Vampire Survivors
Vampire Survivors is a roguelike shoot 'em up role-playing video game developed and published by Luca Galante, also known as poncle. It was released in early access on December 17, 2021. The player controls an automatically attacking character while fighting against continuous waves of monsters, with the goal being to survive the onslaught for as long as possible and unlock additional characters, weapons, and relics for subsequent sessions. In spite of the game's name and key art, a deliberate point of irony is that none of the variety of monsters encountered are vampires. Gameplay. The player  selects one of multiple characters with different starting weapons and bonuses, and controls them on a stage with an endlessly repeating layout. The player's weapons attack automatically, and the goal is to survive as long as possible against constant waves of monsters that inflict damage when they come in contact with the player. Defeating monsters and exploring the stage allows the player to collect experience gems, which are used to level up, "floor chicken", which restores the player's health, and other helpful items. Each level increase provides the player the choice of three or four weapons and passive  power-ups; once the player has collected six weapons and six power-ups and upgraded them all fully, any further levels they gain offer only gold coins or floor chicken. Another way to upgrade weapons and power-ups is to open chests, which are dropped by particularly powerful monsters and may contain one, three, or five random items. Most weapons have an ultimate form that can be attained by opening a chest after fully upgrading them and meeting other specific conditions. Sessions of "Vampire Survivors" have a soft time limit of 15 or 30 minutes, depending on the stage chosen . At the time limit, the stage is cleared of all enemies and a final enemy named Death will spawn. Not only is Death tremendously powerful and difficult to kill, but one additional Death will appear every consecutive minute thereafter to ensure the player's eventual demise. A session that reaches or exceeds the stage's time limit is considered a successful completion. In between sessions, accumulated gold coins can be spent to unlock new characters and persistent power-ups. Development. Developer Luca Galante explained that he created "Vampire Survivors" because he wanted to manage a community, based on his past  experience as being an admin for an "Ultima Online" server. The game was inspired by "Magic Survival", a mobile game that also consisted of a character automatically attacking enemies. Development of the initial early access version took around a year, with Galante spending around £1100 on assets, art, and music. The success of the game exceeded Luca Galante's expectations and allowed him to quit his job in February 2022 to focus completely on development of the game. He was informally assisted by "a few friends" in their spare time. Planned content included additional weapons, characters, and stages, and  an "endless mode". Galante's intent was to bring "Vampire Survivors" out of early access by the end of 2022. On March 24, 2022, Galante announced that he hired multiple freelancers to expand the "Vampire Survivors" team and the pace of development was accelerating. In addition to outlining the scope of the promised new content with a roadmap, Galante explained that a major milestone slated for Summer 2022 would be porting "Vampire Survivors" to an "industry-standard" game engine to improve its overall performance. Reception. While "Vampire Survivors" was initially obscure on release, by late January 2022 it became a  hit and reached over 30,000 concurrent players on Steam. This number continued to climb the following month, with the game peaking at 77,061 concurrent players on February 20th. Ian Walker of "Kotaku" and Graham Smith of "Rock Paper Shotgun" both praised the game, with both comparing the game to dopamine. "Polygon"'s Nicole Carpenter noted the game's depth, with her saying "no one streamer I've watched played entirely the same".