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Vampire Survivors, a Roguelike bullet hell shooter, became a big hit on steam in January, with several updates during the Early Access phase to add new weapons, bug fixes, and tweaks. But in this year's January 21 patch, they highlighted the "Nduja Fritta Tanto" item, which can be dropped randomly from candles and braziers, and the player will get a buff for a period of time after picking it up, which happens to be abbreviated as "NFT".
The development team later stated that "while this is not a suitable metaphor, the props themselves are really practical" and declared that they "actually disagree with NFTs". But considering that a post on Reddit titled "The indie game Vampire Survivors is also getting involved in NFTs" has garnered more than 1,000 likes, we can see that a significant number of people (especially the commenters below this post) think that developers really want to get NFT.
Producer Luca Galante mentioned that the development team actually received a lot of strong opposition. In an interview with us, he said: "People didn't understand what we meant at the beginning, and then I started to receive a lot of negative reviews, and of course I can understand why people reacted to this. But even though we've made it clear in the update that we don't really intend to launch NFTs, it's just a joke, and there are still people who can't understand our real intentions. However, these negative evaluations also have their own reasons."
For the most part, Vampire Survivors was a monotonous game where players simply moved their characters to automatically cast attacks, and the game logged into Steam on December 17 to start early access. Although the joke about NFT has attracted many players' dissatisfaction, the game has received more than 66,000 reviews, and the praise rate is as high as 98%. As an indie work with extremely low development costs, Vampire Survivors quickly gained a lot of popularity after being influenced by well-known YouTube game anchors such as Northernlion, and its simple mechanics have made thousands of players (including many Fanbyte employees) unconsciously addicted to it.
Galante originally developed the game on his own, but now has many part-time companions, and he didn't expect the game to explode at first. Just as players are throwing themselves into the game, Galante has had to spend a lot of time on the game's post-release updates. When I interviewed him in February, he had quit the full-time job he had just found to focus on the development of Vampire Survivor.
Galante recalls, "It was a bit embarrassing to say, I just got my last job a week ago, and quitting at this time was a very unprofessional thing, but now the game really requires a lot of energy." I'm sure I'd regret it if I had stuck with my full-time job and left the game behind." Since then, his daily routine has been divided into two parts, managing the game during the day and fixing in-game bugs and developing game features with other part-timers at night.
The explosion of Vampire Survivors not only gave Galante the feasibility of full-time game development, but also gave him the confidence to continue this business throughout the year. He plans to finish early access with Vampire Survivors in the second half of this year. At the same time, the game is expected to introduce "two major feature mechanics that will have a significant impact on the game itself", one of which is called "Arcanas". More new content was released in April, bringing more weapons, characters, items, and levels. As for more distant plans, Galante hopes to port the game to consoles, expand the game, and start its own game development studio.
But how did it all start?
Galante began working on games in 2014 and spent the years since, living in London, focusing primarily on game production at casinos and slot machines. He then moved on to mobile games on Windows Phone and web development based on HTML5 publisher, as well as some development projects based on the Unity engine (when I asked him how his experience with slot games had influenced him, he mentioned that it was this experience that allowed players to have an unparalleled unboxing experience when they encountered treasure chests in their games).
Inspired by the mobile game Magic Survival, he set out to develop a "Zen" concept game that didn't require players to do much. Galante said: "This project has been in development for a long time."
Originally, there was no health bar in the game, which meant that the characters would not die. Based on this feature, Galante began to add other related elements, and in line with the Pac-Man type game concept, made several basic settings: escape from the enemy, pick up the ball, and then gradually launch a counterattack against the enemy. He also mentioned that he also paid great attention not to adding too many additional settings or expanding the scope of the game too much, but to focus on these basic settings for development. As for the game's theme, Galante had previously bought a very "Castlevania" style material pack (in this case, Serenade of Chaos), so he was finally able to make good use of this resource.
But in the face of such a game with a very simple setting, as a developer, he still can't help but add extra elements to it. During development, he also planned to conceive of a plot model for Vampire Survivors. This mode was originally intended to focus on a very powerful character, who would lead to a short introduction to the overall plot. In this mode, players will face several waves of enemy attacks to learn how the game works, and finally lose to an invincible vampire.
This pattern is designed to quickly show the player the main mechanics of the game so that people can understand the main content of the game in just a few minutes. But as Galante explains, "With the many players adding amway, there is no need for this mode to exist, and most people already know the operation of this game very well."
Having said that, the plot model that Galante had conceived before evolved into a series of story chapters, but the content behind it was still bland and depthless. Each level becomes smaller, it only takes five to ten minutes to complete, and the upgrade mechanics have more restrictions, such as a level cap, or the need to obtain specific items to upgrade to allow the player to find the entire map. But Galante quickly realized that adding more restrictions to the game mechanics wasn't a good thing. Today, he and his team are primarily focused on expanding and improving the game's underlying content, rather than thinking about past misguided ideas.
Galante said: "Considering that the game has been released, I have to state that I have never weakened any of the props. Even if there were, at least it wasn't something I actively wanted to weaken. I may have to weaken some weapons while fixing bugs, but that wasn't my intention. In fact, all the new content we wanted to launch was to make the game richer. Sometimes people complain that a prop is too strong and needs to be weakened, and I'm glad that people can give their opinions, but at this time it is not possible to make a proper judgment on the strength of this prop. If people think a prop is too strong and they're tired of playing, there are other options."
The story mode was eventually shelved indefinitely, as Galante wanted to introduce an "endless mode" gameplay. The idea was laid out in March's development route overview, and after arcanas rolls out, infinite mode will be "the next major development goal." In an interview, he noted that the model "has not yet been finalized."
At present, the game has been postponed from a regular weekly update to a bi-weekly update, and the development team is working on a brand new version that is expected to run on a more stable game development engine. If they can do that, Galante also hopes to be able to relaunch the Android version of Vampire Survivors, which he launched a few years ago but has underperformed due to the limitations of the development engine.
Although the entire development team has a lot to do in this way, players are full of anticipation and are patiently waiting for their new content. Discord alone has more than 32,000 followers, many of whom not only regularly provide feedback and opinions on game content and operations, but also spontaneously launch many mods and set up leaderboards within the server for various confrontations and competitions.
Galante said that he never thought that there was content worth competing in the game, nor did he expect players to be able to set some challenges on their own, but he was also very happy to see the detailed descriptions of various props that helped players a lot. He also has the same idea about the various mods made by players, because he likes to make different mods for the game, so he also encourages people to try it out. Despite the great success of Vampire Survivors, he still wanted to be able to interact closely with the player base.
Galante said: "I just want to focus on my work now, so I've been trying not to think about where it will end. I just think I'm very lucky to see a lot of players enjoying the game in a variety of different ways, and I hope to continue to bring that experience to Dajia, launch more content, and scale up the game."
Translation: Ken Sang
Edit: Zoe