Let people know how long this project has been going, or share a bit of its history.
Amazingly this has been going on for over 3 years. Real work on it is less though as there have definitely been months that i dropped working on the project. Real project time is probably under a year of development. I always want a unique hook when developing and came up with the idea when seeing a similar technique for shovel knight. Though there it was a temporary black out of the level. I decided i wanted something more permanent so i went with blood being visible regardless and painting the level. It plays well as an exe on my 6-7 year old desktop, hopefully any players of my game will get good performance as well. The blood sprites had to be dynamically created for the static tiles, so there is definitely a CPU/GPU hit where red pixels are being drawn on the sprites themselves. For the dynamic tiles/objects (like the rotating spikes/enemies), simple masks are used for the blood effect. However i did run into a limitation of the sprite/mask (maximum number of masks is 31). I didnt figure this out until i had to toss a level or 2 i designed because the masking seemed to randomly break, but turns out i was hitting the limit and simply had to reduce some of my objects).

designed for keyboard, though i think a gamepad would work as well. Designed to be multiplayer (ideally) same screen pass the controller. The best way to play this is competitively, mock those who die :) and see if you can use their failures to speed ahead to the top floor first.

Thanks to all who try my game, and feel free to leave feedback, I enjoy reading them!