Vampire Survivors News

Vampire Survivors is getting an engine upgrade! Don’t expect any fancy ray-traced textures like Minecraft or Cyberpunk, but the upcoming switchover for the addictive Best Game of Last Year will bring with it some very welcome improvements to performance and stability when it lands next month.

Read more

The long-awaited Vampire Survivors engine upgrade is upon us! Developer Poncle has finally announced that the game will fully switch to the new engine on August 17 - a little over a month from the time of this writing.

The game currently runs on Phaser, but the team has been working on porting it to Unity. On the development side, the main benefit of moving to Unity is simplifying cross-platform development. On the players' end, however, Unity offers much better performance.

Poncle shared the news in a Steam post, which also gave us a fresh look at the co-op mode - which was announced last month.

You may be surprised to learn that Vampire Survivors - a game that takes place on a 2D plane with primitive visuals, and character sprites that barely animate - somehow can run terribly. The truth is that no amount of PC horsepower can smooth out those late-game drops.

Once you've evolved all your weapons, and are very close to the 30-minute mark, especially if Limit Break is on, it chugs hard. That was a limitation of the old engine, something Poncle says should not happen with Unity.

Vampire Survivors' Xbox version, and the recently released mobile ports, have actually been running on Unity already. Since Poncle revealed the intention to switch to Unity in September last year, two versions of the game were being maintained on PC. A few players outside the development team even got to play the beta.

The general consensus is very positive, particularly when it comes to the responsiveness of the game's UI during the late stages. The performance updates also benefit Steam Deck users and anyone with a lower-spec PC, so it's good news all around.

If you've somehow avoided playing Vampire Survivors (the BAFTA's game of the year winner for 2022), you should defintiely fix that. Even now, before the engine switch, this is an excellent game - and one of Game Pass' best gets ever.

Read more

I'll be honest: I don't think of Vampire Survivors as much of a resource hog, given that it consists mostly of lightly-animated sprites roaming a 2D plane, but that might just be because I'm not very good at it. As rounds drag on, sprites pile up and the weapon effects grow ever-more vivacious, meaning even a game as elegant and humble as this can start chugging. Good news, then, that Vampire Survivors has finally put a firm date on its switch to Unity almost a year after it was first announced...
Read more.

In June, poncle announced that the reverse bullet hell Vampire Survivors will finally be getting a couch co-op mode in August. Today we got a closer look at how it will work, along with the surprise announcement of new Steam-specific features that are actually live today...
Read more.

We are currently super busy finishing the co-op update (coming 17th August!) but we’ve got a whole bunch of smaller Vampire Survivors updates we wanted to share with you, including Steam Community Items (out today), more info about the local co-op mode (including the first gameplay video), and some info about fully switching to our new engine. Also, our first ever community event will be taking place in London next month, where attendees can try the co-op mode before launch. Let’s dive in!


While you wait for the co-op update we thought we would hit the “generate Steam Trading card and other Steam things” button in our game development software, so here they are!

From today you can finally unlock the following to bolster your Steam profile:

5 Trading Cards
6 Badges (5 + 1 foil)
5 Emoticons
3 Profile Backgrounds

If you are not familiar with Steam Community Items, then you can read how to unlock them here.

Did you know that if you click on a Steam card in your inventory, you get to see the larger picture the snapshot comes from? Because of this, we had a lot of fun making the cards, so I hope you enjoy them too! (Spoiler: If you look really really closely you might spot a super subtle video game reference or two in them).
Here's a sneak peak at one of the large cards:


(please note that due to some rules we had to remove the text from the official cards. Since the artists have spent quite some time on the text versions, we will be publishing them in the Artworks section on Steam in the following weeks)

We'll be looking into making new items in the future, like the animated point shop items, this is just the first step!


We are also getting a lot of questions about how the local co-op mode will work gameplay-wise, and that reminded us of the old saying “a first gameplay video is worth a thousand words”.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It should answer a lot of questions like how levelling up, moving as a group, destroying friendships etc works. The video shows a pretty advanced build of the new mode but we are still tweaking details and balancing it so what you see here is still work in progress. For example...



There will also be a new item in co-op mode that we haven’t shown before. It’s an ancient, almighty artefact called… The Friendship Amulet.

This item can appear on the level-up screen and will level-up a random active weapon for each player. Players will have to decide if they tactically (or selfishly) pick a level-up for a weapon of their choice or give the whole group a round of random level-up.
(don't worry about the Friendship Amulet poking a hole in your Collection, it is shown in there from the beginning since it's more a game mechanic rather than an item you pick up)

We are also trying to pack as many options as possible by the next release to customise the co-op experience:


If you got feedback about the footage, of course let us know in the comments here. On that note: We’ve already heard a lot of players asking for an online mode, but that's an order of magnitude or two more complicated to make right now. Maybe we'll look into it when we have more time. Or maybe we are already?



As you may know, we have been running Vampire Survivors in parallel on its original engine Phaser and its new engine (that we needed for porting and better stability) for a while on Steam. Now that we are close to a point where the new engine is thoroughly tested and runs better than the old one, we will fully switch the game over to the new engine on 17th August.

On this note, big thanks to Phaser! I had a lot of fun building Vampire Survivors in it and can highly recommend it if you are interested in making wild games pretty fast!




We are hosting our first ever community event, in real life!

It’s a hands-on event where you can try out a preview of the local co-op mode with friends (if you don’t have friends then we can provide some in this case, it’s a much requested feature). The co-op event will be taking place in early August, London (UK). We’re hoping to get some player feedback on how people like the co-op mode in the wild.

So you can expect playing the co-op mode, free stuff, and surprising snacks. Tickets will be free but limited. We will announce more details on how to apply for tickets on our usual Discord, and then Twitter, Threads, TikTok, and any other social media platform that dies and arises in the meantime.

Thanks for reading and I hope you've enjoyed both the artworks of the marketing team and mine!
- Luca