Vampire Survivors is getting an engine upgrade! Don’t expect any fancy ray-traced textures like Minecraft or Cyberpunk, but the upcoming switchover for the addictive Best Game of Last Year will bring with it some very welcome improvements to performance and stability when it lands next month.
We’ve known that Vampire Survivors devs Poncle have been working on a Unity version of the fangtastic PC game for a while now, having already released its Xbox and mobile ports on the popular engine and announcing plans to bring over the PC original late last year.
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Since then, Poncle has been releasing two separate versions of Vampire Survivors on PC: the original build based on the Phaser engine, and a beta version of the upcoming Unity build which you could access as a tester (or if you sneakily Googled the beta access code for Steam).
That also means we know what to expect when the public version of Vampire Survivors officially switches over to Unity on August 17th, as recently confirmed by Poncle. As per testers’ time with the new engine during its beta, the Unity version runs a lot smoother than the original – keeping the framerate close to 60 even as the screen fills with enemies and explosions – and is generally more stable, avoiding slowdown.
As a nice added bonus, it also means that folks playing on a Steam Deck – arguably the perfect platform for Vampire Survivors – and lower-spec machines should also benefit from the altogether more friendly engine. Poncle points out that Unity will also help the team with porting efforts.
“Now that we are close to a point where the new engine is thoroughly tested and runs better than the old one, we will fully switch the game over to the new engine on 17th August” the devs confirmed, before thanking Phaser for powering the game to its viral heights of success: “I had a lot of fun building Vampire Survivors in it and can highly recommend it if you are interested in making wild games pretty fast!”
The new engine will accompany a brand new co-op mode, also releasing as a free update on August 17th. If you can’t be bothered to wait a few weeks, stick newenginepls into Steam and give it a blast now.
Vampire Survivors has also been granted new trading cards and other Steam community items like emoticons and profile backgrounds, which you can go and grab right now, so that’s nice.
