The Making of Vampire Survivors - Documentary

the Steam forum and everything, because again, I was expecting 100 people, maybe 200. I would have been very happy with 200, just perfect. When it suddenly hits 2,000 and then 20,000, well, you know, you either close everything or hire someone to help you with the community. And we have Beth, who joined as a community manager and has been doing an absolutely fantastic job ever since. If the game managed to stay relevant all year, in my opinion, it's definitely thanks to everything Beth has been doing on the community side of things. (upbeat music) So the Itch demo can give you a decent idea of ​​how much content was available at the beginning.

So I think the first version from December had seven characters, one setting, and I think 18 weapons. So, considering that in the end we ended up with 40 characters, 10 stages, 72 between weapons and power-ups, seven important game mechanics that should never have been in the game to begin with. - Obviously all this comes from Luca. He comes right out of his brain, implements it on the JavaScript side and then on the engine port, you know, throughout the whole process, we've just been playing catch-up. It's like we come in after a weekend and look at the commit history, and it's like, there's a ton of new stuff here. (Laughs) But that being said, it's really interesting, because yeah, we walk in and we get this, wow, all of a sudden, you know, oh, look what he's done during this time that we haven't been watching him.

And yeah, some of them, you know, are like the One Solution, the galaxy effect and things like that, you know, all these crazy particle effects, the things with gravity wells where you have these swirling particles. Those are the ones that are always there, you look at them and you're amazed, and then you panic and say, okay, how are we going to build this too? (laughs) - Is that the same workflow you still use, Luca? Are you still working on the JavaScript version to this day and are the guys adapting it? - Yes, at a very different pace than last year.

But because it works well, because if you're a developer, if you have the design document in front of you, it's open to interpretation and all that, and it raises a lot of questions. If, on the other hand, you have to port something that you can already see fully implemented and also have access to that code, I think it becomes much easier. Right now, honestly, it's not that important. If we create a new weapon and the weapon turns out in a different way, I mean, in JavaScript, it's not a big deal. But when we were working on porting the main game to the new engine, it was very important that everything was exactly the same, because I wanted people to have exactly the same experience.

I didn't want to change things, I just wanted it to be better. Basically, we already had the first fully functional version of this new engine over the summer, I think it was June, and it was running very well. We could put so much junk on the screen and we just wouldn't lose frames at all. Zero. The problem is that the physics system we were using was basically too realistic. There was friction, there were enemies bouncing off each other and it felt wrong. It seemed like a different game. I didn't feel the stupidity of "Vampire Survivors" with that wave of caddy moves.

And because of that, we have to remake the entire physics engine. (energy hiss) So, sound effects, if you have 200 explosions on the screen, you don't want to play 200 sound effects. Basically, there was a sound system that could be moved around so that everything sounded the same, at the same beat and everything. The sources, I think there is still a problem. Yes, I see Sam's face. (laughs) It took forever for the fonts to get a font that didn't look as bad as the tight one, but also didn't look too good. Just, you know, a little improvement, really.

And that's why it took much longer than expected to make the port. - And there were a lot of things like that along the way where it was like, you know, we'd implement something, we'd look at it and say, "It's too clean, it's too pretty, it looks too good." "Well. We need to make it more horrible to replicate the exact look of the original game." So it's a really interesting process, kind of the opposite of what you would formally think, oh, take your game and make it look better. - In an industry that's constantly trying to break new ground visually, there's something refreshing about a game that intentionally tries to look worse.

It certainly adds to the charm of "Vampire Survivors" and makes implementing new characters and weapons a little easier. So while we're on the topic, I wanted to talk about possibly the hardest part of the entire game, what you first see when you load up "Vampire Survivors," the main menu. - I love working with user interfaces. If we ignore the menu for a second, if you see the game pause menu, it just doesn't appear in your face, but everything has a little animation that just makes it appear. Or when you open the Arcana menu, I spent three days

making

sure it felt right because I really like working with UI.

But the main menu is different. The main menu doesn't have to be pretty. The main menu has to send you to the main game as quickly as possible. One of the games I played during the pandemic was "One Step From Eden", which is a roguelike that I loved. And at “One Step From Eden,” you get absolutely beautiful menus. But in the main menu, you can tap X or whatever three times and immediately jump to a new run. And I wanted the same. I wanted to be able to in the main menu of "Vampire Survivors", just tap the button three times and voila, you're playing it, you don't have to worry about anything.

And in that way, the menus are ugly, they're right in your face. And just like you said, as we added more things, we kept

making

the menus more complex and trying to emulate that effect I had when creating the game, of things appearing only when you need them, really. (dramatic music) - As the game grew in popularity, Luca wanted to implement more characters, weapons, and settings. Many of the ideas that hadn't made it into the game were being put together for its first DLC pack, "Legacy of the Moonspell." But before I do any of that, I wanted to go back to the beginning and ask Luca, what were the inspirations behind some of the most iconic weapons and characters from "Vampire Survivors"?

How about we start with one of my favorites? The King's Bible. - What to say about that? Well, first of all, I got the object from the asset pack, removed the cross and put a plus sign in its place just to avoid problems with people who might be sensitive to the actual cross. Or they are

vampire

s, who knows. Yes, the name is a stupid pun on the name of a subway station in Rome called Rebibbia, which in English literally translates to King Bible. Yes, it is something very stupid. Garlic, I don't know, it felt so good when I made this simple and incredibly stupid weapon that just destroys everything that touches you or tries to touch you.

And yes, I knew that would be most people's favorite weapon, really. Santa Water is another stupid plan, because in Italian Santa means saint. So, I wanted to have something that looked as cool as the sacred flames visual effects from "Divinity 2", and I haven't achieved that at all. The best weapon is the Pentagram, of course. The worst weapon, Clock Lancet. Bored. - Is it Carello, Carello? - Carello, my God, no. Why did you ask for that? I won't tell you the whole story, but let's say the character is the ghost of an old woman who used to steal grocery carts, basically.

And now she's throwing them out there. Originally, characters were just supposed to get a different set of stats, actually. The main thing about the character was supposed to be the starting weapon. It was supposed to be where you chose your starting weapon. As the game grew, it was ridiculous to keep that idea as an idea, so I started trying to add something different to each character. But not those. Those were always supposed to be the joke characters. As if the rest weren't jokes, but anyway. Those were supposed to be the strangest ones, no doubt. Definitely, a lot of enemies are similar in terms of stats, but they all have their individual stats and they change depending on the stage, the number of enemies too and all that.

I think the main differences, actually, are between enemies that have a fixed amount of health and enemies that instead scale over time, scale with your level, basically. Other than that, there are minor scales to the enemies, but honestly, the enemies are... Smart enemies aren't really the point of the game. There is no AI in the game. - I guess since the 1.0 release it's been... Our focus shifted to the DLC, right? But a lot of the time on the development side, at least, outside of Luca doing the creative work and creating the content, we just asked, how do we make DLC?

How do we load DLC into a JavaScript game through Steam through Game Pass through, you know, the engine port? So we learned a lot from the beginning, in addition to creating the content. - So the setup wizard before the idea of ​​turning them into a DLC pack was sometime over the summer, because at that point, I finally had all the resources I needed to finish the game, to make the actual ending. And then I thought, okay, what do we do now? Glauber was available, Glauber Kotaki, he's the guy who does the pixel art for the characters.

So he was available to do more work, and I said, well, let's get started and make something that we'll then use in some way. And I started putting this together in my free time, quote unquote. When I do something new I usually start with the tools I have at my disposal because that simplifies things a lot, of course. You know you won't have to go out of your way to implement, of course, if you start with the things that are already available in the framework. -Go back to what Luca said almost at the beginning, about how he wanted to build something that was more of a framework to place the content, in a sense.

You've built some really cool systems for, you know, ultimately everything is pretty data-driven, so you can define, you know, the number of enemies that spawn at this minute and what enemies would spawn and the way in which they generate. It makes it quite easy for us to cut and change things, and when he designs scenarios, to balance all those things. Yes, it is a very flexible system. I think that's why you see such quick content updates from Luca. (laughs) (game beep) (soft music) - After a year of new content, the team finally raised the cost of the game from $3 to $5, but spent weeks on Twitter telling everyone about the price increase.

This consumer-first ethos has likely contributed to the madness of its 180,000+ reviews on Steam, which still rate the game overwhelmingly positive. It's very tempting to look at the success of "Vampire Survivors" and make broad statements about what it says about our industry, that in an age where new ideas seem so rare, a game as simple as "Vampire Survivors" can capture our imagination. so strong. But I think it's fair to say that, in many ways, "Vampire Survivors" is a rebuke to the greatness and complexity of big AAA games, a prime example of the power of keeping a simple idea simple, of respecting players' time and their wallets.

But before it was any of that, before it was a groundbreaking, multi-award-winning global sensation, "Vampire Survivors" was simply something that an Italian immigrant living in London worked on to flex his creative muscles, to create something that your friends could enjoy. playing, to escape from his daily grind and do something that made him smile. It just turned out that it made a lot of us smile too. (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (soft music continues) (playing keyboard keys)