Developer poncle has taken to Steam to share the wrap up of roguelite bullet hell Vampire Survivors by the end of 2022. The team has read players’ comments, quotes, messages, looked at fan art, Steam reviews and playthroughs, checked out builds and much more. The developers offer their gratitude to the community that built up around Vampire Survivors.
“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!”
In October, the developers managed to wrap up the full version 1.0 of Vampire Survivors. That was the easy part though, as most of the team had been working in parallel on an engine port. In November, the game launched on Xbox and then on mobile in December and received a DLC.
The team had a hard time finding a business partner to work on the mobile version of the game with. The developers were looking for non-predatory free-for-real type of monetization, that is, entirely optional, but the mobile market doesn’t work like that:
“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 new PC engine is in development. Initially, it was 10 times more performing than the current one but the game physics lost the arcad-y feel of the original and so the team had started over during the summer. While the latest version of the engine doesn’t offer quite as significant increase in performance anymore, it’s still overall better with improved hardware compatibility and more options.
There will be more DLC coming – their content will be like that of the first one, adding more characters/weapons/stages, etc., while the main game will keep being updated regularly with additional mechanics and content.
