And we're at the start of 2024! It's been once again a wild ride, and once again we have to thank all of you for your comments, quotes, messages, fan art, reviews, and, naturally, relentelessy keeping up with your 100% (sorry!) As always, we are incredibly thankful for the community that has built up around Vampire Survivors. We're doing another huge post like last year to talk about everything that happened and also have a look at what's to come in the future. There's a lot to cover, so we hope you enjoy!

Thank you from everyone at poncle!

Even after being out for more than one year, the reception of VS keeps being absolutely mindblowing. Poncle has grown to 20 people now and we're all still busy working exclusively on VS due to the ports, engine changes, frequent updates and releases. And then, you know, the marketing team exists. We have a lot going on behind the scenes, but I'll keep the update focused on Vampire Survivors and I'll reveal a few bit in the paragraphs below!

Everything that happened

*Deep breath* : Bat Country, DICE Awards Action game of the year, BAFTA for Game Design, BAFTA for Best Game, Tides of the Foscari DLC, Astral Stair, Nintendo Switch port, Local Co-op, first players event, OST orchestra recordings (3rd one actually ), Whiteout, Adventures, first collab DLC Emergency Meeting! Missed something? Most likely, oh we have udpated the OST on Steam to be available in FLAC format for example, anyway, 2023 summary done, next! [previewyoutube=4nYRx3fPNO4;full][/previewyoutube]

State of: Online co-op

We are still investigating! To retro-fit online multiplayer in a game as simple as this, but with so much content, is still a huge challenge. We've got help now, and things are looking promising, but it's still too early for us to be able to make any promises. We'll keep giving you tiny updates until hopefully we can confirm it's actually going to happen.

State of: Cross-save

We had this in testing for a while now, but the real hold-up is having to put in place everything that is needed to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and whatever else is required for data protection. We had delays even just in testing the feature in public-beta because there's a lot of work to do - even if all we need to do to bridge the accounts you already have on different platforms is storing just an email and password combination. We're working on a QOL update for February and we're hoping to launch cross-save in public-beta only at the same time (Steam and Android only to start with).

State of: Cross-MEDIA

Yep, we're doing cross-media like the big boys for real! Back in April 2023 we announced an animated tv series in collaboration with Story Kitchen. We had of course waited for the various strikes to end before getting to it, so for now we can just say that more info is coming in 2024! Honestly we have received a lot of proposals to collaborate on cross-media projects, but rather than jumping the gun we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn't a videogame out of VS requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game, that is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right! We have several partners now and we'll reveal more on these projects as they mature and we've got good stuff to show!

What's next for VS content?

If you're somehow managing to follow the Chaos Roadmap and are curious to know what changed from the last time: - codename Chalcedony turned out to be Emergency Meeting - Emergency Meeting is update 1.8 - no need to be cryptic about the next update: Honey Moon is the codename for the new update 1.9, "Space 54", currently available for testing on the Steam-PC public beta branch! If everything goes well, 1.9 should reach all platforms in February together with a few performance and QOL improvements. - the vast majority of these are free content updates of Whiteout-size
I doubt we can get all of these done in 2024, and that's why there are no dates nor an order, but we're here to try!

More platforms

We know people are demanding more platforms, but we're also keen on doing the ports ourselves, one at a time, and that takes time. We can't "just hire immediately more people": I don't think that's how a healthy company grows; let's give poncle time to grow organically. We can't "just get a publisher": it would make us lose control on features and pricing. I'd love to tell you everything about the next port, but the marketing team would kill me; I can just say it's the most obvious one, so for streaming services of course, codenamed "if it looks like mud and smells like mud, then it's Vampire Survivors"

Fangamer merch

Our friends at Fangamer have made some neat Vampire Survivors gadgets: an incredibly metal t-shirt, and some enamel character pins that also come with a little accesory. The Queen Sigma pin in particular is very versatile, as shown by Lucy in this video. I use mine in a little diorama my little siblings made for me for Christmas
(feel free to cringe in the comments, but please appreciate I spared you the rest of the poem!)

THE VAMPIRE SURVIVORS EXPERIMENT

Uh-oh, what now? Something I've been trying to put in place almost since the beginning of VS' crazy ride is finally happening: poncle is teaming up with other indie devs to work on some VS-adjacent experiments. We're calling these experiments because: - we're starting with just an idea, we don't know where that will lead us and that's okay - we don't know when, or even if, we'll be happy with the final results and be ready to share them - it keeps us free to, well, experiment, stay flexible, take risks and have fun - as you can see from this totally not vague overview, we're following a highly scientific method and it's totally not an esoteric process at all:
What will these experiments yield? Is there a meaning to the icons? Are there "only" six in progress? Why is this called PENTAgram in game, if the star has 6 points? Will there be a vampire? We'll find out the answers to these and many other important questions someday. --- That's all for now, got a pretty busy 2024 ahead of us! Thank you all once again and see you in the next run! - Luca & poncle (including the marketing team)

[ 2024-01-09 11:58:27 CET ] [ Original post ]