After waking up from their well deserved slumber over the holidays, developer poncle has shared an interesting update on the state of various aspects of Vampire Survivors. It sounds like the studio is going to be very busy indeed, with plans for a new port of the game and several chunky updates.
Perhaps even more interesting than the various quality of life updates and expansions is the big fat tease that poncle left us with at the end. I’ll keep things as succinct as possible here, but if you want more words just head over to the Steam post for every single morsel.
Online co-op: the studio is still working on retrofitting this feature, but the amount of content in the game makes it a challenge. They’re getting help and are hopeful.
Cross-save: data protection makes this a minefield, but work is progressing and a beta on Steam and Android is entering public beta in February.
Cross media: strikes held up the animated tv series, and more news will come on that front this year. They now also have “several partners” in the media space and will announce more projects soon.
New platforms: poncle confirmed that the studio is making sure not to overstretch itself as it ports the game to “the most obvious” platform. Make of that what you will, but it’s easy to speculate that we’re finally getting Vampire Survivors on PlayStation…
Chaos Roadmap: poncle had their own notes to share and I’m dropping them intact below. I think the most interesting point is the final one as it hints to the scale of poncle’s increasingly grand vision:
- Emergency Meeting is update 1.8
- no need to be cryptic about the next update: Honey Moon is the codename for the new update 1.9, “Space 54”, currently available for testing on the Steam-PC public beta branch! If everything goes well, 1.9 should reach all platforms in February together with a few performance and QOL improvements.
- codename Chalcedony turned out to be Emergency Meeting
- the vast majority of these are free content updates of Whiteout-size
The Vampire Survivors Experiment
Finally, the studio teased some VS-adjacent “experiments”, named thus to keep the team free to have fun with it and take risks.
There was an image and a cryptic message to go with it, both of which you can see below. However, as you’ll note, the post made no attempt to make sense. I think we must like it that way by now…
What will these experiments yield? Is there a meaning to the icons? Are there “only” six in progress? Why is this called PENTAgram in game, if the star has 6 points? Will there be a vampire? We’ll find out the answers to these and many other important questions someday.
