found the sweet spot – enough branching to make exploration interesting, but not so much that players get lost. Most importantly, we wanted to avoid the feeling of procedural generation. The dungeon is supposed to feel handcrafted, just like the rest of the environments in the game. It's up to the players to decide, but we're very happy with how it turned out.

The algorithm is too complex to describe in detail, but what worked particularly well in the end was controlled randomization at different levels – layout type and size depending on the depth, the overall layout of the floor, how rooms and corridors connect, all the way down to the placement of enemies, resources, props, points of interest, lighting, and little details that make each area feel unique. Currently, the dungeons are endlessly deep – we might change that later. How we handled performance and memory usage is a separate TED Talk.

The topic of AI in gamedev is as prominent as ever. What are your thoughts and principles?

It's an interesting time, for sure. We're watching the future unfold right in front of our eyes. As far as my own studio is concerned, we have a strict no-AI policy for art assets. 

Most of our codebase predates modern AI coding assistants, but we do use them for debugging, code reviews, and optimization suggestions. I have mixed feelings about the technology, but I can't deny how useful these tools have become, especially for a project as complex as Bloody Hell Hotel.

Looking at the industry as a whole, there's a giant moral question mark around generative AI, but let's put that aside for a moment and focus on the technology itself. AI will make game development increasingly accessible to people who might otherwise never have tried making games. That sounds exciting, perhaps even empowering to smaller studios trying to compete with AAA giants. But there's a catch: as the number of games goes up, so does the cost of getting anyone to notice yours.

I believe generative AI will make life much harder for smaller studios. Game cloning existed long before AI, but now it can happen at incredible speeds. The safest strategy is pretty obvious: announce a game just weeks before release, spend millions on marketing, utilize a pre-existing audience, and launch before anyone has time to copy your ideas. AAA publishers can afford to do that. Smaller studios, which often depend on years of organically gathering wishlists? Not so much.

But I'm optimistic about the future of human creativity. We've seen technological revolutions disrupt entire industries, yet exceptional individuals continue to thrive. Take John Williams, for example. While Hollywood composers increasingly relied on sophisticated software to produce realistic orchestral mock-ups, Williams continued writing music with pencil and paper. The industry adapted to his way of working, not the other way around. Some of the most iconic themes in cinema history, from Star Wars to Harry Potter, came from a man scribbling notes on a piece of paper with a pencil. People care about his music, his imagination, and the remarkable human being behind it.

Meanwhile, music technology made composing accessible to people without formal musical training, but breaking into the industry remained as difficult as ever. Technology lowered the barrier to entry, not the barrier to success.

I have no doubt that technology will keep changing how we create things, or in this case, "generate" things. But I don't believe our desire to connect with other human beings through art is going anywhere. That doesn't mean the industry will stay the same – I think it will be disrupted beyond what we're already seeing. But as the world becomes increasingly filled with automatically generated content, knowing that something came from a real person's imagination might become more meaningful, not less.

Whatever happens, I think there will always be room for people like John Williams in games, or any other industry, for that matter. 

When and where can fans play Bloody Hell Hotel?

We're skipping Early Access and going straight for the full 1.0 release of Bloody Hell Hotel in 2027, on PC and consoles. The official console announcement is coming soon, but we're aiming to launch on all platforms at the same time. 

A big thank you to everyone who's been following the project and patiently waiting. We can't wait to share the finished game with you all!

Wlad Marhulets, Developer