Xbox Game Pass success story, Vampire Survivors, had to be rebuilt to run on console, developer Poncle has said, as the original version was “basically a browser game.”
Poncle was seeing a substantial amount of success with Vampire Survivors when it launched into PC Game Pass as an early access title, but to get it into the position it is today as one of the best games on Game Pass, the developer needed to rebuild it so it could run smoothly on Xbox consoles — a feat the team achieved without some players even noticing.
Vampire Survivors was completely rebuilt for Xbox
The original version of Vampire Survivors was “basically a browser game,” Poncle Tech Director Sam McGarry told Xbox Wire, built for PC using web technologies like Javascript. Once the game’s popularity began to gain traction and players started playing it on other devices, many issues began to surface, and as such, Poncle had to build a dedicated engine for Xbox. “The overall goal was for players not to notice,” McGarry said. “Even to this day, there are still players that don’t realise that the engine is already out there and has been since launch on Xbox.”
With Vampire Survivors still running Javascript on PC and the Xbox version running on its own engine, McGarry explained that maintaining a consistent level of parity between them both is challenging, but worth it for the player experience. “Making sure that players can actually go between Xbox platforms and continue their game is very important to us,” McGarry said. “And we’re also trying to maintain that quality so you can jump between two different versions of the game without feeling like you’re playing different copies of the game, without having any technical issues or anything.”
While juggling the two versions of Vampire Survivors could be seen as a rigorous process, interestingly, McGarry says that getting the game to operate as an Xbox Cloud Gaming title was relatively painless, saying: “We put the game out, ticked a box, and then it was available in the Cloud just like that basically.”
The latest DLC, Tales of The Foscari, is out now and adds another 22 Vampire Survivors achievements alongside plenty of new content. Have you been enjoying the game? Drop down below and let us know!
