We're at the start of 2023!
It's certainly been a wild ride, and we have to thank all of you for your comments, quotes, messages, fan art, Steam reviews, and, naturally, attempting to find the supernatural at all given opportunities. We've watched you 100% the game (multiple times, sorry!), create wonderful monster-slaying builds, get us into the Steam Awards, and generally have a slaying good time.
As always, we are incredibly thankful for the community that has built up around Vampire Survivors.
We thought we'd do a longer post here and cover a bunch of topics we'd like to talk about, from the base game all the way through to the future. There's a lot to cover, so we hope you enjoy!
Thank you from everyone at poncle!
It's been a little over one year since VS released in Early Access on Steam, and the reception has been absolutely mindblowing. Thanks to all the players, my 2022 has been incredible, I went from working on VS over the weekends to working on VS 24/7 and starting a company, somehow. This company is poncle of course and I'm very grateful I got the privilege to work with the people I've always wanted to work with. And then there's the marketing team.
It's been surreal to appear on multiple 2022 GOTY lists, topping a few, and getting an actual, physical, very heavy, Golden Joystick Award too!
Most people in poncle play games, but have been working in industries only adjacent to gaming before, so everyone is hyped and happy for working on a game liked by so many people on so many platforms.
So thank you all once again, and we wish you an incredible new year like the one you gifted us 🙏
Version 1.0 on all platforms
Initially planned for "whenever, maybe end of next year", then secretly "early March", and then totally "in the summer", after more than doubling the content originally planned for the base game, in October we finally managed to wrap up v1.0 of VS.
That was the easy part though, as most of poncle had been working in parallel on an engine port of VS to allow us to reach more platforms ASAP. In Novemeber, we also managed to launch on Xbox and then on mobile in December, not to mention we got a DLC!
VS has also been the most played game on Steam Deck for the past 6 months or so, which makes the Deck another very important platform to take into account every time we add something.
What about other platforms? We all hear you and I know exactly what you want, but honestly, I don't think that putting VS on Teslas would be a good idea.
Mobile version
Soon after the initial success of VS, I started to look for a business partner to work on a mobile version of the game. Unfortunately, nobody I spoke with was on board with the monetization I had in mind for the platform: non-predatory. Months passed by and a large number of actual clones - not "games like Vampire Survivors", but actual 1:1 copies with stolen code, assets, data, progression - started to appear everywhere.
This forced our hand to release the mobile game ASAP, and put a lot of stress on the dev team that wasn't even supposed to worry about mobile in the first place.
Because of that we still have several features that we have to implement or polish on mobile, the most important one being Cloud Saves and Save Transfer (potentially Save Merging too!), but since we're still without a backend/full stack engineer, this might end up taking longer than expected.
If you're like me, then if you wanted VS on mobile you'd have beeen happy to just pay a couple of bucks for it and call it a day; but the mobile market doesn't work like that and by making VS a paid app I'd have cut out completely a lot of new players from even trying the game.
This is why we ended up with a free-for-real approach, where monetization is minimal and is designed to never interrupt your game, always be optional and in your control trough a couple of "watch ads" buttons, and doesn't have any of that real money sinks that mobile cashgrabs are usually designed around. It's just the full game, playable offline, in landscape or portrait, with touch controls or with a gamepad.
With both iOS and Android versions currently sitting at an average 4.8⭐rating and a crazy amount of organic downloads got exclusively thanks to word of mouth and a silly trailer we got given the chance to air during the prestigious Game Adverts, I think we're on the right track with monetization, but we still don't know how to distribute the Legacy of the Moonspell DLC on mobile.
The problems we're facing are the same mentioned above: how do we make it fair, but also accessible to players who are only into free games. We'll figure something out and publish the DLC asap!
We're still working on bug fixes for mobile, but are having trouble finding some specific devices to recreate some of the niche but worse bugs (like invisible enemies wtf) so I'm sorry it's taking longer than usual to fix them, but we're working on it and have been scouting even the dodgiest possible places to find the devices we need.
Where's the new engine?
On console and mobile!
Because of everything I said in the previous paragraph, we didn't have time to offer the new engine also on PC before the end of the year. It's not straightforward as we need to develop a little launcher config tool first, that will allow you to choose what game version to launch and with what options. This might be particularly challenging on Steam Deck and we'll be working on it in early 2023.
There's still plenty of things that have to be ported 1:1 (Valkyrie Turner's VFX come ot mind just to make a quick example) but we're planning to keep supporting the current JS version for quite a bit, until at some point next year, when we'll just swap to the new engine altogether, as maintaining both versions of the game will mostly be a waste of time once they're unrecognizable from one another.
Our first version of the new engine was literally 10 times more performing than the current one, but the game physics behaved in a very realistic way compared to the arcade-y nature of the original, so during the summer we started over and focused on fidelity rather than performance.
So, while the gain in performance is not as significant as x10 anymore, we're still getting overall better performance, improved hardware compatibility, and more options.
DLC and updates
During the summer we started to talk about DLC internally and I would usually go for "4 characters, 8 weapons, and 1 simple stage", only to end up with our first DLC having double the characters (starting to see a pattern here?), 13 weapons, and 1 stage that is all but simple compared to the others.
I was absolutely terrified to launch it since it wass the first completely new thing we put up for sale, but once again reception was mindblowing and we got flooded by positive feedback, so thank you once again for making it a success!
We also had a hype trailer for the DLC where we wanted the animated sequence to be a surprise for the fans, so, to great horror of the marketing team, we put it at the end rather than the start of the footage, hope you've enjoyed it!
If you like this kind of content packs, then there will be more coming. Please remember that DLCs will only ever add more characters/weapons/stages and that the main game will keep getting updated regularly with main game mechanics and content (think Tiny Bridge-style patches) so that no key-feature will ever be gatekept by a paywall.
Since the last few months were mental with v1.0, Xbox, mobile, and the DLC, please expect patches to be released at a slower pace compared to 2022, as we have to swap to a more sustainable release pipeline and also coordinate patches between a lot of platforms, not to say that, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, we now have 2 different versions of the game to maintain.
What's next?
There's a lot of stuff, not exclusively related to Vampire Survivors, getting made behind the scenes in poncle 👀
There's something weird and big (in terms of pixels) coming soon to the Steam public-beta, and since the Legacy of the Moonspell DLC has been a success, The Directer will soon offer to take the survivors to yet another world in search for the vampire... Do you have any suggestions where to try next? The ride only ends when you decide to get off! Or we find a vampire I guess.
Thank you all once again and see you in the next run!
- Luca & poncle (including the marketing team)