In late 2020, Luca Galante — an unknown and unemployed programmer — began work on a new game. This wasn’t the first game he had started work on, not even the first game he’d finished, but this one would be different from the rest. This game was Vampire Survivors. But before the surprise success and the awards and the money, he was a student in Italy, just trying to make games anyway he could.
“I was pretty busy between work, studying, and D&D campaigns,” he tells me. “Back then in Italy, we also didn’t really have video game studies, so I couldn’t study the subject — I just started to learn to program with the goal of making games.”
Life before Vampire Survivors
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Galante cut his teeth in programming, volunteering as an admin on a private Ultima Online server. “I will never not love Ultima Online,” he says, “though the last time I properly played it on a server was probably before I started working on Vampire Survivors, so it‘s been a while.”
I asked what that entails, what being a private server admin for a game like Ultima Online is like.
“I started as a game master and was dealing with support tickets. After a while, I ran community events and worked on different scripts and visual improvements for our server. I kept doing that, and after a while I was a server admin and worked on almost everything a server admin can cover: graphics, scripts, quality of life, [and] optimizations. I only stopped when I moved to London to improve my English and find a job in the games industry.”
Gaming has been my hobby since forever
Anyone who has ever pursued the dream of making games professionally will not be surprised to learn that he did not find a job in the games industry. Galante tells me, “Spoiler alert: I first started at a cozy little restaurant called McDonald’s but did eventually find a job in software development, which was close enough for me.”
Knowing this was a gambling industry job, I asked Galante what kind of software he was making.
“A lot of articles make the connection that I learned some Vampire Survivors mechanics from designing online gambling games before. In reality, I worked for a big gambling company to pay the bills, but I was mostly working on systems and details rather than game design. Things I worked on were stuff like production pipelines automation, front-end applications for maths models editors, and modular code architecture for slots games UI.”
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The origins of Vampire Survivors
Standing on the shoulders of giants
So, if he wasn’t learning the eldritch art of compulsion loops from online casinos, what was he learning? “Mostly, it helped me grow my knowledge of modular coding, which was helpful in making games.” But he did take a little something from his time there. “One of the slot games had a really good jingle when a treasure chest opened. I love that little tune, but [I] thought it really didn’t live up to how the treasure chest animation looked. So, for Vampire Survivors, I put a lot of work into making a super rewarding and over-the-top treasure chest animation that matches a catchy little sound. That’s how the Vampire Survivors treasure chest was born.”
I was curious about the 16-bit aesthetic and asked if that was inspired by games from the Super Nintendo and Genesis or by games from the retro Renaissance like Terraria and Shovel Knight.
“Visually, I’m inspired by different games from different eras, though I would say I’m mostly inspired by ‘proper’ retro games as opposed to the more recent retro-inspired examples you mentioned.” But if asked to give a more specific example, Galante plays coy. “I often don’t remember where a certain idea comes from and only realize the inspiration once someone in the team or one of the players points it out. A lot of it ‘just feels right’ to me because I’ve seen it in another game, and I subconsciously remembered it was fun without thinking of the specific moment I first saw it.”
One inspiration he hasn’t been coy about mentioning is Magic Survival. “At the time, when I started making Vampire Survivors, I tried tons of new games while looking for inspiration. Magic Survival was one of the few ones that really stuck with me. While there were other games that had similar game mechanics like auto attacking, Magic Survival was the only one that I found very fun to play and wasn’t full of ads or tons of microtransactions.”
If you’ve played both games, the similarities are impossible to miss, but they mostly exist on a mechanical level. “I went with a similar movement and the auto attacks, but after that, I experimented a lot with new ideas and game design details, really trying to figure out what felt right to me. For example, settling on three to four options when leveling up felt like the perfect balance. I really don‘t like only having two options in a game, but more than three to four felt overwhelming. So experimenting and getting details like that in the game to feel right was super important to me.”
The success of Vampire Survivors
How to be good to your players
Vampire Survivors was initially launched on Steam in late 2021. In January of 2022 it found a niche in the streaming community which prompted a surge in popularity and sales. “For some reason, Vampire Survivors was picked up and people kept playing, which I’m very grateful for. It really helped the game to get more visibility.”
The value of having streamers broadcast his game isn’t lost on Galante, and at one point, he even made changes to the game’s music just to make streaming less stressful. “The music changes were mostly made with smaller streamers in mind. I really enjoy it when they play Vampire Survivors, but if you’re not careful and use stock music elements, they can get hit with copyright claims. Bigger influencers have teams that can help them sort that stuff out, but small channels struggle if they run into trouble.”
Around a year after the Steam launch of Vampire Survivors, Galante’s studio — Poncle — ported the game to mobile after it couldn’t find a studio willing to do it without including an oppressive monetization scheme. “I do think if a game is designed around monetization it often is quite predatory because the goal is to make as much money as possible. If the game is designed around a different concept like fun or a compelling narrative, I usually don’t perceive it as predatory, but it’s hard to tell where exactly the line is.”
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The fact that the Vampire Survivors mobile port had such a light touch with monetization was both shocking and a breath of fresh air, especially considering how addictive the core gameplay loop is, which had me wondering if it’s possible to make an ethically addictive game.
“Yes, why not! I think the problem is not if a game hooks you but if and how it tries to get money out of you once you enjoy it. So, I think making a really fun game is no problem as long as the monetization is upfront and fair. The game should also give you some easy opportunities to stop, like natural breakpoints.”
I like to treat players like adults and let them make the decisions of how much they want to play
“In Vampire Survivors, we have a few of those stops, like when a run ends. Generally, I’m not super sure how to keep players hooked for a long amount of time. Some people get really hooked on Vampire Survivors, but that really wasn’t on purpose and just kind of happened.”
Advice for making games
What it takes to be successful
Part of the charm of Vampire Survivors is that it came from an independent creator. If one person working in their spare time can make an award-winning game, that means we can, too. So I was eager to learn how Galante felt devs should best allocate their skill points.
“That depends on each person, I think. I feel today you can be really successful as a specialist, like in pixel art, programming, etc. There are a lot of places where you can find your niche. And if you don’t want to find a niche, there are also a lot of spaces for generalists. So really it comes down to whatever you feel passionate about.”
Galante attributes his own success to his soft skills. He didn’t hesitate to tell me which was most important. “Luck! Not really something you can learn, but without luck it’s hard to get anywhere and I think it’s important to acknowledge that. You can do a really good thing but still need the right amount of luck for it to work. And with Vampire Survivors, I had a lot of luck!”
But it takes more than luck to run a successful studio, so I asked him what best prepared him to take advantage of the success of Vampire Survivors.
“I’ve always been daydreaming about running my own games studio. So, while I wasn’t really planning for Vampire Survivors to take off like it did, I already knew what to do and how I would like my company to be. Over the years, I [have] always played with the idea, read business books, tried to listen to advice, and some things stuck with me. So when Vampire Survivors blew up, I told myself not to panic, take one step at a time, and follow through with the ideas I had about my own games studio.”
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The future of Vampire Survivors
The only sure thing is more updates
The popularity of Vampire Survivors has been relentless, and that’s fed in large part by its persistent update schedule. To date, Poncle has released three DLC packs in addition to numerous free updates, each adding new playable characters, weapons, and stages. So, how long will the Vampire Survivors train keep rolling? “We will keep working on Vampire Survivors as long as we have fun with it and as long as people keep asking for more content!”
There could also be a TV show in the works, but official news so far has been scant. “We are … thinking about doing some Vampire-Survivors-related things outside the game, but are quite careful that we only do stuff that we personally really like.” On the Vampire Survivors Steam blog, it says, “More info is coming in 2024,” so we’ll just have to wait and see.
As for the future of Poncle, more games may be in the works, but Galante won’t reveal anything specific just yet. “We would like to make … other games! We are still only 20 people, however, so it takes a while to get new fun content ready. The projects we have in mind at the moment are kind of a similar size to Vampire Survivors. We don’t really have ambitions to make a super big game.”
So what’s next for Luca Galante?
“As always, I’m on a quest to find proper Italian Tiramisu in London. It’s not easy. Wish me luck!”
