Yes, hello, welcome to yet another yearly and vaguely formulaic recap of all the wonderful things that have happened around Vampire Survivors in the past year!
Plus, of course, information and teases for what we have planned for 2025.

Sorry we didn't share this earlier, Nintendo added a 2 onto something and we were busy watching the video on loop.
As usual we have to start with a thank you. This single player game (yeah yeah there's local co-op, alright) has been around for more than 2 years now, and thanks to your support is still going strong and its reception keeps being absolutely mindblowing.
Poncle has grown to 35 people now, so we are finally able to keep taking care of VS, while also working on new projects!

We have a lot going on behind the scenes, but this update will still be focused on Vampire Survivors.

Here's a quick recap of the past year:

• Space 54
  
• The incredibly stupid 1997 Vampire Survivors parody trailer always deserves a mention
  
• Laborratory
  
• It's Vampire Survivors x Contra, but we called it OPERATION GUNS
  
• Vampire Survivors+ on Apple Arcade
  
• Bug Fixes And Improvements (real patch notes here)
  
• Balatro: Friends of Jimbo
  
• Vampire Survivors on PlayStation 4 & 5 (can someone please put a TM after PlayStation, they care for that stuff a lot)
  
• Bonus Stage live concert[ukie.org.uk]
  
• Halloween party with Ode to Castlevania hands-on
  
• v1.12 QOL improvements and the tiniest collab in history ever, Vampire Survivors: Ode to Castlevania
  
• Vampire Survivors on EGS
  
• ™

I'm not sure how much stuff we forgot to put on the list, probably a bit. Like the stunning, and free standing, Mask of the Red Death plush[youtooz.com] (sold out)

We're finally ready to roll out the feature to everyone, on all platforms. We're aiming for Cross-save to arrive with the next content patch, 1.13

We're sorting out the last few problems and scratching our heads a lot about user interface. We've been working closely with multiplayer experts coherence[coherence.io] to get things right and there's hope we'll be able to launch it this year.

We're still working with Story Kitchen on a live-action film, respecting all the strikes and taking our time to get things right.

As mentioned last year, rather than jumping the gun and make stuff for the sake of making it, 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. Please remember the game has no plot (it doesn't? :eyes:), so nobody can really anticipate how a film about it is going to be, that is part of what makes it exciting.

This year we should also be able to reveal a few other "cross-media" things we've been working on. I'm just going to leave this sentence here.

If the Chaos Roadmap™ is giving you a headache, don't worry, you're not the only one, it's just doing its job! In 2025 we're focusing on free standard updates, that will be a bit chunkier than usual. A lot of time is needed to QA and release patches now, since we're on so many different platforms, so the best way to optimise time is to reduce the amount of patches, but increase the amount of content in them.

If anyone's worried about for how long we're going to make patches, please know that we have accidentally started 3 different update cycles that we have to complete.
- The first cycle, started in 2022 with Tiny Bridge, was the "Stage Recycling™" one. The idea was to see if I could make new content quickly by recycling the graphics of existing stages. It worked, but guess what? Just as usual, "quickly" started to feel "cheaply", and it didn't feel right to just re-use the exact same graphics again and again. So now "Recycling" a stage just means "making a stage that has a vague reference to one of the original 5 stages and that is unlocked by playing the Inverse version of that stage" 🤷‍♂️
- The second cycle is about "Pickups™". It involves making a special stage for each of the pickups available in VS. These will include the most stupid stages ever, and I believe some of the future ones will easily top Space 54 or Bat Country. For example, patch 1.13 will be an accurate representation of how the average Tuesday feels at poncle. Don't worry, there's some serious stuff too.
- The third cycle is of course about the Darkanas™. There's 17 more to make, which means at least 17 more ways to break the game.

More Adventures are on the way too, including one for Tides of the Foscari. We are also considering an Adventure for Ode to Castlevania since we got some ideas to make it feel different than the standard expansion.

In terms of paid DLC or expansions, we're very well aware that there's high demand, but there's the problem that anything new will have to be able to somewhat be comparable to the latest expansion: Ode to Castlevania. If you have played it enough, then you probably know is a tiny bit bigger than all other ones, and that is a tiny bit difficult to produce that much content again, for the same or lower price, and in a reasonable amount of time.
That doesn't mean it's the end for large paid DLC packs; there's still a few shenanigans we can pull to provide good value for money, but we're surely going to slow down on that front.
Collabs in particular are especially tricky to make due to admin times and licensing costs. Anyway, I'd love to make at the very least one more original expansion for Vampire Survivors.

We know there's high demand for the collab soundtracks, especially Ode to Castlevania, to be available on more platforms and in more ways, but music licensing is very complex to navigate and so we're currently not able to provide anything outside of the playlists on our Youtube channel.
We're working with the various departments of KONAMI to see what we can do to better distribute the tracks online, including streaming services etc. but it's definitely going to take a long time; there's a lot of parties to talk to and a probably a long trail of paperwork to sort out. Rest assured we're working on it, and we'll provide updates when we start getting close to some results.

In the meantime I'll take the opportunity to thank again Daniele Zandara, Filippo Vicarelly, Evelyn Lark, and KEYGEN CHURCH to put together that incredible soundtrack that's inevitably forever stuck in my head!

It's time. This year we'll finally be able to show some results!
These experiments are a team-up between poncle and other indie devs to work on some VS-adjacent things. Of the 6 original experiments, 2 have been greenlit, 2 have been replaced, and 2 are still ongoing. Take a look at banner!
We have a few not-Vampire-Survivors-but-totally-poncle things to talk about this year, but all I can say now is: please stay tuned. We're still cooking, but 2025 is shaping up to be our biggest, chaotic-est, surprising-est, and other made up word-est year yet!


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That's all for now, going back to work, bye!
Thank you all once again and see you in the next run!

- Luca & poncle (including the marketing team)