How Vampire Survivors Went From Hobby Project To Game Of The Year
By any measure, Poncle's Vampire Survivors is one of the biggest surprise Steam hits of the past few years, perhaps even longer. The content-rich roguelite quickly garnered an impressive amount of buzz last year after it debuted on Steam in late 2021, eventually becoming one of the service's best-selling games. But when Poncle's Luca Galante first started working on the project in his spare time, he was just hoping to get 100 people to play the game on Itch.io, a goal it originally failed to reach.
«I just wanted to get a few players to help with feedback and suggestions as I kept adding content to the core game, and have a laugh together at the silly references,» Galante tells GameSpot. «I was hoping for maybe around 100 people to play it and comment on itch, but that didn’t happen.»
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Now Playing: Vampire Survivors — v1.3.0 Chaos Update — Feb.9th [SPOILERS]
However, while Vampire Survivors might have struggled to find an audience on Itch.io, Galante didn't lose faith. A few months after its Itch.io release, he decided to upload the game onto Steam, where it was met with a lot more excitement. Galante says some of this success comes from the three distinct sources that inspired the game. Its top-down bullet-hell gameplay, for example, was first kindled by a mobile game called Magic Survival, while its impressive visual effects came from the little-known platformer Lapis X Labyrinth. As for the Castlevania-esque set dressing, Galante says he simply had a royalty-free asset pack with that theme lying around, and
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