🦇 The Story Behind Self Care Vampire | Indie Developer Interview

 🎮 An Indie Game With Bite

Self Care Vampire is an upcoming mobile game that blends self-care with supernatural romance in a surprisingly refreshing way. Currently in pre-alpha playtesting, the game encourages players to build healthier daily habits while deepening their connection with immortal companions like Elijah.

In this interview, I spoke with Lauren from Lumi Interactive about the origins of the game, the creative process behind its characters, and how the team is reimagining self-care through interactive storytelling.

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Q. To begin, could you introduce yourself and share the origin story behind Self Care Vampire? How long has this app been in the works?

Lauren: Hi there! I’m Lauren, co-founder at Lumi Interactive where we make mobile games with a wellbeing twist. :) Self Care Vampire is our second major game, though all our small team have worked more broadly in the games industry for a long time. 

Elijah keeping me on track

Self care Vampire came out of an internal game jam when we were stuck for what to do next after some rough times. We’re passionate about games that make your everyday life just a bit better, and build a strong sense of community - so taking a dark romantasy twist on self care sounded like a delicious challenge. We’re about 6 months into development so far, and the game is in a pre-release Alpha early access stage at the time of writing.

Q. Self Care Vampire blends self-care with a romance game featuring vampires, what inspired you to combine those two seemingly different ideas?

Lauren: We think an unexpected flavour combination makes something intriguing. Mixing the cozy vibe of self care with dark romance has been such a refreshing challenge creatively, but it also helps our players get curious about trying something new. There’s a lot of to-do apps out there, so what might offer something different and motivating, and a habit that can actually stick? We decided that sexy supernaturals might fit the bill!

Q. Elijah is such a fun character who I love interacting with. You mention about introducing new characters soon. How do you pick and choose which character designs, personalities, dialogues, and outfits for each of the characters?

Lauren: We’re so glad you’re enjoying Elijah! As a small team, we think about who we might like to appeal to as players, but also what we don’t see enough of in other games with a strong focus on character. The ancient vampire Elijah is openly bisexual for example, and a touch androgynous without being very feminine, which isn’t something we see in many romance games. 

We pick out some archetypes we love, and our artist Cara develops a visual look for a mood board inspired by fashion, personality, body type etc, and designs the character. We all contribute ideas, but Cara develops their look while Alex (our designer and writer) develops their tone of voice/personality. We want to appeal to a variety of players, so that means our cast will vary in their supernatural type, relationship with each other, personality, voice, sexuality and more - we definitely aren’t creating a harem of 5 player-sexual slender male love interests.

Q. The idea that “the better you take care of yourself, the better you taste” is really unique, how did you come up with that?

Lauren: To be honest, we thought about what a lover would want for someone - often what we want most dearly is for a person we care about to look after themselves gently and compassionately, so we wanted to focus on that message rather than ‘100% effort and productivity! Go go go!’

My example tasks

Q. In the current pre-alpha, how do you see players interacting with self-care differently compared to traditional habit-tracking apps?

Lauren: That’s a great question! In the feedback we’re getting from our wonderful players, we hear that the biggest strength in Self Care Vampire is that it feels very rewarding and exciting to open - not like you’re opening up a homework book. 

Self Care Vampire players have shared that they’re excited to come back and be praised by Elijah for drinking that glass of water, which might unlock a new Bond Level and more insight into his backstory for example, which goes beyond a gamification approach of ticking off a task = confetti moment and that’s it.

We’ve kept the self care task system quite simple and flexible in the game so far, because we believe that just a few simple actions per day will measurably help our daily lives, not the pressure of achieving a huge list of complicated, hard goals.

Q. What has the play testing process been like so far? What kind of feedback has been most helpful?

Lauren: It has been amazing and so helpful to ‘co-create’ Self Care Vampire with our playtesting community. Everything from helping us pick which accent a character’s voice should have, selecting outfit designs, the layout of tasks in our UI, and so much more. Genuinely the most helpful feedback is hearing about anything that feels confusing or discouraging in the game experience, so we can hop in to try and improve the player experience with every update. :)

Q. What were some challenges you encountered while designing and developing this app? Anything that surprised you?

Lauren: Absolutely, we’re always battling many (usually fun) design challenges. Game development is very complex, and every decision we make is a trade off. For example we’re trying to design a system where a player can chat with two characters in the same room, but because we’re a mobile game we have to find a way for displaying 2 characters (and their art sprites) to work on a very narrow screen, which is entirely different if we were making Self care Vampire on PC for example!

Q. Elijah’s coffin messages are hilarious and relatable, how did you come up with them? Which coffin message is your favorite and why?

Example of Elijah's coffin messages

Lauren: We have a lot of fun thinking of silly jokes to add as coffin messages as a team, haha! But Alex writes most of them, plus we offer players a chance to post coffin message ideas in the Discord community - and we’ve used several of them!

Q. If you are willing to share, are there any upcoming features, story elements, or characters you're especially excited about?

Lauren: Of course! We just released The Sanguine Prelude Update (alpha 0.7) to our Android players, and will release it on Apple next week at the time of writing. I can’t wait to add final character art into the story chapters with a big update coming in late May, plus much more story chapters to come!

Q. What are your future plans or long term goals for the Self Care Vampire?

Lauren: Self Care Vampire is in early access at our alpha stage - we want to keep developing all the way to a full release this calendar year! From there, we need to be profitable so we can keep growing the game as much as possible, because we’re having a wonderful time making it!

Q. If players could take away just one thing from playing Self Care Vampire, what would you hope it be? Lauren: You are all you need. Keep it simple as much as possible, focus on progress and not perfection. :)

For any folks interested in playing Self Care Vampire, come join the free early access playtest at www.selfcarevampire.com! ──────────────────────── End of Interview ──────────────────────

💋 Want to Learn More?

Interested in joining the play-test or following development updates for Self Care Vampire? Visit the Official Website
You can support Self Care Vampire by following their social channels: Instagram TikTok YouTube Bluesky Telegram Reddit

*Originally posted on Twitch Team Happy People Discord Server