2025 wrapup

Hello, yes, look, last year has been an absolute clusterfuck at poncle, but absolutely not nearly enough to stop us 😎
Thank you all for supporting us for yet another year!

No matter how cold and cloudy it gets, it's always summer at poncle. And always Tuesday.
Here's a handy list of what we've been able to unfuck from our big 2025 clusterfuck:

- won a BAFTA for Best Evolving Game
- published the free-from Vampire Survivors Wiki
- poncle presents: Nao Games' Berserk or Die, Doonutsaur's Kill the Brickman
- COLLABS: Rusty's Retirement, Two Point Museum, Mythical Concept STARNAUT
- VS 1.13: The Coop, Emerald Diorama
- VS 1.14: Westwoods, Mazerella, Online Co-op, Ante Chamber, and Ode to Castlevania+
- Super successful VS Board Game Kickstarter
- Live events and an ARG at Lucca Comics, including the poncle Live Orchestra exhibition with Yoko Shimomura
- Vampire Crawlers announced

But enough with laurels, let's talk about 2026!

Let's spill the beans: all poncle projects

As mentioned a few times in the Steam news over the years, we've been busy greenlighting and kickstarting all sorts of projects, but we've always been quite cryptic about them. Remember the "experiments"?
Recently we started to see several fruits of all that work, like bringing VS spin-off concepts to other indie studios to team up together with (like Vampire Crawlers obviously!) or lending the base VS-Engine to other studios we like and that approached us with interesting ideas (like Warhammer Survivors), not to mention all the collabs we managed to put together for fun!

So, we're always at work on Vampire Survivors updates of course, but let's also have a look a bit more in detail about every game project poncle's been cooking outside of the main games:

🦇 VS Spinoffs

Shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, I was already thinking of taking some of the accidental core pillars behind the development of VS and to apply them to existing genres that I personally enjoy. Pillars like accessibility, immediacy, lightheartedness, and tons of sparkly stuff.
I knew I wouldn't have the bandwidth to do that entirely in-house for a very long time, that is why I tried to bring some of these new game concepts to other studios to start working together. This means that concepts like Vampire Crawlers have been developing in the background for almost 4 years!

Vampire Crawlers has been doing everything right since its very first prototype, so it's also the one that proceeded the fastest and that will be released in 2026. The core concept at the base of the game was to be able to play a turn-based combat system at any pace, even as fast as humanly possible, and still deliver accurate results. Everything else, including using cards to represent abilities, came second! If you want to know how that idea evolved, please keep following the Vampire Crawlers page because we'll talk a lot about all of its game mechanics over the next few months. Yeah yeah, we had to put "deckbuilding" as a buzz word, because that is a major feature after all, but the game doesn't really play like a standard deckbuilder.
I hope plenty of other players will be able to try and enjoy Vampire Crawlers as much as I do!

💎 VS Engine games

We've seen what happened after the success of VS, but what about before? Well, when VS was in version 0.1 and had only 12 weapons and 7 characters, I thought it was close to completion. In fact it was supposed to have just about twice as much content in the final version. But the whole point of developing the game was for me to have fun making content, so at that time I had already started to think about what to do after finishing it and to brainstorm ideas about how to reuse the little game engine in different settings.
Mindblowing ideas eh: zombies, vikings, aliens, presidents, viruses... (look, it was 2021... )

Today, of course, it would be ridiculous and a slap to the face of the fans if poncle were to sell a new game that is just a "Vampire Survivors but with aliens", that is why VS keeps getting all sorts of new content for free and via expansions. If we are to work on a new game based on the VS engine, it has to offer a substantial difference from the original, a good reason to justify a new price tag.

What that good reason is depends on the projects we stumble upon, but a good example is Warhammer Survivors by Auroch Digital. Warhammer is a very popular IP that offers a lot of different eras and settings to explore, and Auroch Digital is a fantastic game dev studio that has proven to understand the IP and has already delivered the beautiful Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun.

👁️ New titles

Just to say that not everything we're doing revolves around VS, please know that we're also working on original titles/IPs. We've started these mostly for fun and they're just side-projects for now, quite far away, so we won't be talking about them for a long time.

⚠️ Our long-term secret project

When it comes to the poncle core dev team, everything mentioned so far was just side-projects|
The core team in fact has been busy since the start of 2025 on a long-term project, that, of course, we can't say anything about yet, not even what kind of game it is, nor if it is about VS or not :p

Vampire Survivors 1.15 coming in 2026

We're still rolling out hotfixes on all platforms for version 1.14, but in the meantime we can start having a look at what's coming in the first patch of 2026. The patch has a lot of major QOL improvements that require a rework of some core systems; that is a lot of words to say it's most likely coming in Q2 rather than at the start of the year.

🟢Arriving in 1.15
- Multiple save slots: about time eh!
- Stability Update: before adding even more new content, we need to make sure the game engine performs better on all devices
- Content management: filters and a better organization of character selection, unlock menu etc. to avoid getting lost in the large amount of content
- A content pack: an usual combination of new stage+character+weapon+darkana

🟠Unlikely to be ready for 1.15
- DLC sharing when playing online
- Cross-save on platforms that needs different policies for us (PS, Apple+)

🔴Definitely arriving post 1.15
- Platform achievements: to avoid the usual disruption, going forward we'll try to bundle all new Steam achievements in a single update at the end of the year (new in-game unlocks will work as usual). Platforms with stricter achievement policies (PS and Xbox) might still get them at the same time as the patch releases instead.

We'll be using the public-beta heavily for this next patch, so anyone who wants to try new features and content in advance, please feel free to join the beta branch and ideally the Discord too.

If you want to peer even further in the future of VS, worry not as the Chaos Roadmap is here to (not) help you:

Can we deliver all these remaining content packs in 2026? Will there be any other out-of-the-blue collabs like Balatro? When's the next lunar eclipse? Did you know the code name for Ante Chamber was "Lemon", from the Italian word "Limonare"? Are you sure you want to google it at work? Did I really mention ALL poncle projects?

Well, that's it for now. Another massive thank you to all of you for your support, hope to see you soon for 1.15 and for Vampire Crawlers!

Your professional news editor
- Luca