Vampire Survivors adds Space Dude and more in today's cosmic Space 54 update

eurogamer.net:

Vampire Survivors might continue to be suspiciously devoid of vampires, but it does now have a bunch of new cosmic sci-fi bits (clearly last year's Among Us collaboration just wasn't space-y enough), courtesy of its latest free update on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and mobile.

Space 54, as the update is known, introduces a new bonus stage going by the same name — officially described as a «cosmic border-realm between this plane of existence and a sinister, third dimension» — as well as two new characters to deploy.

One of those characters, Space Dude, is the star of developer Poncle's energetic Space 54 trailer (or Space-54, or Space54 — the studio doesn't seem to have entirely made its mind up), and there's also four new weapons, a new relic, and seven new EXTRA achievements.

These latest achievements, as explained over in Poncle's update notes, are all inspired by open-source game framework Phaser, which was originally used to create Vampire Survivors. «If I hadn't loved working with [Phaser] to begin with,» the notes explain, «I would have probably never made VS, so I thought it deserved a bit more than just a line in the credits.»

Elsewhere in Poncle's notes, it teases some of the future content coming as part of Vampire Survivors' Chaos Roadmap, saying the next three updates have now been decided. «A lot of players have been asking for more dark/serious settings,» it explains, «so I can at least tell you that one of those three steps has been cherry picked because it's probably the darkest one we have on the roadmap. It won't be the next one, but should arrive soon enough!».

Additionally, development continues on Vampire Survivors' online co-op mode — «Technical work is going well,» Poncle says, «still too early for more details!» — and the studio's Vampire Survivors-adjacent experiments with other indie developers are