Bloody Hell Hotel dev details contractor-only studio and procedural dungeons

Wlad Marhulets, who developed DARQ almost solo, told 80 Level that Bloody Hell Hotel is an AA-scale production with more than 150 collaborators worldwide. The studio has no full-time employees. It works with contractors, and about 15 to 30 of them are active at any one time. The studio's home base is in Los Angeles.

Marhulets says the structure fits a game with many interconnected systems, where priorities shift between furniture assets, modular dungeon art, animation, programming and VFX. Many contractors have been with the project since the beginning, and their involvement changes by development stage. He says this removes crunch, because teams can be expanded in any department when needed. Keeping a consistent vision takes detailed documentation and in-person travel to key team members.

The game is a first-person sandbox in which the player is a vampire who turns a ruined mansion into a hotel to lure victims and restore their powers. Marhulets describes hotel management, farming, cooking, crafting, dungeon crawling and combat as largely optional. Blood is separate from HP and is used for vampiric powers, and it can be bought from the Vampiric Council. He lists six vampiric classes and 270 skills in total, including upgrades.

On the dungeons, Marhulets says the team wanted generated content that doesn't feel procedural and avoided a minimap. As a result, there are no corridor turns. Each turn runs through an antechamber with memorable props and elevation differences between the connecting corridors. He says the algorithm uses controlled randomization at several levels, from layout type and size by depth down to placement of enemies, resources, props and lighting. The dungeons are currently endlessly deep, and he says that might change later.

On AI, Marhulets says the studio has a strict no-AI policy for art assets. Most of the codebase predates modern AI coding assistants, but the team uses them for debugging, code reviews and optimization suggestions. He also says the game's announcement trailer was built around music recorded first with a live orchestra, and that it earned a Golden Joystick Award nomination for Best Trailer.