Vampire Survivors - Android Game

What!? You just discovered Vampire Survivors NOW! You are at least 5 years late to the party, I think they have 3-4 expansions now, including the Castlevania expansion. They are even pulling out a new game, a deck builder I think, called Vampire Crawler. Its getting out soon.

The game was so popular that everybody copied the concept in different ways. My only complaints I remember is that the levels are not that interesting, but its hard to do so with a monster swarming mechanism. The ending is also flat: grim reaper arrives and you die.

I even though of making a deck building card game where you battle wave of monsters. The game is basically an engine building game. You try to combo items together that can fusion, or complement each other pretty well.

Its the perfect type of game for me as game length is 30 minutes, around an hour of play time to finish a stage. It also played well with a fighting stick as it is basically a 1 button game. I mean, the game would have been playable on Atari, who could have though that.

I think the android platform is limited, there is no updates and expansions. So play it there to see if you like it, then migrate to another platform. If you like the genre but not that game specifically, there are dozens and dozens of other survivor games. Ask AI to find those games.

Another one that comes to my mind: "Ball X Pit" is a game in the same genre. There is aiming, but the character attacks automatically. You collect power up and make yourself a build by combining power ups in different ways. The city management is weird and not very interesting for me, but the core game is a variation good enough to stand on its own. Again, a match last 20-30 minutes and you can adjust speed if you want.

Enjoy!

Steam! bloatware?

I am currently running steam on my old laptop from 2013 and sometimes I start steam in the background expecting to play a game (the boot time is long, I don't have an SDD), and I have not experimented slowdown doing any other tasks. Of course, not all games run on that old computer, especially not with the proton emulator if the game is windows only. If you do not start the process, it cannot slowdown your computer. If you are short in disk space, that is another story. Still there are many games under 500 megs on steam.

I am not sure if I posted on this forum my idea to make a Survivor deck building game. It did not get any feed back here and/or board game geek. I imagine that is because people did not know the video game in the first place. If you can search my post, you might be able to find it. Again, not sure on which forum I posted.

This game has progression, but maybe no the type you are thinking. A game basically last 30 minutes of play. Approximately 1 hour if you add chest and menu selection. You do not stop the game in that time period, so you must be willing to play 30-60 minute. Once completed, you unlock new character, items, etc. That is the progression that is saved. So for somebody ADHD like me, that is perfect, it follows the play and forget philosophy. I can get back in to the game 2 years later without having to remember what I wanted to do.

The industry is effectively not creative because we are in time of crisis, so it is not taking risk, and doing the thing that works (see Phil Spencer's letter). But in a creative industry, that should not be the case. Also production cost and time are so high for AAA games (about 5 years), that you cannot take risk anymore. This is why for example everybody is copying slay the spire, it reusing bullet prof concepts.

I never understood the water cooler section, is it like an out of topic section?

I think I learned from Vampire Survivor because my GF saw it on Xbox or Windows PC, I am not sure. I think Microsoft asked or helped the game to be released on xbox.

Xbox and probably PC windows store, will display new games getting released on the store or on game pass. So its one way to discover them. Else, I guess you could ask AI to pull you out the most innovative video games that was released during the last year.

Vampire Crawlers is coming out in a few days, its a deck builder, you might like it. Look at the trailer.

I have seen yesterday Vampire Crawler, it just got released. It looks like a mix of vampire survivor and slay the spire. Its a deck building game, but the card play is much faster as you need to defeat waves and waves of monsters.

I found back the thread I was talking about, it was posted in 2022. You even submitted a post in that thread:

Idea: Vampire Survivor: the deck building game

https://www.bgdf.com/forum/game-creation/new-game-ideas/idea-vampire-sur...

They really made a board game out of it. Nice.

Vampire Crawler is a real deck building video game:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https:...

maybe this link is better, google is adding prefix and suffix:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3265700/Vampire_Crawlers_The_Turbo_Wi...

I played it yesterday, my friend got 2/3 of the achievements in one day. One of the interesting differences with slay the spire is that you can put gems on your cards changing their behavior. Also you can build up combos by playing cards in casting cost numerical sequence. So if the card cost are 0,1,2 each successive card is boosted (more damage for example).

As for the board game, its not just deck building, they seem to have decided to have a minimap too.