Vampire Survivors development sounds like an open source-fueled fever dream

The last print issue of Game Informer shipped with a fantastic interview with Vampire Survivors creator Luca Galante, and boy is it a doozy. Galante’s given plenty of interviews in the past about his surprise hit game that birthed a sea of “survivor” games, but his chat with Game Informer tells us a little more about the tools and techniques that brought the game to life.

Speaking with Pao Yumol, Galante retold some familiar tales from development—that his gambling app programming background didn’t really influence the whole game’s design, just the treasure chest openings, and that he he was first inspired by LEME’s mobile game Magic Survival—but there are a few new tidbits that tell us how making the game was possible.

For instance, the proliferation of open source tools and free assets are what set Galante on the journey to making his own games. Galante specifically used the HTML5 open-source game engine Phaser, and built the basics of Vampire Survivors with default engine assets.

The game’s janky visuals that spiral out of control when hundreds of sprites pour onto the screen were there from the start, when he grabbed a Castlevania-themed pack of sprites. He told Game Informer that the sprites “were not getting rendered at the right size,” and he fell in love with those imperfections.

“They were all very chaotic [and] messy. There was a lot of green on screen, with a giant mantis and grass on the floor.”

Galante’s fire-and-forget development process apparently took off when he began designing playable characters and weapons, which is still his “favorite part” of the development process. He explained his approach to design was “mercenary,” grabbing individual assets from the sprite pack and coding attack patterns on the spot, with little thought for character, feel, or consistency.

This…uh, “methodology” manifested in a strange way in 2023, when he opened the game and discovered a character Game Informer says he “didn’t recognize.” Sometime in development he “blacked out” (his words) and forgot he’d made the character before going to sleep.

Stories of blackout in game development may conjure nervous memories of crunch and overwork for many developers, but it seems Galante perceives it as being more about his familiarity with his own toolkit. “Sometimes that comes from knowing your tools very well—your programming language, the game framework, and all of that.”

The story closes with the tale of Peppino, a Christmas Tree character whose ability is just standing still and letting enemies pour over him. Galante made him in tribute to a Christmas tree that he was taking down on January 7, 2022, when a friend messaged him to let him know the game’s sales were exploding after YouTuber SplatterCat published a review of the game.

According to Galante, he forgot to take down the tree and then decided to let it stay up forever.

But there’s more. Peppino’s “standing still” gimmick came from Galante learning about players who took on self-imposed “no movement” challenges. Galante told Game Informer that he had an unused sprite for a pine tree still on hand and the still-standing Christmas tree in his apartment.

“The name Peppino in Italian means a pine tree, basically,” he told the outlet. “And so my incredibly stupid brain just put all those bits together.”

We would normally point you to Game Informer’s website to read the rest of Yumol’s interview with Galante, but the interview was never published online following GameStop’s decision to close the outlet and wipe out its online archives.

We encourage you to seek out a physical issue of Game Informer’s final issue to read it, and other great stories, for yourself.