The long-awaited Vampire Survivors engine upgrade is upon us! Developer Poncle has finally announced that the game will fully switch to the new engine on August 17 - a little over a month from the time of this writing.
The game currently runs on Phaser, but the team has been working on porting it to Unity. On the development side, the main benefit of moving to Unity is simplifying cross-platform development. On the players' end, however, Unity offers much better performance.
Poncle shared the news in a Steam post, which also gave us a fresh look at the co-op mode - which was announced last month.
You may be surprised to learn that Vampire Survivors - a game that takes place on a 2D plane with primitive visuals, and character sprites that barely animate - somehow can run terribly. The truth is that no amount of PC horsepower can smooth out those late-game drops.
Once you've evolved all your weapons, and are very close to the 30-minute mark, especially if Limit Break is on, it chugs hard. That was a limitation of the old engine, something Poncle says should not happen with Unity.
Vampire Survivors' Xbox version, and the recently released mobile ports, have actually been running on Unity already. Since Poncle revealed the intention to switch to Unity in September last year, two versions of the game were being maintained on PC. A few players outside the development team even got to play the beta.
The general consensus is very positive, particularly when it comes to the responsiveness of the game's UI during the late stages. The performance updates also benefit Steam Deck users and anyone with a lower-spec PC, so it's good news all around.
If you've somehow avoided playing Vampire Survivors (the BAFTA's game of the year winner for 2022), you should defintiely fix that. Even now, before the engine switch, this is an excellent game - and one of Game Pass' best gets ever.
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