Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns is our second collab DLC, made in collaboration with the KONAMI's Contra team, and is now available on all platforms!
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2887680

Content:
- 1 large stage and 1 bonus stage
- 11 new characters
- 22 new weapons between base versions and evolutions
- 6 new music tracks
- 13 music tracks directly from the Contra series and 6 brand new covers
- A new 6-chapters Adventure

How to start the DLC
After installing the DLC, the new stage "Neo Galuga" will appear at the bottom of the Stage Selection screen. Play the stage to start the new chain of unlocks.
Alternatively, go to Adventures and play the chapters of Operation Guns to have a strongly guns-themed experience using almost exclusively the new characters and weapons from the Contra series!

There is no DLC when I start the game
Please make sure you're on game version 1.10, as older versions won't detect the content pack. Fully closing and reopening Steam to trigger an update should do the trick!

Patch 1.10
We had a free content update last week that, among other things, also adds the Seal III power-up! You can read all about it, and about other VS news in general, here:
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/1794680/view/4104540932629694732

Will the main game still receive free updates?
Yep, just like 1.10 mentioned above.

22 new weapons and evolutions?! My level-up pool!
We have added one more Seal power-up in the latest content patch, so don't worry, you'll still be able to easily manipulate the level-up pool.

Why only $2.49?
As usual we've been receiving kind comments about pricing and giving us more money, some intended just as a compliment, some actually serious. Collab DLCs have a much higher production cost for us, but that doesn't mean their price should skyrocket.
You've already given us the luxury to keep working on Vampire Survivors even just for fun (hence the constant free updates), it just seems fair to try keep the cost of major expansions as contained as possible and border-line risky. We'd need something very big to justify a higher price point.
And then if we accidentally inflate our own production costs because we decide to add 12 characters for fun instead of the usual 8... well that's our problem innit

More DLC FAQS
While most of the contents of the DLCs are straightforward, being a collab there are some differences. For example, there are no Steam achievements and the 6 music covers won't be available in the Soundtrack on Steam, so please read the FAQs here for more info: https://poncle.games/operation-guns

_
Thank you all once again for your continued support and I hope you'll have fun with the hyper-realistic gun fights of Operation Guns!

- 7 new EXTRA achievements
- 1 new challenge stage
- 1 new bonus stage
- 1 new character
- 1 new weapon with its evolution
- 1 new passive weapon
- 1 new power-up, Seal III

Since the early days of VS, people have been asking important questions like "Why is it called Santa Water?" and this patch is finally here to answer that; but what other dark mysteries will surface while looking for answers in the Laborratory?

- Pick up a total of 33 Rosaries to unlock the Laborratory stage. If you've been playing for long you'll most likely already have enough; if so, enter and exit a run to get the unlock.
- Use the levers in the larger rooms of the stage until you get the Santa Javelin and Arma Dio.
- Evolve the Santa Javelin with a maxed out Clover
- Use the levers at the bottom of the new stage to defeat a lot of enemies and unlock a bonus stage
- Survive 20 minutes to unlock Santa Ladonna.
- Seal/Banish 40 items in a run to unlock the Seal III power-up.


New stage: Laborratory
A challenge stage where everything is trying to kill you, including the narrow corridors. There are special levers you can pull to trigger mostly positive effects (depending on Luck) that could also spawn weapons and passives, depending on which room they're from.

New weapon: Santa Javelin & Seraphic Cry
Though starting weapon as it aims for random enemies, can critically hit and it turns the Duration stat into additional Amount for itself. Compatible with special arcanas (Gemini, Twilight Requiem, Tragic Princess). Requires a maxed out Clover to be evolved.
The evolution uses Luck to deal additional damage. Picking up Rosaries while it is equipped turns them into a quadruple screen clearing explosion that turns enemies into XP gems.

New passive: Arma Dio
Allows you to choose any base-game passive.
It actually counts as a weapon, so can also be chosen from a Candybox.

New character: Santa Ladonna
Starts with a temporary cooldown bonus and automatically triggers a Rosary when reaching critically low HP (recover hp to full to recharge the ability). Absolutely nothing else 👀

New stage: Carlo Cart
A silly little bonus stage where you cannot fully stop moving. It plays very differently compared to the average stage, so there are no extra unlocks tied to playing it, it's just for fun.

New power-up: Seal III
As the name suggests, it's a more convenient Seal power-up that allows you to seal 3 items per rank. This brings the total number of sealable items to 60!



►Cross-save beta
- Cross save is now available on the beta branches on Steam, Android, and iOS too.
- FAQ here: https://poncle.games/account-help


►Other projects
- Online co-op for Vampire Survivors: the technical work is going well, still too early for more details!
- EXPERIMENTS: going well, a lot of fun, I'm putting this here and planning to copy-paste this line for many future updates though, this stuff takes time!
[this was copy pasted from previous news as expected :p]

►Will you make more Adventures?
Yes! We had planned to make new Adventures more often, but then realised that while they work very well to isolate new DLC content, the base-game ones are missing something.
So we've been working on adding a new feature to the game (that will remain a little secret for now) after which we'll be back releasing new adventures.

The Tides of the Foscari one is an exception. Instead of just retelling the story of the DLC, we decided to do something different with it, but that requires yet another feature that still isn't in the base game. Hopefully we'll see it happen sometime during the summer!

It's worth noting that in the meantime nothing has stopped us from writing the deepest lore to accompany new future adventures, that, as we all know, together with environmental storytelling, is at the core of the VS experience /s

►Where are we on the Extra-content roadmap?
Right here obviously:
Our next Collab DLC releases in a few days, on May 9th, for $2.49 / €2.49 / £1.99 !
Read everything about it on the store page and here:
https://steamproxy.net/games/1794680/announcements/detail/4104540932629701544

1.10.0 tweaks and fixes
- You can now PET the dog by pressing both triggers on a controller.
- When playing co-op, added the option to Share Passive among players for evolution purposes.
- Stage Selection is now split into two steps for ease of navigation if you're playing with a controller
- Updated pre-spawned arcana treasures so they get pulled in by VIII - Mad Groove.
- Improved loader to provide more information about the current DLC loading progress.
- Added missing retaliation damage to Pako Battiliar and its evo.

- Fix for tips not showing in the Treasure Chest info panel of evolutions.
- Fix for Bestiary mobile portrait info masking issue.
- Pickups group in recap page now generates a new row when exceeding max width.
- Fix for the game over red background overlay to use correct sizing after White Hand.
- Fix for Sole Solution causing tile map issues during the fight with The Ender.
- Fixed audio playback error in fight with The Ender.
- Fix for "new content available in store" button showing up incorrectly.
- Fixed character reveal so the characters are the correct scale.
- Hyper mode toggle is now correctly shown.
- Fix for text overlap/sizing in treasure chest info panel.
- Updated pause menu map to match old-engine implementation.
- Fixes for various weapons to hide them correctly when dying in co-op.
- Fix for errors with random arcana selection being triggerable before the animation is complete.
- Fixes for various stage collisions when playing in inverse mode.
- Updated the player stats panel (pause menu) to handle displaying the Recovery value to 2 decimal places, so small increments are shown.
- Fix for DLC ordering so that DLCs will now be loaded in a consistent order.
- Fixed cosmic egg in bestiary.
- Updated the Item Found page to check whether the item you are picking up allows duplicates, and if so displays the base level data.
- Fixed an issue where if you manually changed the window size the current resolution would not display correctly inside the options page.
- Fix for camera zoom issues when playing on displays less than the target 16:10 aspect ratio (both portrait and landscape).
- Fixed selection arrows sometimes showing on mobile when they should not.
- Fix to make drop downs hide when clicking anywhere outside of them.
- Fixed an issue with allowing player 1 to reassign controllers when toggling in options.
- Fix for Gatti chicken eating power and chance upgrades being reset on level up.
- Fix for drowner's spawned via trisection events after 30 minutes being invulnerable.
- Fix for disable moving background not being applied on stage start (only when toggled).
- Fixed formatting / centering issues with secrets page on mobile.
- Added a loader between menu and gameplay to show that the game is loading a stage.
- Fix for Moongolow secret check in co-op.
- Added scrolling to character selection progress panel.
- Fix for hyper (and inverse) mode creeping to stages without hyper (or inverse) unlocked.
- Added in missing scene fade transition between Moongolow and Holy Forbidden.
- Fixed hellfire rotation on world bounce.
- Various portrait UI scaling fixes.
- Fix for error with coin spawn in Poe's Adventure Chapter 3.
- Improved back button navigation on bestiary to be more accurate to JS.
- Fix for cut off character found animation on mobile portrait.

[LEGACY OF THE MOONSPELL]
- Evolving Four Seasons now only requires a maxed out Candelabrador

[TIDES OF THE FOSCARI]
- Evolving the Flash Arrow now only requires a maxed out Bracer
- Fixed a sprite error in Foscari Abyss' background.
- Fixed animation timing of World Eater.
- Fix for World Eater offsets.

[EMERGENCY MEETING]
- Fix Impostongue firing assassination when disabled.
- Updated the body part pickups that Shapeshifter spawns to allow them to be attracted by the magnet.
- Updated the font used for the Vent2Weapon when enemies are ejected.
- Fix for reactor engine sprite not filling in the black bars in portrait leaving visible gaps for the flames.

Today we are announcing Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns, our second collab DLC, made in collaboration with the KONAMI's Contra team!

You might have noticed a couple of very obscure hints in Vampire Survivors about how much we admire and remember fondly playing all the iconic game series sparked by KONAMI over the years, which is why when we got the opportunity to work with their Contra team we took it immediately!

It's been surreal and a lot of fun to retrieve old memories of playing Contra with randos at the arcade, or with friends on a home console, and reinterpret them in a Vampire Survivors sauce. In fact we got a bit carried away and added more content to the DLC pack than initially planned, trying to pick & mix some of the old and some of the new, some of the obvious and some of the unexpected.

This was yet another dream come true for many in our team, so thank you all for your continued support and making this a reality!

Will the agents of the Contra Force resist the urge to join the Vampire Survivors in their doomed search for a vampire? No.


We started with the usual number of characters and weapons in mind when developing this content pack, but it's been very difficult to work with such constraints when dealing with such an iconic series like Contra. So we did the only logical thing, make more:

• 11 gun-slinging characters
  
• 22 new weapons between base versions and evolutions. They're not all guns - some of them trigger explosions too!
  
• 1 large stage and 1 bonus stage
  
• 13 music tracks directly from the Contra series and 6 brand new covers
  
• An explosively silly 6-chapters Adventure

You can wishlist Vampire Survivors: Operation Guns now by clicking the link below.
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2887680

And check out the Contra franchise page for even more Contra goodness: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/franchise/contra

As usual the DLC will add a new stage in Stage Selection, from where you'll be able to start the chain of unlocks to get the new characters and weapons.

Most characters will offer cross-stats benefits for players who like min-maxing, and will be able to find special pickups typical of the Contra series, like Grenades or RapidFires.

Most weapons will have a damage output slightly lower than usual to try paying a little homage to the historically high difficulty of the Contra series, but also there will be a lot Arcana interactions to customise the difficulty to your liking. In the same spirit, there are several weapons that require some aiming or that follow the typical arcade 8-angle constraints when firing.

While we like to joke about the concept of just adding a ton of guns, actually there will also be melee weapons and most of the new projectiles are rather unusual.

Finally, yes, the silly racing-stage seen in the trailer is real and will be playable!

We're finally in a position to make an unsurprising announcement about Vampire Survivors coming to PlayStation, in a time interval vaguely defined as Summer 2024!
We're doing the ports ourselves just like the others, so we took our sweet time to get here, but in this way we can keep the low price and the parity of content, so it's better in the long term. We're doing a port for PS4 and another for PS5.
We can't make any promises yet, but hopefully we'll have cross-save publicly available by then too.

Will the main game still receive free updates?
Yes, we're doing free content updates as usual. In fact there will be one happening around the end of the month! (it will be available on the public-beta branch on Steam in minutes 👀)

22 new weapons and evolutions?! My level-up pool!
We're adding one more Seal power-up in the next free content patch, so don't worry, you'll still be able to easily manipulate the level-up pool.

More DLC FAQS
While most of the contents of the DLCs are straightforward, being a collab there are some differences. For example, there are no Steam achievements and the 6 music covers won't be available in the Soundtrack on Steam, so please read the FAQs here for more info: https://poncle.games/operation-guns

- 7 new EXTRA achievements
- 1 new bonus stage
- 2 new characters
- 4 new weapons (of which 2 evos)
- 1 new relic

In this patch there are a lot of fixes too, including some optimisations that will let you play a run with Sammy for at least 2 more seconds than before!

Steam Achievements notes: this patch actually adds 8 platform Achievements, because it includes the Atlas Gate from the Adventures update!


THE BAT STUFF
- Defeat a total of 161616 bats, from any stage, to unlock the Pako Battiliar weapon
- Evolve Pako Battiliar using Max level Hollow Heart to unlock the Bat Robbert character

THE SPACE STUFF
- Collect 5 Gold Fingers to unlock Space 54 (enter and exit a run if you've already got enough)
- Pickup the Phas3r weapon in Space 54, get it to level 7, and evovle it using Max level Empty Tome.
- At minute 18 in Space 54, locate and collect the Brave Story relic.
- Survive 20 minutes in Space 54 to unlock the Space Dude character.

Available on the Steam public-beta branch and on Android public beta! Please send us any feedback about the feature, it's very delicate since we're talking about save-data, so we'll take all the help we can get to make sure it's solid.
Please also let us know if there's any other service you could find useful. We've been investigating cross-platform-dlc (so buy in one place, play anywhere) but it's the biggest bureaucratic can of worms ever; so, not being a technical problem, I'm honestly not too hopeful we'll be able to get it done (if you follow gaming news then you probably know very well how protective certain platforms are of any paid content).

We have put together a FAQ here: https://poncle.games/account-help



Stage: Space 54
Plain bonus stage with plenty of items and odd enemies. Walls stop blocking movement at minute 11:00
Might be a bit strong visually, so if it's bothering you please make sure to see if checking the "Disable Moving Background" makes it better!

Relic: Brave Story
Allows to choose Random Level Up choices in Stage Selection. Currently selectable only before starting a run. This will let you try do to runs in which the RNG picks weapons for you when levelling up, good luck!

Weapon: Phas3r & Photonstorm
Can be picked up in Space 54, and unlocked for every other run by levelling it up to Level 7. For the base version, Area only affects size horizontally. The evolution fires at least x2 projectiles than the base version, occasionally x5 when dealing a critical hit.

Weapon: Pako Battiliar & Mazo Familiar
Can be unlocked anytime just by killing A LOT of bats, across any amount of runs. It fires additional times when the owner receives damage or loses a shield. The evolution fires more projectiles and deals bonus damage depending on the current Max Health bonus of the owner.

NewCharacter: Space Dude
Fast character that starts with Phas3r.
Has a special ability that fires all weapons regardless of their Cooldown every few seconds. The cooldown of this ability is affected by the Cooldown stat.

NewCharacter: Bat Robbert
Slightly tanky character that starts with Pako Battiliar.
Has a special ability: when falling below 20% health, he gains +16 MaxHP (max +400) and recovers 30% health. This ability recharges every time the character is fully healed.

Well, I know the next 3 steps/updates we'll take on our Chaos Roadmap, but if I say anything I'm going to spoil the surprise effect (and probably find myself face to face with a hitman hired by the marketing team). A lot of players have been asking for more dark/serious settings, so I can at least tell you that 1 of those 3 steps has been cherry picked because it's probably the darkest one we have on the roadmap 👀
It won't be the next one, but should arrive soon enough!

We're also working on new Adventures for the main game of course, together with the "missing piece" of the Adventures mechanics, that once again I won't spoil until we have something concrete to show.

Flash updates on other projects:
- Online co-op: the technical work is going well, still too early for more details!
- EXPERIMENTS: going well, a lot of fun, I'm putting this here and planning to copy-paste this line for many future updates though, this stuff takes time!

I don't usually reveal details about the DEEP LORE of VS, but this time it's worth making an exception, because part of this update is dedicated to... a game framework, Phaser!
Weirder than usual, I know, but Phaser was the original framework I used to make VS, is an absolute joy to use, and if I hadn't loved working with it to begin with, I would have probably never made VS, so I thought it deserved a bit more than just a line in the credits.

I've noticed a few players asking for more info about Phaser the previous times I've mentioned it, so I asked Richard, its developer, to write a few lines for you!

quote=Richard:

Originally posted by Richard:

I can still remember when Luca came to the Phaser Discord and showed off the first public version of Vampire Survivors, which he had created using our game framework. As the developer of Phaser, I'm always interested in seeing what people make with it, no matter what it may be like visually or how complete it is, so I had a look.

Seeing the screenshots on the Itch page, my immediate thought was, "What a strange mish-mash of sprites!" It was almost as if someone had thrown together a bundle of OpenGameArt and hoped for the best. As we all know, looks can be deceiving. Because then I played it. You don't need me to tell you just how sublimely addictive Vampire Survivors is. The Steam score and play time stats are a testament to this. Yet even in that very early stage, it sunk its gameplay hooks deep into me and never let up.

Because each run-through was relatively quick, you felt compelled to give it just one more go to see how you could improve. It didn't matter how insane and chaotic the visuals were. It didn't matter that the game was made in JavaScript and running in the browser. Because as thousands of creatures mobbed you and you swung that King Bible desperately, all of that just blended away as you fixated on the zone you were in.

It's the perfect example of a compelling gameplay loop. Demonstrating clearly that it doesn't matter one bit what tech you choose. You can still make an outstanding game. We've had many people come to Phaser since the release of Vampire Survivors, some looking to make similar games. For those who are curious, Phaser [phaser.io]is a fully open-source game framework that allows you to make web-based games. All you need to know is a little JavaScript, and you can get started within minutes. There are built-in features for physics, animation, audio, and plenty more, and it has been in active development for the past decade. If that appeals to you, then we'll be more than happy to welcome you into our community. While we cannot guarantee you'll achieve the same level of success, after all, that would be like capturing lightning in a bottle; you'll at least have fun trying.

Richard's too kind and is advertising VS more than Phaser, so let me put my two cents and say that Phaser offers incredible support, with dozens of clear examples you can access and edit on the fly directly from your browser window; it allows you to go straight to the fun part of game development. Everyone is different and therefore has different preferences for coding and development; I love the freedom of creativity and speed that a language as chaotic as Javascript provides, and the empowerment I got from Phaser is something I've never seen any other framework to match.
If you're curious just click on one of the examples from the website and fiddle with it in real time!

Not really a Steam problem, but there are a lot of players who have the game on multiple platforms, so just wanted to thank you for waiting that long to get the content that Steam got in December 🙏
We managed to do a global release with this patch today at least, I hope we'll be able to keep it up!


---

1.9.0 tweaks and fixes:
- Optimisation for spawning of gems and coins
- Optimisation for weapons that interact with pickups (Gatti Amari, Vicious Hunger, etc.)
- Fixed red XP gems sometimes flying away and taking forever to come back
- Fixed Coffins not spawning if the corresponding character had been unlocked via a spell
- Fixed Crimson Shroud not triggering retaliation damage
- Fixed a layering issue with CosmicEgg enemy
- Fixed merchant alignment upon multiple opens
- Fixed some particle emitters leaving gaps
- Fixed collision shape of Valkyrie Turner
- Fixed bought weapons in Adventures that wouldn't always level up in the same run they had been bought
- Fixed multiple evos of the same weapon appearing in treasure chests when only one should be present
- Fixed some animations going at insane speed on certain monitors
- Fixed Victory Sword not instant-killing some reapers that should have been weak to it
- Fixed text scaling sometime being off in Stage Selection
- Fixed display of secret characters sometime showing question marks when they shouldn't
- Fixed timing of events tied to music in Gallo Tower, Astral Stair, Eudamonia Machine
- Fixed "Show Guides" option resetting after every run
- Fixed The Directer sometime not getting counted as defeated in the Bestiary
- Tentative fix for Linux launch issue and missing Steam Overlay
- [MOONSPELL] Fixed time limit in Adventure Chapter 5
- [FOSCARI] Fixed Arcana XIX - Heart of Fire sometimes not applying to Prismatic Missile
- [FOSCARI] Optimisation for Shadow Servant at high Amount
- [FOSCARI] Fixed Je-Ne-Viv's World Eater's offset
- [EM] Fixed Mini Impostor and Impostongue appearing as level up options when they shouldn't anymore
- [EM] Fixed the medical scan not clearing its projectiles when the character dies
- [EM] Fixed interaction between Just Vent and Pentagram triggering errors
- [EM] Fixed Magnet bonus from Paranormal Scan being 10 times smaller than it should have been
- [EM] Fixed white box shown on some maps while in Adventures
- [MOBILE] text sizes on portrait when opening grimoire adjusted
- [MOBILE] fix missing options button on fresh save in portrait
- [MOBILE] fix jumping characters on ascension mobile window
- [MOBILE] fix for merchant screen layout on some screen resolutions
- [MOBILE] fix for Ascension animation moving parts of the UI
- [MOBILE] fix an issue for spells sometimes not working on Android
- Other minor bugfixes, tweaks, memory optimisations
- A lot of background work for accounts management and Cross-Save
- (x18) Pushing this change so [new game engine] stops bugging me
- (x6) Pushing this change because [new game engine] decided a feature was a bug

And we're at the start of 2024!

It's been once again a wild ride, and once again we have to thank all of you for your comments, quotes, messages, fan art, reviews, and, naturally, relentelessy keeping up with your 100% (sorry!)

As always, we are incredibly thankful for the community that has built up around Vampire Survivors.

We're doing another huge post like last year to talk about everything that happened and also have a look at what's to come in the future. There's a lot to cover, so we hope you enjoy!

Even after being out for more than one year, the reception of VS keeps being absolutely mindblowing.
Poncle has grown to 20 people now and we're all still busy working exclusively on VS due to the ports, engine changes, frequent updates and releases. And then, you know, the marketing team exists.

We have a lot going on behind the scenes, but I'll keep the update focused on Vampire Survivors and I'll reveal a few bit in the paragraphs below!


*Deep breath* :
Bat Country, DICE Awards Action game of the year[www.interactive.org], BAFTA for Game Design[awards.bafta.org], BAFTA for Best Game[awards.bafta.org], Tides of the Foscari DLC, Astral Stair, Nintendo Switch port, Local Co-op, first players event, OST orchestra recordings (3rd one actually 👀), Whiteout, Adventures, first collab DLC Emergency Meeting!

Missed something? Most likely, oh we have udpated the OST on Steam to be available in FLAC format for example, anyway, 2023 summary done, next!

We are still investigating! To retro-fit online multiplayer in a game as simple as this, but with so much content, is still a huge challenge. 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. We'll keep giving you tiny updates until hopefully we can confirm it's actually going to happen.

We had this in testing for a while now, but the real hold-up is having to put in place everything that is needed to comply with GDPR, CCPA, and whatever else is required for data protection. We had delays even just in testing the feature in public-beta because there's a lot of work to do - even if all we need to do to bridge the accounts you already have on different platforms is storing just an email and password combination.
We're working on a QOL update for February and we're hoping to launch cross-save in public-beta only at the same time (Steam and Android only to start with).

Yep, we're doing cross-media like the big boys for real!
Back in April 2023 we announced an animated tv series[deadline.com] in collaboration with Story Kitchen. We had of course waited for the various strikes to end before getting to it, so for now we can just say that more info is coming in 2024!

Honestly we have 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!

We have several partners now and we'll reveal more on these projects as they mature and we've got good stuff to show!

If you're somehow managing to follow the Chaos Roadmap and are curious to know what changed from the last time:
- codename Chalcedony turned out to be Emergency Meeting
- 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.
- the vast majority of these are free content updates of Whiteout-size

I doubt we can get all of these done in 2024, and that's why there are no dates nor an order, but we're here to try!

We know people are demanding more platforms, but we're also keen on doing the ports ourselves, one at a time, and that takes time.
We can't "just hire immediately more people": I don't think that's how a healthy company grows; let's give poncle time to grow organically.
We can't "just get a publisher": it would make us lose control on features and pricing.

I'd love to tell you everything about the next port, but the marketing team would kill me; I can just say it's the most obvious one, so for streaming services of course, codenamed "if it looks like mud and smells like mud, then it's Vampire Survivors"

Our friends at Fangamer have made some neat Vampire Survivors gadgets: an incredibly metal t-shirt[www.fangamer.com], and some enamel character pins that also come with a little accesory. The Queen Sigma pin in particular is very versatile, as shown by Lucy in this video.
I use mine in a little diorama my little siblings made for me for Christmas 😭
(feel free to cringe in the comments, but please appreciate I spared you the rest of the poem!)

Uh-oh, what now?
Something I've been trying to put in place almost since the beginning of VS' crazy ride is finally happening: poncle is teaming up with other indie devs to work on some VS-adjacent experiments. We're calling these experiments because:
- we're starting with just an idea, we don't know where that will lead us and that's okay
- we don't know when, or even if, we'll be happy with the final results and be ready to share them
- it keeps us free to, well, experiment, stay flexible, take risks and have fun
- as you can see from this totally not vague overview, we're following a highly scientific method and it's totally not an esoteric process at all:
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.

---

That's all for now, got a pretty busy 2024 ahead of us!
Thank you all once again and see you in the next run!

- Luca & poncle (including the marketing team)

- Seal 2 power-up now gives 2 seals per rank instead of 1
- Fixed Area and Duration scaling of Fuwalafuwaloo
- Bug fixes from previous version
- For more information on Adventures please see: https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/1794680/view/3870343609927647849?l=english



Content:

• 9 playable characters
  
• 15 new weapons (of which 7 evolutions)
  
• A new large stage
  
• A new Adventure
  
• 6 brand new music tracks
  
• 20 in-game-only achievements

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2690330/Vampire_Survivors_Emergency_Meeting/



Main FAQs: https://poncle.games/emergency-meeting.html


How to start the DLC?
The new stage will appear right away at the bottom of the Stage Selection menu. You'll see 20 new entries in the Unlocks menu to guide you through the rest of the content.
Otherwise, if you've played the Dairy Plant at least once, you'll also be able to play the "Emergency Meeting" Adventure from the adventures menu.

Will the main game keep receiving free updates and content?
Yes, DLCs will always be purely extra content in terms of Stages, Monsters, Weapons, Characters etc.
Items, Power-ups, game mechanics and more will continue to be added to the base game, so if you don't pick up the DLC you don't have to fear missing out.
We'll keep having free updates like the recent Whiteout for example, including new base-game Adventures. The vast majority of planned updates for 2023 will be free.

Does the DLC have achievements?
No, there are no platform-level achievements for Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting. There are in-game achievements to unlock (in the Unlocks menu as usual), but no Xbox/Steam achievements. More info on this here: https://poncle.games/emergency-meeting.html


Will you only do collabs going forward?
No, we're indeed talking to a few people to make other collabs happen, but we also have our own content updates in the works, as usual.

Hope you have fun with the DLC, and if not, please send us some feedback, thank you! 🙏



[discord.gg]

The patch is available right now and contains:

• 1 relic, Atlas Gate: Enables base game Adventures. Found in Boss Rash, minute 7, only after seeing the Yellow Sign.
  
• 1 new achievement for obtaining the Atlas Gate (in-game only. Will be added to the list on Steam together with the next content patch, your 100% is safe for the rest of the year!)
  
• 2 base game Adventures
  
• 1 Adventure for the Legacy of the Moonspell DLC
  
• 🌹

Adventures are self-contained, mini story-modes that remix the game's content.

FAQs: https://poncle.games/adventures-faq

Aside from providing deep lore 💀, their main goal is actually to give you an excuse to play VS when you feel like it, but have already unlocked everything the game has to offer.

Or maybe because you want to have the feeling of starting fresh, with a different set of weapons, without actually remaining behind with the progression of the base game.

Or maybe because you just got a new DLC and would like to do a full-immersion experience in it, as a standalone piece, rather than a part of the main game.

Because of all these reasons, please keep sharing your feedback in the Discord, so we can make tweaks and see how to evolve the feature going forward!

Please know that there are no platform (Steam, Xbox, etc.) achievements for Adventures, but you can unlock base game content from them as normal (eg. if an Adventure sends you to Astral Stair, you can loot the relics in there and unlock them ahead of the standard game progression)

Things that unlock new game mechanics, like Relics, Arcanas, unlocked Power-Ups, and pickups count, carry over to Adventures.

We have 2+1 adventures for now:
- Two are unlocked by collecitng the Atlas Gate relic mentioned above.
- Then there's the Legacy of the Moonspell adventure that gets unlocked if you have the relative DLC.
DLC Adventures becomes accessible only after visiting the Dairy Plant once.

For more information and details on Adventures, for example on how and why to Ascend an adventure after completing it, please refer to the FAQ: https://poncle.games/adventures-faq


We didn't add a Steam achievement just for the Atlas Gate, your 100% is safe for the rest of 2023!
Our future free content patch -that is still top secret- will add a handful of achievements instead, and we'll bundle the Atlas Gate platform-achievement with those.

- Locked characters can now be previewed in Character Selection (Secret characters aren't shown until the Forbidden Scrolls relic is found)
- Added filters to the Collection page. You can now see easily what you need to unlock Queen Sigma for example.
- Tweaked Whiteout bosses' HP pool
- Fixed Whiteout treasure chests not containing evos
- Fixed Celestial Voulge not being available in Super Candybox II Turbo
- Reduced self-harm from Muramasa
- Fixed Millionaire's projectiles not being affected by the direction faced by the player

The Vampire Survivors are desperate to find the vampire, but are running out of places where to look. Only one option remains, the last frontier: be the bullet hell... in space!

We shoot them to the moon, but landed just slightly off target... Oh well, since we're here we might as well investigate this carefully crafted knockoff mysterious purple world of Polus Replica and stock up on friends, weapons, and floor chicken as usual. You never know when or where you might get lucky and stumble upon a vampire, so better keep those EYES open anyway!

Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting is our first collab DLC, made possible by the wonderful Among Us developers, Innersloth! We took elements of Among Us that most fans of the game will recognise and freely re-interpreted them in a Vampire Survivors spin, for some outrageous, ridiculous, and hopefully fun, combinations of characters and weapons.

Common daily questions at poncle HQ are among the lines of "How would I survive 30' in the videogame Vampire Survivors if I only had an ID Card to defend myself?" and it was pure bliss to be able to give an answer to those important questions. Huge thanks to the folks at Innersloth for making all of this possible!
Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting contains:

• 9 playable characters
  
• 15 new weapons (of which 7 evolutions)
  
• A new large stage
  
• A new Adventure
  
• 6 brand new music tracks
  
• 20 in-game-only achievements

DLC FAQS
While most of the contents of the DLCs are straightforward, being a collab there are some differences. For example, there are no Steam achievements, so please read the FAQs here for more info: https://poncle.games/emergency-meeting.html


You can Wishlist Vampire Survivors: Emergency Meeting now by clicking the link below.
https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/app/2690330/Vampire_Survivors_Emergency_Meeting/

(Nintendo Switch and mobile versions are coming soon, so stay tuned to our Discord for more info)

[discord.gg]

It's been another crazy year here at poncle working on Vampire Survivors, and as usual it's thanks to you all if we can keep doing that while also having fun!
This year isn't over yet anyway, we still have update 1.8 to release, together with a (very little) extra bit of content that isn't even available in the public beta version yet.

If you think we've done enough, it would be great to get a nomination for "Labor of Love" in the Steam Awards please!
If you think we should do more instead, no problem, hopefully in 2024 we'll get there! I'm going to share our Chaos Roadmap just below, to tease how much more we're planning to add in the future 👀

When it comes to planning new content, I'm not a fan of big, perfect, highly detailed roadmaps, as it's often straight up impossible to foresee all problems that might occur during development (did you happen to hear about a huge software company trying to screw over game developers recently?)

Even internally, we use a big list of stuff we know we want to do, but we don't put that in order or on a timeline. So here's our Chaos Roadmap, a highly cryptic list of all future updates that are getting cooked behind the scenes:
Wondering what the heck MAZERELLA is? Sorry, my lips are sealed.

Wondering which one will be next? Me too haha

Thank you all once again, and hope to see you in here again soon for the Adventures update!

- Luca

Ready for the October patch? 👻🎃🦇🕸️

It's snow themed.

- 6 new EXTRA achievements
- 1 new bonus stage
- 2 new relics to get a new PowerUp and morph an existing character
- 1 new weapon with its evolution
- 1 new playable character
- 1 new music track

- Pickup a total of 20 Orologions to unlock the new stage, Whiteout. If you have played the game long enough, you'll probably just need to enter and exit a run!
- In Whiteout, find the Antidote relic and the Glass Fandango weapon.
- Pick up and maximize Wings to evolve the Glass Fandango.
- Survive 20 minutes in Whiteout.
- In the post game, go to Tiny Bridge and find the Chaos Altemanna.


Stage: Whiteout
It's a 20 minutes Bonus stage, so for most of it there isn't anything particularly challenging. Enemies move very slowly and take extra damage from fire weapons, which is why you might want to save the next spicy sausage for when the boss shows up. Funny snowmen will block your path, but might drop a decent amount of gold coins and everyone's favourite pickup: Orologions.

As you can tell from the unlock condition, this isn't a post game stage like TinyBridge/BatCountry/AstralStair, so it's rather easy. If you Invert it though...


Relic: Chaos Altemanna
Allows the character O'Sole Meeo to morph when reaching Level 80. It gets a few minor stats boost and evolves its Celestial Dusting into Profusione D'Amore.
The weapon evolution still shoots flowers, but these ones also bounce against the side of the screen. It also spawns floating leaves that occasionally bloom into a chain-reaction of damaging explosions.

Relic: Antidote
Allows to buy the Defang PowerUp.

PowerUp: Defang
Very cheap PowerUp to slightly reduce difficulty. Makes some enemies completely unable to deal damage. These enemies have a green tint, that can be disabled in Options.

Weapon: Glass Fandango
Can be picked up in Whiteout, and unlocked for every other run by levelling it up to Level 7. Attacks faster and in the faced direction when moving, and with standard delay and all around when standing still. Deals extra damage to frozen enemies. Gains bonus area during the time-freeze triggered by Orologions. Requires maxed Wings to evolve into Celestial Voulge.

Weapon evolution: Celestial Voulge
Has a chance to deal critical hits and to freeze enemies. Changes the time-freeze from Orologions: enemies appear frozen and deal no damage as usual, but keep moving towards the player. Deals continuous damage.

NewCharacter: She-Moon Eeta
Starts with Glass Fandango. Slightly defensive character thanks to high Armor and Movement Speed. Has a "CriticalHP skill", that triggers when she drops below 25% Max Health: she triggers a 10 seconds time-freeze, just like Orologions do.
The CriticalHP skill recharges only when the character recovers all HP. If the characters get hit by an attack strong enough to kill them, CriticalHP doesn't trigger.


If you haven't already done it last year, cast the spell spoopyseason to unlock special skins for Mortaccio, Yatta Cavallo, Bianca Ramba, and O'Sole!

The next big feature, "Adventures", needs just a bit more time in the oven before we'll be able to release it. We wanted to deliver it together with Whiteout, but there's a lot of QA to do and, as mentioned in the previous update, the release process has become slower due to all the platforms we're on, so we decided to play it safe and leave the risky bits to a future update.
If everything goes well, we should be able to deliver the Adventures patch on Steam in less than a month🤞

Adventures remix content of the base game and add a bit of new flavour through new stage progression and descriptions. They allow to have a fresh start with new chapters to tackle, without losing anything obtained in the main game. There are several features and details that we will explain one by one in the weeks ahead.
There will be Adventures in the base game and also a special Adventure for each DLC. For example, this is what you'll see when you start the Legacy of the Moonspell Adventure:
We're also planning to put the new cross-save feature into the beta channels; if you'd like to try it, please follow the beta updates on our Discord to know when it will be available for testing.

We'll keep supporting VS and stick to our top secret updates roadmap, but that doesn't mean that we aren't ready to port VS once again if the engine situation becomes unsustainable.
We already had to rewrite almost everything in the new "game engine", since we're using it only for the ability to easily export the game for consoles. Everything else is basically custom and working in the new engine was actually an uphill battle against the engine itself.

That being said, going back to the old engine is not an option. While Phaser is a fantastic framework and I wouldn't use anything else if I could, the tech stack needed to make it run on anything that isn't a web browser is too heavy and unsupported by consoles. Most of the performance gains we've seen with the swap are in fact thanks to dropping the old tech stack, not because the new engine is doing any miracles.
There are also some features that exist exclusively on the new engine (co-op, and soon Adventures) that would have been incredibly hard to make in the old one, so, if we really have to make a change, we'll go to a new-new-engine rather than the old one.

Thanks to your support we could afford another engine switch if we have to, but it would be another bumpy ride and I'd rather spend that time and headspace on new features, content, and games.

PS: if you're a fan of Phaser like me, you probably have already noticed some funny content in the Directer's Cut teaser... can't wait to show you more in the following months! 👀


Despite being ready for weeks, the Whiteout update is actually still not approved for release on all platforms. The blocker -on another platform, not Steam- , was the usage of the term "Flashing VFX" in the Options menu...

Last time I mentioned that we wanted to always release patches globally, because we know how frustrating it is to receive updates late only because your platform of choice is not the main one. But with this level of silliness, in return it becomes unfair to all other players to hold back a release because a single platform is that slow, for such nonsense reasons.

Going forward we'll stick to our release pipeline, try to anticipate all the submissions as much as possible, but then we won't wait for all the approval processes to be finished to release new patches on PC.

Sorry if content gets delayed on other platforms, we'll keep trying our best, but we have so much more content to release before the end of 2023 that we really can't afford longer waiting times.


Last week we hit 200k reviews on Steam! A huge thank you from everyone at poncle for your support!
In return we will... keep working on VS and stuff! :)

---

1.7.0 tweaks and fixes:
- Added more treasure chests in Il Molise
- Fixed weapon spacing in arcanas list to accommodate new weapons.
- Fixed text overlap in collection where there are 3 line descriptions.
- Fix for some missing translations in the options menu.
- Fixed Je-ne-viv world eater logic causing slowdown.
- Fixed bought character's in secrets menu.
- Fixed revive animation not being scaled correctly.
- Fixed issue with Je-ne-viv crashing Il Molise.
- Fixed quit button audio cutoff.
- Fixed bestiary enemies scaling up and down incorrectly.
- Fixed resolution dropdrop displaying incorrect resolution.
- Fixed Cosmic Egg display in Bestiary.
- Fixed World Eater crashing with lots of eggs.
- Fixed Trinacria in Bestiary.
- Fixed Bestiary Information cutoff/display issues.
- Fixed incorrect No Future particles.
- Fixed Hellfire projectile rotation on bounce.
- Fixed Goshadokuro losing it's head in the Bestiary.
- Fixed Directer fight inconsistencies vs old engine.
- Fixed the pause menu not animating the first time it is opened.
- Fixed missing red death particles in Holy Forbbiden.
- Updated Traditional Chinese display name on the languages page.
- Updated pickup logic to better match old-engine behaviour.
- Minor optimisation on damage number display.
- Removed incorrect screen flash on Gorgeous Moon.
- Removed various flashes if Flashing VFX is disabled.
- Added translations for "Mobile FAQ".
- Added bounds on death particles.
- Added missing flash vfx on Directer intro.

1.7.103:
---
- Fixed Je-Ne-Viv world eating effect
- Fixed display of Stage Progression on Character selection screen
- Fixed Starry Heaven VFX in co-op

[discord.gg]