Hi everyone, we have a lot happening around new games and Vampire Survivors, so here's a gigantic news post!
🟣- Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton
🔴- Vampire Survivors 1.15
🔴- Legacy of the Bloodmoon teasers
🔴- Legacy of the Moonspell info
🔴- Workshop Support for Vampire Survivors
🔴- ARG and Character Community Challenge winners
🔴- Vampire Survivors Comics
🔵- Vampire Crawlers updates
🟢- PoncleUp

🟣 Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton

A few days back we announced Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton in collaboration with Shueisha Games!

Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton is a game like Vampire Survivors, but with a twist: you'll be able to play an 8-player survivors royale PvPvE mode!

Some in-game names and terminology are still in development and may be subject to change.

While every player plays in their own world, you accumulate points by defeating curses and sorcerers, and with every 100 points accumulated you get to choose a Rule Change that can affect everyone's game. Some Rule Changes are INSANE, but for now we'll just reveal the simple ones you can see in the trailer (silence, slow, steal points...).

But Rule Changes aren't the only way to interact with other players. Introducing a world first, mind blowing, unbelievable game mechanic: PRESS A BUTTON.

While you move your auto-attacking character, your special attack also builds up. By PRESSING A BUTTON when the special attack is ready, you get to unleash your character's Special Attack, or, if that character can, a DOMAIN EXPANSION!

Other players can be caught in the effect of your Domain or Special Attack, so you have to keep an eye on other players' position and special-bar status.

A very important aspect of the 8-players mode is the Live Match Status Feed (working name). This big chunk of UI on the left side of the screen constantly updates in real time, acting not only as a scoreboard, but also sending out warnings and all kind of information about what the other players are up to.

At the end of the 15 minutes battle royale, the 2 players with the most points will face one another in a 19 seconds duel.

Despite the online focus, Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble: Survivaton is a game you can also play alone, in a mission-based mode, just like Vampire Survivors. If you don't ever want to go online, you'll still be able to play the 8-players battle royale mode against bots.

This is a game you buy once and can play anytime. We'll keep supporting the game after launch, with our usual style of content updates. So forget about gatcha elements or a forever-evolving PvP meta keeping your time and wallet hostages: our focus here are fun and affordability.

Apologies if you had enough of this wall of text, but I kepty mouth shut for almost two years and I haven't even got to the technical bits yet!

Yes, the game runs on the Vampire Survivors - First Survivaton framework, so you can expect that same familiar experience playing it, but we had to do several unique tweaks for Jujutsu Kaisen Rumble Survivaton.

Other than the obvious, completely new networking for the gameplay and Live Match Status Feed, we have doubled the resolution at which the game runs.

That allowed us to completely rebuild the whole VFX pipeline so that we could re-create the distinctive look of Curse Energy and the changes the whole stage depending on activated Domain Expansions or Special Attacks.

Another reason to double the resolution was to properly display the UI (that has been completely reworked at framework level) and the Live Match Status Feed, that is capable of also streaming gameplay snippets from other online players.

You'll see a lot of other tweaks, like the fact that characters look different if they are seen from the left or from the right, a "default attack" per character that triggers without any weapon, or walls that are actually solid to name a few.

Then there are other changes that won't be noticeable until you get to play the game. For example, while we are going by the same content-unlock-philosophy as Vampire Survivors, we are completely reworking the progression in the various game modes and also per-character, so that every game mode will feel fresh even to VS veterans.

That's all for now, I hope you have enjoyed the trailer; my favourite part was that bit were Gojo takes a walk.

🔴 Vampire Survivors 1.15 available on all platforms

- Nintendo Switch 1 and 2
- Android
- iOS & Apple Arcade
- PS4 and PS5
- Xbox
- EGS

In the following weeks there will be small updates quite often on all platforms to bring them all on the same version, because all platforms have the same content, but not the same bugfixes and tweaks.

Please join the Discord or keep an eye on the Updates version of the wiki if you're interested in knowing the fixes in each update (I won't spam Steam News every week for small tweaks).

🔴 New Moonspell Content spoilers

When we'll launch Legacy of the Bloodmoon, we'll also update the contents of Legacy of the Moonspell. It will get 7 new unlocks, that will deliver:

• 4 new weapons: LunarMight, LunarSight, LunarBight, and LunarFlight
  
• 1 Special Evolution: Argent Flow
  
• 1 new passive Weapon: Pearl Magatama
  
• 4 new characters
  
• 1 new music track
  
• some buffs to the original cast of characters:
  

- Menya Moonspell gets Overheal +16: activates her starting weapon.
- Babi-Onna gets Overheal +16: gains a temporary bonus to MoveSpeed (that also means she attacks faster).
- Megalo Menya Moonspell gets Overheal +16: activates her first weapon.
- Megalo Syuuto Moonspell gets Overheal +16: equipped Blood weapons gain extra damage.
- McCoy-Oni gets Overheal +16: gains a Reroll.
- Gav'Et-Oni gets [a new feature shared with Bloodmoon so won't be spoiled today].This will be a free update, in fact last month we have actually dropped the price of Legacy of the Moonspell to balance out a bit the cost/content ratio of the various expansions.

🔴 Bloodmoon character tease

Legacy of the Bloodmoon is almost complete and we will be able to start testing and submissions soon! That means we'll have an actual release date soon too.

In the meantime, here's a Character Spotlight video about Malice Bloodmoon:

🔴 ARG and Community Character Competition winners

Congratulations to the trio of winners of the Lucca Comics ARG:
Jenoss, Miryel, Siming, and GIU_LLS (?), and to DissonantSynth for winning the Community Challenge!

We're finally getting into the design stage of the characters, with a first implementation that will soon be shared with the winners, behind the scenes, to start iterating together on gameplay mechanics. You can expect a few surprises and little extras about them when they'll make their appearance in the game!

Baron Husker and Sefi Rotto (?) will come alive in a later update, v1.17

🔴 First steps for Steam Workshop support

Instead of waiting the conclusion of the current cycles of updates for Vampire Survivors as originally planned, we will develop modding support over time, one feature at a time. Feature 1 will be about adding CUSTOM (private/local) and WORKSHOP (public/Steam Workshop) characters!

Please join the Discord or use the public-beta forum if you're interested in trying out custom characters before they go live on the main branch, in a future update (currently aiming for v1.17)

🔴 Vampire Survivors Comics

Vampire Survivor is getting comics! We've been working with Titan Comics on a 4-issue series, written by David Hazan and illustrated by Jimm Kucaj, with the first issue coming out this September, available in 3 cover variants. Some familiar Vampire Survivors will go through Mad Forest, Inlaid Library, Dairy Plant, and a few other places, and there might even be some lore in there. Issue #1 is available to pre-order from your local comic shop or from Forbidden Planet if you're in the UK / EU.

You can find out more about the comics on the Titan Comics website.

🔵 Vampire Crawlers: first QOL update

Our first update to Vampire Crawlers add an Endless mode and several QOL improvements! You can find more details, the strategy behind future updates, and some content spoilers in the Steam News here.

🟢 Countup to the next announcement

Look, we're doing a lot of stuff across several small teams. I'm always happy to write the Steam News but I cannot bombard your feed with everything we're doing. Also took me something like 3 weeks to set this all up. So if you'd like to hear about what we're doing a bit more often, then please visit poncleup.com to see a recap or subscribe to our newsletter.

It's a countup instead of a countdown because, as you might have noticed, we're release-date-averse and have no idea ourselves when we'll drop something new 🤷‍♂️

Just know that the newsletters are written by the marketing team

Alright, I'm done with work, time to go back having fun on my secret project.
Thank you everyone, I'll leave you in the self-proclaimed capable hands of the marketing team!

- Luca