Indie developer poncle announced the Vampire Survivors development roadmap has expanded “significantly,” due to the game being a big hit.
The new development roadmap has been expanded to include more than double the number of playable characters originally planned, with more stages planned and the introduction of bonus and challenge stages as well.
News that the Vampire Survivors development roadmap has expanded comes not long after popular hololive streamers became enamored with the game, and it even started spawning fan game spinoffs.
Here’s the development roadmap:
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.
Vampire Survivors is available now on Windows PC on Itch.io (this is like a demo and doesn’t get updated) and Steam.
