Fans of Vampire Survivors will encounter familiar elements like treasure chests, weapon evolutions, unlocking something new after every run, a banger of a soundtrack, and terrible humour. 

So would you call this a sequel to Vampire Survivors, or something else? 

Luca: This is just a spin-off of Vampire Survivors – hopefully the first in a series of spin-offs! The idea is to take some of the core pillars behind the development of VS and to apply them to existing genres. I’m talking about accessibility, immediacy, affordability, replayability, and sparkly stuff. Tons of sparkly stuff! With regards to a sequel to Vampire Survivors, we’re working on something, but we’re not talking about that just yet.  

How long have you been working on the game, and what kicked off development? 

Luca: The project started very early – shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, I was already thinking of getting in touch with other indie studios to start working on spin-offs. This means that it is something that has effectively been in the works for almost 4 years!  

We’ve been calling these “experiments”, and Vampire Crawlers was the one that immediately hit its goal. Even in the prototype phase, you could tell the game had legs. It’s the one that proceeded faster than any other, which is why it’s the first one we’re seeing. 

As is always the case for me, inspirations come from all sorts of games I’ve played over the years. From obscure stuff I played 30 years ago, to stuff I was playing just yesterday. I’ve been inspired by some PC games from the ’80s, computer RPGs, modern solitaire games, JRPGs from the early console eras… 

With such different influences, why did you decide to stay in the world of Vampire Survivors? 

Luca: There are several reasons! First of all, it is to let the players know that it’s a game based on the same core pillars of VS that I mentioned before. The second reason was to get out of the way one of the major blockers I always had when making games: defining story, settings, lore etc.  

When making VS, I managed to put all of that aside and let it all come out organically while developing the game, by taking inspiration just from a weapon icon, a music track (from the usual VS composers Daniele Zandara and Filippo Vicarelli, who are back, covering each other’s music tracks for Vampire Crawlers), or even wacky theories from the community!

Now all that lore has a huge value, it allows me and the developers to just focus on the gameplay aspects of the game, while at the same time allowing space for new ideas thanks to the open-endedness of VS. 

We actually have a lot of ideas to expand the game even further, so we’ll keep supporting the game for several months after launch. But just like VS, we’ve built the game so that it could eventually be expanded. We’ll leave it to the community to tell us if they want even more, and what they actually want from it going forward. 

Whereas Vampire Survivors more or less created its own subgenre, Crawlers sees you adding to one that’s already hugely popular. Does that change how you approach design? 

Luca: Yes, absolutely. Vampire Survivors was born with very different needs. The main goal was just to have a simple game where I could keep adding content, because I mainly wanted to focus on creating content.  

In this case, instead, I wanted to take an existing genre and try to remove everything I usually find frustrating about it. I really like card games, especially deckbuilders, so ultimately I approached this game from a completely different perspective. I tried to take everything I like from the deck builders I’ve played in the past, focus only on those aspects, and cut out all the things I find frustrating.  

That’s where the idea to be able to play as fast as you can came from: once I become good at playing a card game, I usually don’t like to have to wait for animations to complete or artificial pauses to be able to play my whole hand and complete my turn. 

It’s been challenging to make sure exploration isn’t a too heavy component of the game! The dungeons exist mainly to offer more interesting choices about what to do in between fights and to help in giving the feeling that you are moving through a world where a large variety of things could happen, instead of just navigating menus. 

Another unexpected mechanic here is a “mana combo” system – so you’re always aiming to build stacks of cards (for example: 0 mana, then 1 mana, then 2 mana) to get the strongest effects. Where did that stem from? 

Luca: To me that seems like a basic mechanic since there are a few popular Italian card games where you have to stack cards based on their value, not to mention it being the base for Solitaire. It is also similar to something I’ve seen and really liked in Baten Kaitos (Namco, 2004) – it’s something that is simple to understand and fun to do, especially when the screen immediately reacts to your combos. 

The key question: when can we play the game? 

Luca: As soon as it’s ready! We don’t have a launch date yet, because this is going to be our first global launch for a new title, so it’s guaranteed that it’s going to take longer than we expect.  

At the very least though, we know that it will be in 2026 – and on the day that it launches, you’ll be able to dive straight in if you’re an Xbox Game Pass Premium or Ultimate subscriber.