Hello everyone,

We still can’t quite believe we made it into the final three winners, but it has made us very happy. We wanted to take the opportunity to say ‘Thank You!’ to everyone who tried out our game and enjoyed playing through the story. Special thanks for all those who also went above and beyond by providing feedback, tracking bugs or proofreading our work throughout the process. 

We would also encourage everyone to give us any feedback or bug reports you can find while we work on another iteration of the game. You can do so either through the comments here or by visiting our Discord server: https://discord.gg/gP5USre4PW . 

All the feedback we can get would be really helpful in squashing the remaining problems, as we want to eventually release the game under the “World of Darkness Unbound”-program with a 2.0 update. This process might take a while, given that we are a small team that just got together to participate in the Jam but we are trying to figure out the details!

Speaking of which, we’ve thought this might be a good opportunity for us to introduce ourselves as the people behind the Beissgetränke-Logo and how we started out:

It all began with the annoucement of the Vampire the Masquerade 2022 Game Jam. On the discord server Simon and Melina asked around for people who would like to participate in the jam and started talking with each other since they were both in the same timezone and country. Then Simon asked Marcel if he would be interested to participate with us and provide the visuals for the game. And Ramona got added to the team via contact with Marcel to help him and take care of the GUI. It was the first game jam for almost the whole team and as a group we did not know each other prior. But we had an amazing experience and worked really well together. Everyone delivered reliably and responded quickly. We had weekly meetings on the weekends to discuss what needed to be done and what we wanted to do.

During the production Marcel made a very cute cup logo for the cafe in the game and then we came up with the name "Beissgetränle". This is wordplay for the german word "Heissgetränke" which means hot beverages so it would be loosely translated to "biteverages" ;-P

In the smoke of our logo Marcel incorporated our initials and in the following paragraphs each teammember introduces themselves:

Ramona (UI-Design):

“My Name is Ramona. I’m a Graphic and Industrial Designer. My Apprenticeship as Graphic Designer started 2014 and was completed in 2017. Then I started to study Industrial Design at OTH Regensburg and finished it in 2021. Since then, I’ve been taking courses for UI Design and UX Design and work as an Editor for a Video Games Magazine. Vampire is one of my favorite pen and paper games and I started to play it back in 2008 or 2009. A good friend of mine told me stories about the World of Darkness before so I wanted to try it by myself. I’ve been playing in numerous Groups and had a broad variety of Characters. If you’d like to meet me or get in touch, visit www.kiu-design.de and write me an E-Mail.”

Melina (Developer & Producer):

I´m Melina and worked as Game Designer, Developer and Producer on Bitter Nights. I studied Game Design and Game Producing at the Games Academy Berlin from 2015 to 2017. Afterwards I started to work at a media agency in southwest Germany that develops browser games and other software contract work. My first contact with Vampire the Masquerade was as a child when I walked in on my older brother who played Redemption. He was at the part with the Werewolf crushing through a wall after London tower and I was scared and left. But later with 14/15 a neighbor showed my Bloodlines and from then I was hooked. I was not able to play a lot of the TTRPG over the last years but VtM is a passion for half of my life now and will continue to be.

Simon (Writer):

Simon (or Elegias for most of the WoD online communities I hang out with) here. I've done most of the writing for Bitter Nights. While I do some very different things in my main job, I have previously worked as a creative writer in the video game space with a small gaming start-up from Iceland. While I have 15 years of storytelling/game mastering experience at this point, I only had occasional contact with VtM throughout the years until I took the plunge last year and started my own chronicle. Some of the ideas in the game might even be loosely inspired from the things I made up for the tabletop. While the main stylistic influences of the game are found in Noir and VtM itself, I hope I also managed to incorporate a hint of the culture of the Ruhrgebiet, where I live and which I took as the basis for the nameless City of the game.

Marcel (Artist): 

My name is Marcel. I did the background and character art of Bitter Nights. I started drawing at an early age and have been a non-professional illustrator for almost two decades. My love of the horror genre (and vampires in particular) was born when I watched “Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles” as a teenager. In subsequent years, I enjoyed many books, movies and games that revolved around vampires. Sometime after playing “Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines”, I bought my first VtM core book and joined a TTRPG group. I've been a fan ever since, so I jumped at the opportunity to participate in the Vampire Jam 2022. If you want to see more of my work, you can find me on Instagram (instagram.com/nastanian)

What else can we say? It was a lot of fun (and stress!) to put together this little game last year and we hope to give it another bit of polishing to make it the best version of itself it can be. 

Your

Team Beissgetränke