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!
Steam Community Items (Trading Cards etc) out today
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!
First local co-op mode gameplay video + new info
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”.
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?
Fully switching to new engine
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!
Co-op hands-on event in London
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
