Poncle, the studio behind the award-winning horde-defense game Vampire Survivors, has shared some of its future goals for the surprise hit in a new Steam post.
The UK-based indie studio has big plans for 2024 and beyond. Although most of what’s included in this preview of what’s to come addresses stuff we already knew about (like online co-op, cross-platform saves, the upcoming animated TV series), Poncle’s post also teases loose plans to work on other games.
After thanking players for sticking with and supporting Vampire Survivors and recapping everything Poncle accomplished in 2023, studio head Luca Galante dove into specifics about what’s down the pipeline. Details like a firm roadmap or release dates for any of these updates are pretty sparse here given Poncle’s relatively small size of 20 employees.
Galante addressed online co-op first. Although it’s been announced that developers are working on adding online co-op to the game, the post acknowledges that it’s a “huge challenge” to implement.
“We’ve got help now, and things are looking promising, but it’s still too early for us to be able to make any promises,” Galante wrote. “We’ll keep giving you tiny updates until hopefully we can confirm it’s actually going to happen.”
He then moved on to cross-platform save files, saying they’ve been in testing for a while before confirming that Poncle’s planning to launch cross-save functionality in public beta next month. At the time of writing, the public beta will only work on Steam and Android platforms but will eventually come to other platforms if all goes according to plan.
More Cross-Media Projects?
Meanwhile, following last year’s SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes, it should come as no surprise that the Vampire Survivors animated adaptation is still a work in progress. Announced in April of last year, the collaboration between Poncle and Story Kitchen (a studio formed by people who’ve worked on projects like John Wick and the Sonic The Hedgehog movie), the only update here is that we’ll be getting more info at some point in 2024.
Galante added that they’ve “received a lot of proposals to collaborate on cross-media projects, but rather than jumping the gun we have preferred to wait to find partners that felt right, especially because to make anything that isn’t a videogame out of VS requires good ideas, creativity, and that quirky knowledge of the game, that is a very difficult triplet to get 100% right!”
The post also addressed VS content, with the promise that the next update — Version 1.9 — should release on all platforms in February.
Perhaps the interesting (and the most vaguest) announcement in this long post, however, is The Vampire Survivors Experiment. Poncle is working with indie developers from outside the studio on, “[Vampire Survivors]-adjacent experiments.” Galante’s very clear here that these experiments might not see the light of day, clarifying, “We don’t know when, or even if, we’ll be happy with the final results and be ready to share them.”
You can read Poncle’s full 2024 statement here.
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