Vampire Survivors News

It's unclear if the people's champion of 2022 will ever slow down: hot on the heels of an Among Us crossover DLC with outer space maps and enemies in December, Vampire Survivors has released yet another free content update...
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- 7 new EXTRA achievements
- 1 new bonus stage
- 2 new characters
- 4 new weapons (of which 2 evos)
- 1 new relic

In this patch there are a lot of fixes too, including some optimisations that will let you play a run with Sammy for at least 2 more seconds than before!

Steam Achievements notes: this patch actually adds 8 platform Achievements, because it includes the Atlas Gate from the Adventures update!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]



THE BAT STUFF
- Defeat a total of 161616 bats, from any stage, to unlock the Pako Battiliar weapon
- Evolve Pako Battiliar using Max level Hollow Heart to unlock the Bat Robbert character

THE SPACE STUFF
- Collect 5 Gold Fingers to unlock Space 54 (enter and exit a run if you've already got enough)
- Pickup the Phas3r weapon in Space 54, get it to level 7, and evovle it using Max level Empty Tome.
- At minute 18 in Space 54, locate and collect the Brave Story relic.
- Survive 20 minutes in Space 54 to unlock the Space Dude character.


Available on the Steam public-beta branch and on Android public beta! Please send us any feedback about the feature, it's very delicate since we're talking about save-data, so we'll take all the help we can get to make sure it's solid.
Please also let us know if there's any other service you could find useful. We've been investigating cross-platform-dlc (so buy in one place, play anywhere) but it's the biggest bureaucratic can of worms ever; so, not being a technical problem, I'm honestly not too hopeful we'll be able to get it done (if you follow gaming news then you probably know very well how protective certain platforms are of any paid content).

We have put together a FAQ here: https://poncle.games/account-help




Stage: Space 54
Plain bonus stage with plenty of items and odd enemies. Walls stop blocking movement at minute 11:00
Might be a bit strong visually, so if it's bothering you please make sure to see if checking the "Disable Moving Background" makes it better!

Relic: Brave Story
Allows to choose Random Level Up choices in Stage Selection. Currently selectable only before starting a run. This will let you try do to runs in which the RNG picks weapons for you when levelling up, good luck!

Weapon: Phas3r & Photonstorm
Can be picked up in Space 54, and unlocked for every other run by levelling it up to Level 7. For the base version, Area only affects size horizontally. The evolution fires at least x2 projectiles than the base version, occasionally x5 when dealing a critical hit.

Weapon: Pako Battiliar & Mazo Familiar
Can be unlocked anytime just by killing A LOT of bats, across any amount of runs. It fires additional times when the owner receives damage or loses a shield. The evolution fires more projectiles and deals bonus damage depending on the current Max Health bonus of the owner.


NewCharacter: Space Dude
Fast character that starts with Phas3r.
Has a special ability that fires all weapons regardless of their Cooldown every few seconds. The cooldown of this ability is affected by the Cooldown stat.


NewCharacter: Bat Robbert
Slightly tanky character that starts with Pako Battiliar.
Has a special ability: when falling below 20% health, he gains +16 MaxHP (max +400) and recovers 30% health. This ability recharges every time the character is fully healed.



Well, I know the next 3 steps/updates we'll take on our Chaos Roadmap, but if I say anything I'm going to spoil the surprise effect (and probably find myself face to face with a hitman hired by the marketing team). A lot of players have been asking for more dark/serious settings, so I can at least tell you that 1 of those 3 steps has been cherry picked because it's probably the darkest one we have on the roadmap 👀
It won't be the next one, but should arrive soon enough!

We're also working on new Adventures for the main game of course, together with the "missing piece" of the Adventures mechanics, that once again I won't spoil until we have something concrete to show.

Flash updates on other projects:
- Online co-op: the technical work is going well, still too early for more details!
- EXPERIMENTS: going well, a lot of fun, I'm putting this here and planning to copy-paste this line for many future updates though, this stuff takes time!


I don't usually reveal details about the DEEP LORE of VS, but this time it's worth making an exception, because part of this update is dedicated to... a game framework, Phaser!
Weirder than usual, I know, but Phaser was the original framework I used to make VS, is an absolute joy to use, and if I hadn't loved working with it to begin with, I would have probably never made VS, so I thought it deserved a bit more than just a line in the credits.

I've noticed a few players asking for more info about Phaser the previous times I've mentioned it, so I asked Richard, its developer, to write a few lines for you!

quote=Richard:

Originally posted by Richard

I can still remember when Luca came to the Phaser Discord and showed off the first public version of Vampire Survivors, which he had created using our game framework. As the developer of Phaser, I'm always interested in seeing what people make with it, no matter what it may be like visually or how complete it is, so I had a look.

Seeing the screenshots on the Itch page, my immediate thought was, "What a strange mish-mash of sprites!" It was almost as if someone had thrown together a bundle of OpenGameArt and hoped for the best. As we all know, looks can be deceiving. Because then I played it. You don't need me to tell you just how sublimely addictive Vampire Survivors is. The Steam score and play time stats are a testament to this. Yet even in that very early stage, it sunk its gameplay hooks deep into me and never let up.

Because each run-through was relatively quick, you felt compelled to give it just one more go to see how you could improve. It didn't matter how insane and chaotic the visuals were. It didn't matter that the game was made in JavaScript and running in the browser. Because as thousands of creatures mobbed you and you swung that King Bible desperately, all of that just blended away as you fixated on the zone you were in.

It's the perfect example of a compelling gameplay loop. Demonstrating clearly that it doesn't matter one bit what tech you choose. You can still make an outstanding game. We've had many people come to Phaser since the release of Vampire Survivors, some looking to make similar games. For those who are curious, Phaser is a fully open-source game framework that allows you to make web-based games. All you need to know is a little JavaScript, and you can get started within minutes. There are built-in features for physics, animation, audio, and plenty more, and it has been in active development for the past decade. If that appeals to you, then we'll be more than happy to welcome you into our community. While we cannot guarantee you'll achieve the same level of success, after all, that would be like capturing lightning in a bottle; you'll at least have fun trying.

Richard's too kind and is advertising VS more than Phaser, so let me put my two cents and say that Phaser offers incredible support, with dozens of clear examples you can access and edit on the fly directly from your browser window; it allows you to go straight to the fun part of game development. Everyone is different and therefore has different preferences for coding and development; I love the freedom of creativity and speed that a language as chaotic as Javascript provides, and the empowerment I got from Phaser is something I've never seen any other framework to match.
If you're curious just click on one of the examples from the website and fiddle with it in real time!


Not really a Steam problem, but there are a lot of players who have the game on multiple platforms, so just wanted to thank you for waiting that long to get the content that Steam got in December 🙏
We managed to do a global release with this patch today at least, I hope we'll be able to keep it up!


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1.9.0 tweaks and fixes:
- Optimisation for spawning of gems and coins
- Optimisation for weapons that interact with pickups (Gatti Amari, Vicious Hunger, etc.)
- Fixed red XP gems sometimes flying away and taking forever to come back
- Fixed Coffins not spawning if the corresponding character had been unlocked via a spell
- Fixed Crimson Shroud not triggering retaliation damage
- Fixed a layering issue with CosmicEgg enemy
- Fixed merchant alignment upon multiple opens
- Fixed some particle emitters leaving gaps
- Fixed collision shape of Valkyrie Turner
- Fixed bought weapons in Adventures that wouldn't always level up in the same run they had been bought
- Fixed multiple evos of the same weapon appearing in treasure chests when only one should be present
- Fixed some animations going at insane speed on certain monitors
- Fixed Victory Sword not instant-killing some reapers that should have been weak to it
- Fixed text scaling sometime being off in Stage Selection
- Fixed display of secret characters sometime showing question marks when they shouldn't
- Fixed timing of events tied to music in Gallo Tower, Astral Stair, Eudamonia Machine
- Fixed "Show Guides" option resetting after every run
- Fixed The Directer sometime not getting counted as defeated in the Bestiary
- Tentative fix for Linux launch issue and missing Steam Overlay
- [MOONSPELL] Fixed time limit in Adventure Chapter 5
- [FOSCARI] Fixed Arcana XIX - Heart of Fire sometimes not applying to Prismatic Missile
- [FOSCARI] Optimisation for Shadow Servant at high Amount
- [FOSCARI] Fixed Je-Ne-Viv's World Eater's offset
- [EM] Fixed Mini Impostor and Impostongue appearing as level up options when they shouldn't anymore
- [EM] Fixed the medical scan not clearing its projectiles when the character dies
- [EM] Fixed interaction between Just Vent and Pentagram triggering errors
- [EM] Fixed Magnet bonus from Paranormal Scan being 10 times smaller than it should have been
- [EM] Fixed white box shown on some maps while in Adventures
- [MOBILE] text sizes on portrait when opening grimoire adjusted
- [MOBILE] fix missing options button on fresh save in portrait
- [MOBILE] fix jumping characters on ascension mobile window
- [MOBILE] fix for merchant screen layout on some screen resolutions
- [MOBILE] fix for Ascension animation moving parts of the UI
- [MOBILE] fix an issue for spells sometimes not working on Android
- Other minor bugfixes, tweaks, memory optimisations
- A lot of background work for accounts management and Cross-Save
- (x18) Pushing this change so [new game engine] stops bugging me
- (x6) Pushing this change because [new game engine] decided a feature was a bug

And we're at the start of 2024!

It's been once again a wild ride, and once again we have to thank all of you for your comments, quotes, messages, fan art, reviews, and, naturally, relentelessy keeping up with your 100% (sorry!)

As always, we are incredibly thankful for the community that has built up around Vampire Survivors.

We're doing another huge post like last year to talk about everything that happened and also have a look at what's to come in the future. There's a lot to cover, so we hope you enjoy!




Even after being out for more than one year, the reception of VS keeps being absolutely mindblowing.
Poncle has grown to 20 people now and we're all still busy working exclusively on VS due to the ports, engine changes, frequent updates and releases. And then, you know, the marketing team exists.

We have a lot going on behind the scenes, but I'll keep the update focused on Vampire Survivors and I'll reveal a few bit in the paragraphs below!



*Deep breath* :
Bat Country, DICE Awards Action game of the year, BAFTA for Game Design, BAFTA for Best Game, Tides of the Foscari DLC, Astral Stair, Nintendo Switch port, Local Co-op, first players event, OST orchestra recordings (3rd one actually 👀), Whiteout, Adventures, first collab DLC Emergency Meeting!

Missed something? Most likely, oh we have udpated the OST on Steam to be available in FLAC format for example, anyway, 2023 summary done, next!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


We are still investigating! To retro-fit online multiplayer in a game as simple as this, but with so much content, is still a huge challenge. We've got help now, and things are looking promising, but it's still too early for us to be able to make any promises. We'll keep giving you tiny updates until hopefully we can confirm it's actually going to happen.


We had this in testing for a while now, but the real hold-up is having to put in place everything that is needed to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and whatever else is required for data protection. We had delays even just in testing the feature in public-beta because there's a lot of work to do - even if all we need to do to bridge the accounts you already have on different platforms is storing just an email and password combination.
We're working on a QOL update for February and we're hoping to launch cross-save in public-beta only at the same time (Steam and Android only to start with).


Yep, we're doing cross-media like the big boys for real!
Back in April 2023 we announced an animated tv series in collaboration with Story Kitchen. We had of course waited for the various strikes to end before getting to it, so for now we can just say that more info is coming in 2024!

Honestly we have received a lot of proposals to collaborate on cross-media projects, but rather than jumping the gun we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn't a videogame out of VS requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game, that is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right!

We have several partners now and we'll reveal more on these projects as they mature and we've got good stuff to show!


If you're somehow managing to follow the Chaos Roadmap and are curious to know what changed from the last time:
- codename Chalcedony turned out to be Emergency Meeting
- Emergency Meeting is update 1.8
- no need to be cryptic about the next update: Honey Moon is the codename for the new update 1.9, "Space 54", currently available for testing on the Steam-PC public beta branch! If everything goes well, 1.9 should reach all platforms in February together with a few performance and QOL improvements.
- the vast majority of these are free content updates of Whiteout-size


I doubt we can get all of these done in 2024, and that's why there are no dates nor an order, but we're here to try!


We know people are demanding more platforms, but we're also keen on doing the ports ourselves, one at a time, and that takes time.
We can't "just hire immediately more people": I don't think that's how a healthy company grows; let's give poncle time to grow organically.
We can't "just get a publisher": it would make us lose control on features and pricing.

I'd love to tell you everything about the next port, but the marketing team would kill me; I can just say it's the most obvious one, so for streaming services of course, codenamed "if it looks like mud and smells like mud, then it's Vampire Survivors"


Our friends at Fangamer have made some neat Vampire Survivors gadgets: an incredibly metal t-shirt, and some enamel character pins that also come with a little accesory. The Queen Sigma pin in particular is very versatile, as shown by Lucy in this video.
I use mine in a little diorama my little siblings made for me for Christmas 😭

(feel free to cringe in the comments, but please appreciate I spared you the rest of the poem!)


Uh-oh, what now?
Something I've been trying to put in place almost since the beginning of VS' crazy ride is finally happening: poncle is teaming up with other indie devs to work on some VS-adjacent experiments. We're calling these experiments because:
- we're starting with just an idea, we don't know where that will lead us and that's okay
- we don't know when, or even if, we'll be happy with the final results and be ready to share them
- it keeps us free to, well, experiment, stay flexible, take risks and have fun
- as you can see from this totally not vague overview, we're following a highly scientific method and it's totally not an esoteric process at all:

What will these experiments yield? Is there a meaning to the icons? Are there "only" six in progress? Why is this called PENTAgram in game, if the star has 6 points? Will there be a vampire? We'll find out the answers to these and many other important questions someday.

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That's all for now, got a pretty busy 2024 ahead of us!
Thank you all once again and see you in the next run!

- Luca & poncle (including the marketing team)