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Luca Galante remembers clearly the first time Vampire Survivors was copied.
“It was immediate,” he says.
“Even before the game got popular.”
At the time, he took it as a compliment.
This was a new experience for Galante.
In this case, though, he kept returning to his project.
“Every day, I’d just add a little something.”
This feature originally appeared inEdge magazine.
“I wanted to let other developers know what they could do with it,” he explains.
“One person was super-inspired, and they started to make their own version.
It was flattering to see someone like the game so much.
But those were the early days, where people were inspired for real.”
“People would copy and paste Vampire Survivors and publish it on other stores.”
“The first thing I noticed was the literal ripoffs,” he says.
“People would copy and paste Vampire Survivors and publish it on other stores.”
“It’s how this industry works, like it or not.
“I got lucky.
My success was lightning-fast.
Players noticed me before any vulture could notice the ascension in sales.
For everyone else, they have to stand out among the hundreds.”
“We saw this genre exploding.
AAA Developers discuss the three little letters that have shaped an industry: “It’s a stupid term.
It’s meaningless”
It didn’t help that Funday arrived to this party comparatively late.
“They were truly psyched about playing Vampire Survivors,” Rohde remembers.
He’d only played a little of the game himself, but the other two were hooked.
After the show, though, back at the Funday offices, Rohde found the idea taking root.
He called Lundgaard with a simple pitch: “It’s Vampire Survivors with mining!”
But they made other changes, too, which would prove essential to the game’s eventual success.
“It was the innovation we needed, and it fit the IP perfectly,” Rohde says.
Rohde and his team weren’t content simply to adapt the formula laid down by Vampire Survivors.
In fact, they were keen to address what they saw as flaws in Galante’s original design.
“We wanted people to succumb to their greed and then die,” Rohde laughs.
Their solution was twofold.
“We got a shit-ton of wish lists [after that, which] calmed everybody down.”
Of course, not every developer has access to a platform like Ghost Ship’s.
“There was only one character,” he says.
“There weren’t the talent or equipment systems.
There were only the F-rank and D-rank [campaigns].”
It hurt a lot of developers.”
He ended up pricing his game at $2.50, 49 cents less than Vampire Survivors.
“I like the idea of having a lot of upgrades it’s possible for you to combine.”
“I like the idea of having a lot of upgrades you could combine,” Huard says.
“And I always wanted to make a game like that.”
The prototype didn’t feel different enough from the original.
“It was very quick,” he recalls.
“You got a character that moved and auto-attacked it was super-simple, and there was very little content.
Some art was just a circle.”
At launch, Rogue: Genesia drew over 5,000 players in one day.
“I’m going to steal that,” Huard decided.
“It would improve the way people play.”
And Funday can hardly complain, given it did the same thing itself.
“We looked at Soulstone Survivors and how they tag stuff,” Rohde says.
“I had some questions about the game,” Rohde says, “We just chatted on Discord.
“We broke them down into features,” he says.
“Like, we want this feature from Soulstones Survivor, this feeling from Rogue: Genesia…
It wasn’t only Vampire Survivors.
There were four or five key reference games.”
“It sounds weird but we give a shot to keep our innovation as low as possible.”
“We’ll say, ‘it’s this game but with that’.
It takes so much time to innovate.
We’re a studio of 50 people with bills to pay, so we can’t do that.”
“I do my best to stay away,” Galante says.
“Comparisons are destructive.”
“From a creative perspective, it’s too risky to go and play someone else’s game.”
And he suspects he wouldn’t enjoy them much anyway.
“I have impossible taste,” Galante says.
“I criticise everything.
Sitting down and enjoying a game is very difficult for me.”
“I criticise everything.
Sitting down and enjoying a game is very difficult for me.
“Vampire Survivors is the first game I made just for fun.
That might be the key ingredient for its success.
It’s just not going to work.”
Galante is not particularly interested in his game as a product.
“I don’t want to start having to look around for attempt to maintain the success.
The success was an accident.
It’s fantastic, it’s beautiful I’m very grateful to the players for that.
But, again, that should not be the aim.
Otherwise, we enter a completely different world which I’m not keen on, honestly.”
