Messhof talks building Blood Dungeon, inspiration from games like Vampire Survivors, and more

Hi there! I've recently been playing through Blood Dungeon, the latest game from Nidhogg and Wheel World developer Messhof.

Blood Dungeon is a roguelite where your chosen character from a wacky cast (including a gun-toting baby) automatically attacks, taking a page out of games like Vampire Survivors. The big twist here is 2D platforming, as you can jump and climb along the walls of dungeons to explore and avoid the unending hordes of enemies, all of which are rendered in an art style that makes the most of minimal doodles. It's been a great experience, so I wanted to share some thoughts.

I also spoke with Mark Essen, co-founder of Messhof, in an email interview where he elaborated on the making of Blood Dungeon, figuring out the style, and launching it into a market of major, established roguelites.

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A coterie of blood-gathering dungeon dwellers

Blood Dungeon is quite different from Messhof's past games, and I was curious as to whether it started out that way or evolved significantly throughout development. Essen tells me it started quite simple and grew over time.

"I didn’t really have anything particular in mind when I started. I have a lot of these little sketches of games that I work on for a little bit once in a while just for fun. It’s nice to work on something for a day or two and then be able to share it with friends, or just as an excuse to make some silly animations," he says, adding that it started around the basic concept of climbing up and down walls.

"I had played a lot of Contra 3 as a kid and I wanted to make something that had the flavor of some of the climbing based levels where you have a lot of freedom of movement," he says. "There’s a boss fight on, I think, stage 3 where you can climb all over the walls and ceiling of a room while dodging attacks. After I added some enemies and shooting mechanics I realized that it was most compelling as a routing challenge where you avoid enemies by travelling any direction. Vampire Survivors and some other games like it had consumed some days recently and the game started to grow more in that direction."

When I previewed Blood Dungeon during Summer Game Fest 2026, I described the art direction as "stylistic suck," and I stand by that assessment. Every enemy and character here is rendered as something like an MS Paint doodle, with a consistent, charming simplicity greater than the sum of its parts.

As I played, I was constantly looking forward to what new oversimple foes would come crawling out of the dark. Essen says this came out of a desire to keep Blood Dungeon's development simple and easy to maintain.

"The goal of the project was to keep it small and fun to work on so that it was something that I could just pick up for an hour or two before bed so I wanted to keep the art pipeline pretty fast and loose," he says. "I also enjoy drawing and animating and it never felt like the game needed to look more polished than it does now. I think the wigglyness of the animations where the characters and enemies are always in motion helps a lot."

Essen notes the one real change for the art happened when everything was doubled, going from 32x32 pixels to 64x64, which required redrawing everything done up to that point.  

"There were definitely times when I didn’t feel confident that the art would stand up to player expectations, but over time I came around to the idea that people liked it well enough and it felt different, and a unique look is kind of all you can hope for when making a game," he adds.

There are dozens upon dozens of enemies and bosses that appear, moving erratically to attempt (often successfully) to bring a run to a screeching halt. I was curious what monsters Essen was proudest of designing.

"I’m most proud of the crawling type monsters, especially the spiders. They can move like you, wrapping around the walls and ceilings, but they can also randomly drop down on a web and pause there. If you shoot them they’ll swing back and forth," he says. "They either crawl back up the web after that or let go and drop to whatever platform is below them."

"I think that’s the limit for how complicated the movements of the enemies can be, I always had to stop myself when I was approaching a spider amount of complexity with new enemies."

As mentioned above, Blood Dungeon is quite different compared to Messhof's past work, and is by far the most complicated game Essen has worked on, at least in what options players have to work with.

"There’s a lot more to keep in your head with this one, there are so many weapon combinations. Thankfully it’s had a number of dedicated playtesters throughout development that will surface funny and broken combinations of items and powerup," he says. "It’s been fun to come up with solutions to those, and that often spawns ideas for new items that break the game once more.

Despite that complexity, Essen indicates it's been fairly easy to develop, all things considered, and never became a grueling experience.

"By far the most rewarding part of the game is that it’s stayed small so it’s just fun to work in," Essen says. "There’s no friction to adding in art because I can draw it myself. I can rough in sfx, and weapons are pretty simple to sketch out. It’s just nice to have a bite-sized codebase to play inside."

Blood Dungeon is launching into a market that's seen the rise of auto-battling roguelite titles as players latched on this specific sub-genre. Vampire Survivors from poncle, Ball x Pit from Kenny Sun, and others have all seen great success. I was curious if Essen was more confident or more nervous about Blood Dungeon's prospects, in light of these major successes from other teams.

"It definitely feels like a late entry to the genre! But I’m happy that it’s stuck around as a genre that has grown in all these interesting directions. I was sure that there would be a game like Blood Dungeon by now just in terms of the specific platforming style, but I guess it maybe makes sense: most of these games are pretty breezy to play and it’s only when you start to get to the late game do they really demand a lot of actual control mastery," he says.

"I wanted to stand on the shoulders of all this 2D platforming competency that most players have grown up with and build off of that rather than re-teach it so the pacing is pretty different than most of these games. It feels like there’s an audience for that, but I guess we’ll see!"

Fittingly, Essen pulled in a fair few ideas from those games into Blood Dungeon, especially when it came to the weapon variety.

"It has a lot of influence from games like Vampire Survivors, 20 Minutes Till Dawn, and Megabonk, but also games like Risk of Rain, Downwell, and Spelunky," he says. "You can see it in some of the weapons, it’s probably pretty obvious but things like the Axe (Vampire Surivo– ok Castlevania), Forcefield (VS), jetpack (Spelunky), and the Machine Gun had some upgrades inspired by 20 Min Till Dawn."

"Megabonk pushed me to make the weapon upgrade variations, which I guess is not unique to Megabonk but it’s a great way to add some variety to builds. I think that game also sealed the idea that showing more stats was ok if you kept the choices simple. Before that I didn’t show any of your current stats or even tell you what the upgrades did at all."

Overall, the end result is an extremely fun time, and I highly recommend checking Blood Dungeon out. I've had a blast crawling, leaping, and nakedly spinning across the dungeons to find more bones and blood.

Blood Dungeon is available on consoles and PC. The overall concept is certainly similar to many of the roguelites that have blown up over the past couple of years, but adding platforming as a mechanical threat — as well as the clever art direction — ensure it stands on its own two (four?) legs.

Assorted news

We've actually got some good news to catch up on. I know, I know, that kind seems like an endangered species, so cherish it.

• Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions, now independent, have officially received the rights to their games back from Xbox. Double Fine is also embarking on a new Amnesia Fortnight Kickstarter, where backers will help the team pick a new game to develop.
• CD Projekt RED's The Witcher 4 is now slated to arrive at some point in 2028. This game is the first entry in a new trilogy focused on Ciri, adopted daughter of The Witcher's prior protagonist, Geralt of Rivia.
• Harvey Smith, the former head of the shuttered Arkane Austin, has founded a new studio called Black Pony Immersive. As the name suggests, it's all about immersive sims.