Vampire Survivors

Vampire Survivors
Developer(s)	Luca Galante
Publisher(s)	Luca Galante
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, MacOS
Release	17 December 2021
Genre(s)	Roguelike, Shoot 'em up
Mode(s)	Single-player

Vampire Survivors is a roguelike shoot 'em up role-playing video game developed and published by Luca Galante, also known as poncle. It was released in early access on December 17, 2021. The player controls an automatically attacking character while fighting against continuous waves of monsters, with the goal being to survive the onslaught for as long as possible and unlock additional characters, weapons, and relics for subsequent sessions. In spite of the game's name and key art, a deliberate point of irony is that none of the variety of monsters encountered are vampires.

Gameplay[]

The player controls one of several characters with different starting weapons and bonuses on a looping stage. The weapons attack automatically, and the player's goal is to defeat constant waves of various monsters that appear. Defeating monsters and exploring the stage allows the player to collect experience gems, which are used to level up, roast chicken, which restores the player's health, and other helpful items. Each level increase provides the player the choice of several weapons and passive power-ups; once the player has collected six weapons and six power-ups and upgraded them all fully, any further levels they gain offer only gold coins or roast chicken. Another way to upgrade weapons and power-ups is to open chests, which are dropped by particularly powerful monsters and may contain one, three, or five random items. Fully leveled weapons can also be merged or upgraded into an ultimate form if the right conditions are met.^[1][2]

Sessions of Vampire Survivors have a soft time limit of 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the stage chosen. At the time limit, the stage is cleared of all enemies and a final enemy named Death will spawn. Not only is Death tremendously powerful and difficult to kill, but one additional Death will appear every consecutive minute thereafter to ensure the player's eventual demise. A session that reaches or exceeds the stage's time limit is considered a successful completion. In between sessions, accumulated gold coins can be spent to unlock new characters and persistent power-ups.

Development[]

Developer Luca Galante explained that he created Vampire Survivors because he wanted to manage a community, based on his past experience as being an admin for an Ultima Online server. The game was inspired by , a mobile game that also consisted of a character automatically attacking enemies. Development of the initial early access version took around a year, with Galante spending around £1100 on assets, art, and music.^[3]

The success of the game exceeded Luca Galante's expectations and allowed him to quit his job in February 2022 to focus completely on development of the game. He was informally assisted by "a few friends" in their spare time. Planned content included additional weapons, characters, and stages, and an "endless mode". Galante's intent was to bring Vampire Survivors out of early access by the end of 2022.^[4]

On March 24, 2022, Galante announced that he hired multiple freelancers to expand the Vampire Survivors team and the pace of development was accelerating. In addition to outlining the scope of the promised new content with a roadmap, Galante explained that a major milestone slated for Summer 2022 would be porting Vampire Survivors to an "industry-standard" game engine to improve its overall performance.^[5]

Reception[]

While Vampire Survivors was initially obscure on release, by late January 2022 it became a hit and reached over 30,000 concurrent players on Steam.^[3][6] This number continued to climb the following month, with the game peaking at 77,061 concurrent players on February 20th.^[7]

Ian Walker of Kotaku and Graham Smith of Rock Paper Shotgun both praised the game, with both comparing the game to dopamine.^[1][8] Polygon's Nicole Carpenter noted the game's depth, with her saying "no one streamer I've watched played entirely the same".^[2]

References[]