How Vampire Survivors Was Rebuilt for Xbox Without Players Even Noticing

Since its unpretentious launch in mid-2022 on Game Pass for PC, poncle’s Vampire Survivors has ridden wave upon garlicky wave of critical and commercial success. Most recently, the game received not one, but two accolades at this year’s BAFTA Games Awards: Game Design and the biggest prize of all, Best Game.

It’s the decadent core loop of shoot, survive, die, repeat that has left countless Vampire Survivors players — including Xbox boss and superfan Phil Spencer — utterly enamored. The surprise title was instantly available on Xbox One and PC Game Pass, allowing millions to get involved.

Vampire Survivors wasn’t originally designed to support this level of grandeur. Creator Luca Galante’s brainchild was originally designed for web technology, particularly JavaScript. Poncle Tech Director Sam McGarry tells us that the launch version of Vampire Survivors was “basically a browser game.”

The build wasn’t running very well on platforms different to PC, players were running into issues across different devices, and addressing those problems quickly became a priority for the team. Once it became the smash hit we know it as now, it became clear it needed a new engine – something fans asked about from early on. It turns out, the team made that happen so seamlessly, many didn’t know it had even happened.

“The overall goal was for players not to notice,” McGarry says. “Even to this day, there are still players that don’t realize that the engine is already out there and has been since launch on Xbox, so we still have differences to sort out, but I think we did a pretty good job.”

Xbox was the first platform that poncle launched the engine-enhanced Vampire Survivors on, and McGarry tells us that one of the main challenges the team faced, and still faces, is maintaining level parity between different versions of the game in parallel — the new engine on Xbox and the original Javascript version on PC.

“Making sure that players can actually go between Xbox platforms and continue their game is very important to us,” McGarry says. “And we’re also trying to maintain that quality so you can jump between two different versions of the game without feeling like you’re playing different copies of the game, without having any technical issues or anything.”

All that effort has been worth it, however – McGarry says the game’s addition to Game Pass has been crucial in how it became a word of mouth success. “If you look at a screenshot of Vampire Survivors, you might not get drawn into the game just by the way it looks,” McGarry says. “And we find often that early game players don’t always get the hook of it until they’ve gotten further in. That’s when we really see that people are like, ‘ah, okay, I get the game now. It is also common for people to play the game, bounce off and come back. Game Pass allows us to bring in a lot more people and let them play the game.

“The other great thing about [Game Pass]The best part was that the game could be accessed via cloud. So people are able to play not just at home on their console or on their PC, but out and about or… on the toilet on their phone. That was relatively painless process too; we put the game out, and ticked a box, and then it was available on the Cloud just like that basically.”

The development team is creating two different versions of the game on Xbox and PC, which is a far cry from Galante’s independent work on Vampire Survivors. In the last twelve months, the poncle team’s development has mirrored that of a Xenomorph — emerge quickly and grow fast. But despite that rapid expansion, the actual workflow hasn’t really changed all that much, testament to the game’s solid foundations.

“Ultimately, it’s just that we have more people in the process now,” McGarry explains. “So it still starts at Luca and filters through, he’s doing that work on that PC version alongside writers and other teams helping with the creative side of things. This work is then replicated in the new engine. Having that dual engine setup has helped us keep that same workflow in a sense, without disrupting the creative part of the very start of the chain.”

Poncle is keen to highlight that while Galante still sits atop of the creative tree and the majority of the game’s increasingly wild ideas come from him, Vampire Survivors is now created by a team that all provide input and feedback.

“The more people that we bring on board, the more we can take off Luca’s plate,” says poncle Lead Game Developer Adam Goodchild. “Throughout last year, everyone tried to take as much as they could so Luca could focus on the creative side.

“The original goal of what Luca set out to make hasn’t changed at all. It’s just the pace at which we can do it is a lot different because there’s more of us, and everybody’s got a role now.”

Vampire Survivors continues to update and provide new content. Legacy of the Moonspell, the first premium DLC launched in December. Tides of the Foscari launches today.

These paid DLC packs are thematically based in their own worlds — Moonspell took us to the snow-kissed mountains of “the east,” while Foscari promises a lush, vibrant forest concealing a magic academy with absolutely nothing unusual about it. Vampire Survivors was on the same page. However, Galante, Galante, and their team insist that all content that enhances or changes the core gameplay loop must be delivered in free content updates. This should only apply to players that have either purchased the game directly or used Game Pass. We can’t say too much, but the team has plenty in store in that department too.

“For anyone that can’t or doesn’t want to get the DLC, you’re still getting other updates at the same time,” McGarry adds. “We’re also constantly adding little things to the base game, adding more achievements… if only to give Phil Spencer something new to finish off.” 

Today’s Vampire Survivors game, Tides of the Foscari, is now available on Xbox One and PC.

Vampire Survivors

Poncle

☆☆☆☆☆
313

★★★★★

$4.99

$3.99

PC Game Pass

Xbox Game Pass

Vampire Survivors features a minimalistic game play and roguelite components. There is no hiding place, so you must survive the night to get enough gold to help others. Death will eventually end your struggle.