This article originally ran in Back Alley Games Issue 21, December 2025

ICG community member and super producer Khoi Pham has once again put together an all-star team of developers, this time for a 2D tower defense game heavily inspired by Plants vs. Zombies.

In Bloodlusters, the most recent effort by a loose collective Pham calls “Crowseeds and friends,” players control ghosts that have kidnapped a vampire princess. In order to repel the sparkly bloodsuckers that come to find her, they must haunt various household items to act as their towers.

A simple task, to be sure, but the difficulty lies mainly in the active elements – unusual for the genre – that require swapping between rooms (and item towers) on the fly. Towers are limited, meaning that the game doesn’t incentivize overloading enemy spawn areas.

Speaking of enemies, they are infused with Crowseeds and friends’ signature humor. Vampires range from gothic, bat-transforming Counts to sparkly forest dwellers to “Reddit atheist vampires” that use facts and logic to destroy the ghosts they don’t believe in.

According to Pham, humor is always central to their process. They said that they usually choose “whatever is the funniest and most unique idea” and then iterate on mechanics from there. However, with Bloodlusters, Pham also had the urge to fix the problems they have with the tower defense genre.

“In tower defense games, you’re usually sitting there watching an auto-battler,” they said. “With this project, I wanted to make unique game mechanics, meaning a tower defense where you’re actually active.”

Pham goes on to say that the tower defense genre is somewhat stagnant, and that iterating on it was a challenge. Harsh criticism, but Pham said they come from a place of love (despite their admission that they “literally hate video games”), especially for a game they label the GOAT, Plants vs. Zombies.

PvZ directly inspired many of the towers and enemies in Bloodlusters, but the send ups go further than that. Pham said that one of the most fun parts of developing this project was writing the PvZ-style notes that appear right before each boss.

Once the idea and the goals were in place, Pham began compiling their team. They ended up with about 15 team members on this project, but many were added within the final week of the jam’s time frame.

“Even though we had three weeks [for] the jam, we really only used one week,” Pham said. “We didn’t even come up with the concept until week two.”

Having a 15-person team is certainly unique among ICG jam entrants, but Pham said they prefer it this way. In their view, large teams allow individuals to take breaks and avoid overwork. If one person falls behind, another can just pick up the slack.

In addition to that, Pham’s teams are very focused on artistic identity. With so many cooks in the proverbial kitchen, styles could become flattened or projects could seem disjointed, but to Pham, having so many distinct artistic voices is the point.

“My games are a hodgepodge of people’s artistic styles and creative flavors,” they said. “I try to be involved in people’s creative process as little as possible since I like having people’s personality shine through into the final product.”

During the jam, team members like vaaasm (enemy art) and Shady (music) were added to a Discord server Pham keeps for all their games. Work came together quickly once it got started, but Pham said that procrastination was one of the biggest challenges for this project.

“The game looked bare-bones until like the day before the deadline,” they said.

In true jam fashion, work was done until the final minute, then continued after the jam was finished. Pham and the rest of the team put in another week of work polishing Bloodlusters for a Newgrounds release, then put it down, with no plans to add to it.

Pham’s projects are all hobbies, and they are mostly concerned with making things they consider cool. When asked about their philosophy and plans for the future, they said:

“I make games for myself and to make others laugh and smile, not for money. I definitely want to make a longer-term project with more writing and plots and story and such. For now, I’ll continue to make more jam games, but wind down on their frequency.”

You can play Bloodlusters on itch or Newgrounds: https://crow-seeds.itch.io/bloodlusters