- 1 new, hard Challenge Stage - 1 new Character and 1 new Weapon - 1 more rank for Reroll and Skip powerups - 2 new Arcanas
Time to go back to the dark and serious roots of Vampire Survivors ☠
Tweaks: - Added a toggle in Stage Selection to disable Arcanas. Disabling them also disables the extra minibosses at 11:00 and 21:00 - Added the option to pick a random first Arcana. - Reduced long term gains of Gatti's attack power when stealing chicken. - Halved projectile explosion damage from Arcana XIX - Heart Of Fire. - Reduced cost of Reroll, Skip, and Banish.
Bugfixes: - Tentative fix to chicken/coinbag choice presenting itself when there are still items that can be leveled up - Phieraggi is now affected by Arcana V - Chaos in the Dark Night. - Added an extra backup system for save data in %appdata%/Vampire_Survivors/saves/backups. These backups will not sync with Steam Cloud, so you can restore them manually if needed.
Community
A big welcome to all the new players, and a big thank you to all the returning players that are pushing the game once again to some incredible concurrent players peak! 🤯
Patch 0.5.0
New Content
Contains 4 (?) new achievements:
- 1 new relic/major gameplay feature (Arcana) - 1 more level of Banish - 1 new weapon - Inlaid Library Coffin
The new content in this patch will allow you to summon chaos and vicious creatures and also tap into the great occult power of the Arcanas. It sounds like this though: [previewyoutube="RETz46NOQWE;full"]
Tweaks: - Minor changes to spawn waves - Changed base drop rate of some Treasure Chests from 80% to 100% - Reduced Cooldown of Carréllo - Each rank in "Skip" now gives 2 skips instead of 1 - Specified Clock Speed in Stage Selection - Removed special BGM from weapons (it stays on special characters only)
Bugfix: - Game data will now be saved when backing out of selection menus
How to unlock Arcanas as a game mechanic
- Find the Randomazzo at the top of Stage 4. Be careful.
How to unlock more Arcanas
- After finding the Randomazzo, new unlocks will be available and visible in the Unlocks menu. There are 6 Arcanas in this patch, more will be added in future patches.
How to activate Arcanas during a run
- You get to choose any unlocked Arcana at the start of a new run. After that, if you have unlocked more arcanas than just the default one, then there is a chance you can get a random draft from Trasure Chests. Most Treasure Chests containing Arcanas are carried by bosses spawning at minute 11:00 and 21:00. You can carry a maximum of 3 Arcanas at the same time.
The real Early Access content
Because of the way I've originally tested the game mechanics in VS, most of what we've seen so far has somewhat always been from the realm of the expected.
With Arcanas that's going to change a little.
This new layer of game mechanics will be largely untested due to the large amount of interactions it could have, so there might be major changes to them as we move forward in patches.
Please keep this in mind when discussing Arcanas, there will inevitably be talks about what's trash and what's op, but my concern is about people fighting over this kind of stuff and forgetting the main point of the game: having fun.
So I hope you have fun finding new ways to break the game and reach 1fps again, and fingers crossed there won't be need for nerfs, only buffs :)
Patch 0.4.2
New Content
Contains 7 new achievements: - 1 new stage, including new enemies and events - 1 new character - 1 new relic/gameplay option - 1 new weapon - 1 new evolution - 1 more Reroll - 1 more Banish
Tweaks: - Heavily reduced chances that enemies will spawn inside walls in the Dairy Plant - New entry in the Options menu "Less physics, more FPS". It's enabled by default, if you don't like it or for some reason it glitches badly on your machine, you can disable it from the Options menu from the main screen. - Guide arrows don't jitter anymore - please enable the guides from the Pause menu if you have the Map but can't locate coffins etc.
Bugfix: some projectiles not moving when there are no enemies to target Bugfix: Clock Lancet disappearing when moving upwards for too long
New gameplay option
Unlocked by finding the new relic in Stage 4, the new "Hurry" option in Stage Selection will simply make the timer tick twice as fast, so enemies waves will change every 30 seconds in real time instead of the usual 60.
What's next
Arcanas are coming soon :)
Patch 0.3.2
New Content
Contains 5 new achievements and: - Mad Forest Coffin - 3 weapons (more like 2.5) - 1 new unlockable power up - 1 new music track that plays when...
[previewyoutube="Ox9uRw-ddJM;full"]
Tweaks: - Added stage modifiers information on the Stage Selection screen - Added info for discovered evolutions on Level Up panels - Changed treasure chests in Il Molise - Changed Il Molise unlock condition to "Unlock Hyper mode for any normal stage" - Updated sprites for some items
- New save data system that uses a much simpler file format and should prevent issues like unlocks getting out of sync. It has the drawback that the game won't be saving your coins as soon as you pick them up anymore, but will only save at the end of a run, or when opening a treasure chest.
Save data will be converted automatically on launching the game. The new location of the save file is %appdata%/Vampire_Survivors/saves
What's next
We have a fresh, yet already outdated with this patch, roadmap infographic here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1794680/view/3131696199131643254
Arcanas are coming sometime in April, but before they do we'll be getting a new super-chill stage
Development Roadmap Overview
This is going to be akin to a blog post, so here's right away a TLDR:
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.
Speaking of other games, there's another one I'd like to mention and that is Serenade of Chaos, an actual roguelike, for which the original asset pack used by Vampire Survivors was commissioned for. Here are some words from the developer, Slashie :
CastlevaniaRL is a completely traditional, turn-based roguelike that was originally created for the very first 7DRL challenge back in 2005. A lot of things were planned but this version only managed to have a "survival" mode in which you had to stay at the entrance of the castle, fighting round after round of enemies, getting upgrades for your whip and your mystic weapons. After some months of development, many things were added including different character classes and a full story mode, but the game remained using a traditional, character-based display. I was then contacted by the artist who would later be known as Oryx; he was looking for interesting roguelike projects to support with graphics and he created an awesome tileset for it. Amidst some more popular "xRLs" like DoomRL, CastlevaniaRL never became popular, probably due to being super difficult and somewhat hard to get into; Oryx then decided to release the tileset as his higher-res "Gothic" tileset and some other variants, available with a non-exclusive license on his website. Also, somewhere down its development, I added back the "survival mode" to it, just for nostalgia about its original roots. The game was recently added to itch.io for easier access and preservation, although it hasn't seen any update in ages. I also made this vid some time ago: https://youtu.be/Fe3lGEqw99k
When developing VS I wanted to focus exclusively on gameplay and having fun, which is why I'd let the available sprites or just about the first thing that comes to mind to influence any aspect of the game. With playing games being my main hobby, that "first thing that comes to mind" very often turned into a reference to some other game I love, either consciously or not.
For example I've realised only recently that the no-nonsense approach of "mash a button to start playing immediately" of the main menu came from playing One Step From Eden a few months before starting to develop VS. Or that there's a cheat code that gives you exactly 2800 gold coins because that's the same amount you get by cheating in Kagero Deception 2.
The list of influences goes on and on, but I'm pretty sure it's safe to say that without Magic Survival and Serenade of Chaos there wouldn't be a Vampire Survivors today, so please check them out!
Thank you once again to the awesome community, see you on the update thread for patch 0.3.2 in a couple of days! 🙏🏻
A quick message from Slothie, our community manager
Want to see what's going on behind the scenes? We have launched a Public Issue Tracker on Trello so you can see the progress of the most common bugs and suggestions currently being worked on by the team. https://trello.com/b/jWAoN59o/vampire-survivors-public-issue-tracker
These issues have been brought to us by the brilliant members of our Discord server, so join the community to chat to other survivors and let us know your thoughts to help improve the game.
We are loving hanging out with you all on the Vampire Survivors Twitter and other socials! Come find us for updates, polls, memes and all the good stuff. Find the links to all our social media accounts here: https://linktr.ee/vampiresurvivors
Patch 0.3.1
New Content
4 achievements to unlock: - a Bonus stage - a new weapon evolution - a new character - an extra rank for the Skip power-up
If you've already met the requirements for the Bonus stage achievement, then simply enter and exit a run to unlock it right away.
[previewyoutube="i-cNkgovw2Q;full"]
Bugfixes: - changes to cooldown don't reset weapon firing timers anymore - special stage pickups are now immune to bad/purple Pentagram, but now Pentagram also correctly erases all other on-screen pickups - tentative fix for King Bible/Unholy Vespers not making a full circle - tentative fix for UI elements overlapping when pickipng up a stage item at the same time as leveling up or pausing the game
Tweaks: - reduced cost of the Skip power-up - treasure chests are now visible on the map
What's next
The original Early Access description from December mentioned a 60% content completion, but since then a lot more stuff has been added to the roadmap for game version 1.0, not to mention that content has been coming out at a much faster pace than anticipated. So, rather than providing a few hints about what to expect from the next patch as usual, I'll soon be putting together a larger announcement to shed some light on the overall roadmap, game difficulty, power creep, performance optimisation etc.
Thank you to all the players for the continued, incredible support, see you soon on the Steam News page of the game! A new major game mechanic is coming in April 👀
0.3.0c
updated translations for existing languages
increased XP gain over the first 10 minutes in Stage 3
moved some stage items closer to the starting point
Patch 0.3.0
New Content
6 achievements to unlock new content, including 1 stage and 1 weapon.
The fastest way to start unlocking the new content is: Reach Level 40 in the Inlaid Library, then either Quit or complete your run.
From then on, just keep an eye on your list of achievements to see what's next.
Here's how the new stage looks and sounds [previewyoutube="p7qpWDSN7lM;full"]
Tweaks: - armor and hp bonus for Antonio - hp bonus for Gennaro and Suor Clerici - moveSpeed bonus for Krochi - changed colliders in Mad Forest - hidden stage items now have a 100% chance to appear - minor optimizations
Bugfixes: - tentative fix for game freezing at startup after using localization mods - tentative fix for game freezing on character selection after save data corruption/mod
Stage 3
The new stage introduces a few new gameplay mechanics, so you might want to take it easy and disable your Curse PowerUp if you have it enabled. It also contains a new type of item that you can pick up to permanently unlock a new game feature. Unlocking Stage 3 will also make its enemies and events eligible to spawn in Green Acres.
Mac version
It will come out a few hours after the Windows one, apologies for the delay! 🙏🏻
Future content and the Dev Team
So far I think I've managed to keep up a decent pace with new content patches, while the rest of the part-time team has been focused on making builds, QOL improvements, and porting the game to a standard game engine. The port is now in a fully playable state and has been stress tested to handle even more stuff than the currenv version of VS puts on screen, by staying at stable 60fps even on low specs hardware. This version also gets rid of of those problems where people who can play the web version with no issues aren't instead able to play on Steam due to some hardware error, or who gets weird rendering issues with the screen freezing or becoming white while the game keeps running in the background.
So we have reached a point where we need to start working more towards having feature parity between the new version and the current one, which means that new content will be rolled out more slowly. While there will probably still be weekly patches once in a while - after all I've built the game specifically to allow myself to make new content quickly - officially we're moving to a new content patch release every two weeks.
TLDR: new content patches will come out once every two weeks, efforts to fix breaking erors (WebGL Unsupported, white screens etc.) will be redirected to speed up development on the new game engine.
Community
Thank you everyone once again for helping in the public beta, providing quality memes, fantastic fan art, an incredible amount of guides and videos, and just being overall awesome 🙏🏻
What a horrible night to have a Patch 0.2.13
New Content:
- 1 new PowerUp immediately available
- 4 new achievements to unlock:
1 new character.
1 semi-new character holding a new special weapon.
1 new Passive Weapon.
1 extra rank for the Reroll PowerUp.
[previewyoutube="MIaIoi1f1jw;full"]
- Additional fixes and diagnostics for people stuck on a blank screen when starting the game - Tweak: doubled Hollow Heart and Pummarola bonuses - Tweak: default Axe passes through 1 more enemy - Tweak: changed layout of pause menu and availability of the Quit button - Tweak: Steam achievements synched automatically when launching the game - Tweak: Reroll base cost reduced to 5k - Bugfix: Empty Tome now affects cooldowns immediately - Bugfix: keyboard input opening/closing menus too quickly - Bugfix: a late-game issue that would occasionally spawn too many enemies off-screen
The Deep Lore of Vampire Survivors
While we wait for an in-game bestiary, I just wanted to make everyone aware that this is not bacteria nor a desktop fan, but it is, allegedly, a "Lion Head":
Curse PowerUp
The new Curse PowerUp is for experienced players and will most likely be tweaked quite a bit compared to the others as new patches keep coming. If you buy it by accident, please remember that you can refund your PowerUps at anytime, for free.
What's next
Next week we'll be moving up to patch 0.3.0, containing a new game mechanic and a new Stage, complete with new layout and enemies.
Localisation
There's work in progress for languages that require a lot of space and for using better fonts, but an estimate for such improvements would be after the next patch. Thank you to everyone who wants to contirbute to fan translations, still have a lot of emails to go through so sorry if I still haven't managed to reply to everyone!
Linux version
Still in the process of making tentative native builds, especially with the Steam Deck being just around the corner, but for now Proton is still the best way to play the game, even on Deck.
Community
Thank you everyone for your continued support, we're at 20k active users in Discord! 🤯
Patch 0.2.12 - small update
New Content:
- 1 new weapon evolution - 2 new minor game mechanics/PowerUps - 3 new achievements to unlock the content above - Enabled the following languages: French, Korean, Russian, and Chinese. Also Spanish and Japanese at about 90% completion.
[previewyoutube="ajQONQJPp-g;full"]
- Added a brief moment of invulnerability after leveling up - Translation fixes and Translation tools, new languages - Minor sprite updates - Minor tweaks to weapons rarity - Bugfix for people getting stuck on a black screen after changing language - Bugfix for treasure chests getting stuck in obstacles - Made a certain thing official but the ride never ends 💀
Localisation
While more languages are on the way, there is now also an official tool to make mods for fan-made translations. Please join the Discord server for the details (link at the end of the page).
What's next
A new input system is being tested to improve controls between screen transitions and allow for key rebinding. A few other QOL improvements are in the works, but priority right now is being given to the completion of Stage 3 and the new game mechanics it will bring.
Linux version
Still no luck with the native build, playing the Windows version using Proton still seems to be the best way for now. There will be more tests done on the public-beta branch during this week, thank you for your patience and help!
Community
Thank you all once again for your help and feedback, between the modding scene, fan translations, and the Discord community leaderboards the support is simply incredible 🙏🏻
