Vampire Survivors will hit 1.0 on October 20th, move to new engine by end of year
Like death, leaving early access is not the end
Vampire Survivors will hit version 1.0 on October 20th. Developer poncle announced the release date today as planned, but didn't say what new features the full release would contain so that its additions remain a surprise.
Although reaching 1.0 means leaving early access, it's also not the end of Vampire Survivors development. Work on porting the game to a new engine continues with the aim to "release it by the end of the year."
The news posted to the Vampire Survivors Steam page says that, since patch 0.11.3 fulfilled promises made in the last released development roadmap, they don't feel the need to say what's to come in version 1.0. The content should therefore be a "surprise and should hopefully offer a little something for everyone."
They do say that the update will include tweaks to balance items, a nerf for Santa Water/La Borra, and two new achievements. Version 1.0 will also include official support for new languages, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.
When you reach high levels, Vampire Survivors can slow to a crawl due to how many sprites are onscreen at the same time. For that reason - and as a result of the massive success of the game - poncle announced the intention to switch to a new engine back in March.
Work on that engine switch continues. Today's post says that the new engine should fix common bugs, allow support for multi-core processors and improvement framerates, and bring native support for Linux. Save data will carry over to the new engine, although the post also says that the engine switch is optional. "If you're happy with the current Electron version, nobody will force you to move to the new one :)", says the post.
More info about 1.0 will be dribbled out daily between October 7th and its release on the 20th, providing "sometimes just a little detail, sometimes something slightly bigger." We'll report on any substantial news, because Vampire Survivors is great.