Devoted Vampire: The Bite Behind The Game
In the world of indie games, it takes grit and vision to bring a solo-developed story to life—especially one as moody and mysterious as Devoted Vampire. We sat down with CheriBeanArt, the creative mind behind this vampire-themed mystery visual novel, to talk game jams, writing fear, art style, and, of course, complicated supernatural romance.
In this Interview:
Devoted Vampire: In Details
Cheri: Yeah, hello. I’m the artist, writer, programmer, and creative devoted vampire. I pretty much did everything, except the music. This is around my fifth year working on games. I’ve mostly worked as an artist on different game jam projects. The second game I worked on was A Pinch of Magic in marketing. Actually, it’s probably like one of the most impactful learning experiences for me.
Overall, were a lot of failures in my first game jam and I looked at a lot of past members’ social medias and I feel like I’m the only one who’s still working on games, which I don’t know how I feel about that. It’s kind of disappointing. But we’re still going. Hopefully, this one will be successful and commercial. This game was largely inspired by how disappointed I was with the Vampire Knight DS game. And I also wanted to express myself better and more apologetically, which is why I started making games of my own .
Cheri: You play as a vampire who’s been homebound for most of your life and hasn’t left the building but has been feeding off of mysterious corpses left by some killer. You don’t know why they’re being killed but it’s a good source of food and no one bothers you there until a cop gets involved and then all of a sudden you garner the attention of Wolf, Angel, Casey.
Cheri: This one’s complicated. I don’t think there was like a specific thing that I referenced. It’s more like this is just what I really enjoy and like and read a lot. The very beginning scene and what really made this game happen was inspired by… If you’ve played the game, this will sound very familiar.
So I exit the apartment in broad daylight, and right in front of the elevator door, there was like a little blood spec trail to the elevator and to another door. It’s kind of insane. I have photo evidence of this. Writing the first scene was very simple and easy because it’s just me feeling the fear I had. A lot of it is just me being spoon-fed by my crazy neighbors or whatever else is happening in real life. I don’t know if I’m like magically attracting these situations. I don’t know if I like this or not.
Cheri: I don’t think I was inspired so much by vampires, but coming back to Vampire Knight, which is the main reason this game was created, I was very disappointed with one of the romance routes because you can’t even romance the character. They quite literally just… I know, they just tell you that you need to romance someone else, which I can’t believe that happened. It just made me go, I need to make this. This is not fair. I need to make something that’s, I don’t know. And then I went off and made something that’s not really romanceful. So I don’t even know what I’m doing.
Visually, it was inspired by Detention, SCP and Vampire Knight. A lot of text, Arby’s cheese and sandboxes. Rosario Vampire was actually my first anime. Obviously Diabolic Lovers is one of those series that you can’t really see vampire without. The Fedora guy was awful. So many of these yandere or like Vampire made it just- it’s old and because of it you can like heal the age and all the tropes that are just… I don’t think they fly.
Cheri: So, fun fact, Day 2 was supposed to be part of the demo release, or like the game jam release, but time happened, and bugs and coding errors and problems, so I only have Day 1. Yup. But it’s just you, so you can’t even like share the stress and just shove it all to the programmer to deal with.
At first there was supposed to be like a limited daylight system where you have like three or four actions that you can do. Kind of like in RPGs you might have, you do this task and like five minutes pass and then it kind of stacks up to like end the day. I realized that would kind of be difficult. First of all, there’s a lot of writing that needs to go into it, then planning and coding, which I’m terrible at.
So I kind of scrapped it and instead made it so you can hang out who you pick with and investigate them and their scenario, what happens for the day and like only them for that day. So I already know in the back of my mind, like the backstory of what happened, what the characters have been doing behind the scenes while you’re not around. And it adds a lot to how much you need to plan because it’s so focused on this since it’s a mystery and it’s like a very critical moment for the game. I would love to make something more complicated, but it’s kind of taxing mentally because you need to think about all of this.
Devoted Vampire: The Characters
Cheri: Woof is my favorite character. I’m very biased. Even if they don’t have the most screen time, they’re like, they’re precious and my child. I think Woof is their name. If there was one they had before, I doubt we will ever find out or I will ever know. This question is kind of a spoiler in a weird way because of how important names are in the story. When coming up with the name, I said on it after asking a friend because it was like the funniest thing ever. I don’t think I should be allowed to name children. Just like how every other question is like a spoiler because of the mystery aspect, this one has a purpose. But I think Woof’s name is more, this was funny and easy and I was running out of time and I need to name the characters quickly. And I’m pretty happy with the names, but no, he’s just cute, that’s the entire thing. The concept was also largely inspired by growing up biracial and somehow vampires and werewolves was a very good analogy for it and also nice way to explore it.
I think of Casey as the youngest character. I don’t have exact ages for them, but I always saw Casey as the youngest. They’re probably like the youngest child. They just needed to have that energy. They’re probably like the easiest to write because I really like banter and banter is just easy. Wolf might be younger, but I don’t think they act younger. They act more like an animal and they’re written like an animal.”
Angel is probably like the most deranged character and I don’t think it’s subtle but I’m not sure if it’s very clear or not. I think time will tell. I struggled with writing Boss (Angel) quite a bit because all the characters were… Honestly, all the characters were difficult to figure out for writing Day 2. Day 1 was pretty much just laid out there in front of me. For the boss scene, The Handmaid’s Tale was like the thing that made it all click and explained to me what the dynamic I wanted to get would be like.
Cheri: Originally, gender-inclusive listening was not the main goal, but it was like a side benefit. It was mostly because I plan to have female versions of the sprites and implementing pronouns in RPG Maker in general would mean more problems in writing in code, because then I’ll have to actually skim through everything and find the pronouns and that would be like another thing that I need to debug and check so it just didn’t make sense for me to do that.
Cheri: So this depends a lot on the information that’s acquired. I guess the point system is the best way to describe it. Like in a lot of otome, like you have either you end up going down a route after making a choice and it kind of like flows into a route. Or you have, you did this for this character and then you get a little plus. I think that’s the closest way to how the story is structured. I don’t have solid endings, but I do have an outline and it focuses a lot more on the mystery than the end goal because it’s like the main core of what this thing is. You explore and try to find out information. So it’s basically just me tracking the information you get and based on that, in like a final confrontation, you’ll be able to either do this or do that or you’ll have maybe Lyon in your favor or you’ll have Cop in your favor or Woof in your favor.
Cheri: It was coding game engines and trying to find people to help and, well, failing at that and then doing everything yourself. This is like the first project that I went, yeah, I’ll get people to work with me. This is going to be great. No, this is not great. I’d rather do it myself.
Devoted Vampire: The Future
Cheri: I really hope to get it on Steam. I’ve never done it before. It’s quite scary and intimidating. I don’t know what I’m doing. For day two, I plan for it to come out in May and June for another jam. I hope to get more days in. I think this game will probably be like seven days, but it’s like seven, five, maybe 10 days. But because of how much people are just pigeon-holed into having one route or one choice. There’s a lot of background stuff that players just don’t get to see through the first playthrough. It might feel short for a player, but there’s a lot more behind the scenes. My brain is still processing the thoughts of how to make the plot work and everything like that.
Cheri:Thank you. Please play my game. Because I have no clue what I’m doing and I don’t know if I’m doing a good job or not. Thank you for all the cats that have served as moral support and people who posted pet pictures. I really couldn’t have done it without you. Every single time I come across a bug, it’s like, alright, where’s my cat picture? Okay, I feel healed, I can move on. There were like a couple of these random things, just… Yes, this is what I pray to when things don’t work. Also, thank you for being such great hosts and I wish you guys all the best and yeah, thank you.”
Cheri Beanart’s Devoted Vampire is a hauntingly personal blend of mystery, supernatural themes, and raw indie ambition. With its distinct visual style, layered character dynamics, and a narrative that encourages replay, it’s more than just a bite-sized visual novel—it’s a glimpse into one developer’s journey through creativity, fear, and fierce determination. If you haven’t played it yet, now is the time to sink your teeth in.
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