This is going to be akin to a blog post, so here's right away a TLDR:
Overview of the Roadmap to 1.0
When Vampire Survivors first released on Steam in Early Access, it was estimated to be at 60% content completion. The game had 7 playable characters, 22 weapons, 12 power-ups, 1 stage, and 23 achievements.
Thanks to the overwhelming success and support from the players, new content has started to come out at a much faster pace than anticipated and the roadmap has also been expanded significantly. The amount of playable characters planned for version 1.0 of the game has been doubled and so has the number of stages with the introduction of bonus/challenge ones. A dozen new weapons have been designed and a handful of new power-ups thrown into the mix.
This is where we're at now (patch 0.3.1) :
- Playable characters: 15 / 24
- Weapons and evolutions: 32 / 48
- Power-ups: 18 / 20
- Normal Stages: 3 / 5
- Special Stages: 2 / 5
That is about 70% content completion for the new roadmap to 1.0, but it doesn't even include the content that two new major game mechanics will bring to the game.
The first one, Arcanas, will arrive in April and will unlock a whole new level of viable builds and power creep.
Instead of the Story mode mentioned in the Early Access notes, we'll be implementing a new major gameplay mechanic, but which one is yet to be decided, with some kind of Endless mode being the main candidate.
This doesn't necessarily mean that Story mode is gone forever, but the deep lore of Vampire Survivors requires a solid grasp of theoretical physics to be fully appreciated, so maybe environmental storytelling and subtle hints are the way to go. Please don't take anything from this last paragraph seriously.
New engine, performance issues, and promised features pushed back
When I first launched Vampire Survivors, all I wanted was to have a little game that would allow me to have fun making new game content in my spare time. Thanks to your incredible support and a once-in-a-lifetime surge of luck, the game turned out to be an incredible success instead.
Getting help from some friends to try fix all the issues deriving from such a huge player base got very soon unsustainable, so I've also started a parallel project to port VS to an industry-standard game engine with the help of trusted freelancers.
The port to the new engine is going smoothly and the game is already fully playable, lacking mostly in polish and content, but we also ran benchmarks that show a tenfold increase in performance (and so in framerate).
The port going well is the reason why a few features promised back in January haven't been developed on the current version yet, like key-remapping, increase responsiveness when switching screens, localised text that fits the available space etc...
It's just more time effective to implement those things directly in the new engine, and the same goes for worrying about game performance and hardware compatibility.
While there could be a lot of stuff getting drawn on screen in VS, the real bottleneck are the physics calculations that are stuck on using only a single CPU core, which is why not even having powerful modern hardware guarantees a smooth gameplay. That list of hardware includes the Steam Deck unfortunately, with the game's performance dipping to an embarassing slideshow near the end of a run, while other graphics-intensive games run at a buttery 60fps.
The new engine will ensure VS runs like butter too.
We're aiming to release the version on the new engine in the summer. The executable will be completely different, but Savedata will be moved over of course.
Mobile version and other games
Vampire Survivors originally released on Android, in just a couple of test markets, and it ran terribly. It was so bad in fact that I'd just decided to stop developing it and move it to PC instead. With the new engine, the game is perfectly playable even on mobile, so hopefully we should see a proper version hitting the stores soon!
In the meantime, if you want to play on the go there is the Steam Deck option of course, but I'd also recommend once again to play Magic Survival on Android, which is the game that inspired the original prototype of Vampire Survivors. I doubt I'd have started developing VS if I hadn't played something as good as Magic Survival, as other mobile games in the same genre tend be the usual Ads & Microtransaction machines with a bit of gameplay attached.
Speaking of other games, there's another one I'd like to mention and that is Serenade of Chaos, an actual roguelike, for which the original asset pack used by Vampire Survivors was commissioned for. Here are some words from the developer, Slashie :
CastlevaniaRL is a completely traditional, turn-based roguelike that was originally created for the very first 7DRL challenge back in 2005. A lot of things were planned but this version only managed to have a "survival" mode in which you had to stay at the entrance of the castle, fighting round after round of enemies, getting upgrades for your whip and your mystic weapons. After some months of development, many things were added including different character classes and a full story mode, but the game remained using a traditional, character-based display. I was then contacted by the artist who would later be known as Oryx; he was looking for interesting roguelike projects to support with graphics and he created an awesome tileset for it. Amidst some more popular "xRLs" like DoomRL, CastlevaniaRL never became popular, probably due to being super difficult and somewhat hard to get into; Oryx then decided to release the tileset as his higher-res "Gothic" tileset and some other variants, available with a non-exclusive license on his website. Also, somewhere down its development, I added back the "survival mode" to it, just for nostalgia about its original roots. The game was recently added to itch.io for easier access and preservation, although it hasn't seen any update in ages. I also made this vid some time ago: https://youtu.be/Fe3lGEqw99k
When developing VS I wanted to focus exclusively on gameplay and having fun, which is why I'd let the available sprites or just about the first thing that comes to mind to influence any aspect of the game. With playing games being my main hobby, that "first thing that comes to mind" very often turned into a reference to some other game I love, either consciously or not.
For example I've realised only recently that the no-nonsense approach of "mash a button to start playing immediately" of the main menu came from playing One Step From Eden a few months before starting to develop VS. Or that there's a cheat code that gives you exactly 2800 gold coins because that's the same amount you get by cheating in Kagero Deception 2.
The list of influences goes on and on, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that without Magic Survival and Serenade of Chaos there wouldn't be a Vampire Survivors today, so please check them out!
Thank you once again to the awesome community, see you on the update thread for patch 0.3.2 in a couple of days! 🙏🏻
A quick message from Beth, our community manager
Want to see what's going on behind the scenes? We have launched a Public Issue Tracker on Trello so you can see the progress of the most common bugs and suggestions currently being worked on by the team.
https://trello.com/b/jWAoN59o/vampire-survivors-public-issue-tracker
These issues have been brought to us by the brilliant members of our Discord server, so join the community to chat to other survivors and let us know your thoughts to help improve the game.
We are loving hanging out with you all on the Vampire Survivors Twitter and other socials! Come find us for updates, polls, memes and all the good stuff.
Vampire Survivors Twitter: https://twitter.com/poncle_vampire
Poncle Twitter: https://twitter.com/poncle_games
Find the links to all our social media accounts here:
https://linktr.ee/vampiresurvivors