poncle Shares Insight on Upcoming Roguelite Deckbuilder Vampire Crawlers in New Dev Update

One of the most influential videogame developers in the modern era is none other than poncle, the creator of Vampire Survivors. With the genre-birthing title, bullet heavens took over Steam for a while, and even to this day, companies still launch new titles to make players feel like gods while playing it.

It's been a few years since the release of the debut title, launching back in 2022, and poncle has been working to define a new genre — the roguelite deckbuilders. Though it's a bit of a competitive place in the industry, the team thinks they can redefine the experience once again and please both newcomers and veterans.

Vampire Cralwers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors offers players the opportunity to experience the first spin-off to the franchise, and the first developer update gives us a bit of an overview about what players can expect. The video published on the official poncle - Vampire Survivors YouTube channel gives us a look at two mechanics that will set the card-based spin-off apart from others.

First, let's talk about Turboturn. poncle has been a fan of fast-paced titles for a long time, with the debut title wreaking havoc and simulating dozens to hundreds of entities at a time to really give you a feeling of power. Turn-based card titles have always been antithetical to fast-paced combat, but poncle wants to fix that with this mechanic.

Essentially, players will be able to mash the cards at their leisure, using all of their possible resources in one go, without having to wait for attack or death animations to play. Play every card, and the system automatically keeps in mind which characters — from waves that we've grown accustomed to in Vampire Survivors — will die and which characters will take the next hit.

This means that, instead of a methodical and slow approach to combat, Vampire Crawlers encourages players to use their abilities at will. It's a turn-based deckbuilding title that wants to keep the fast-paced element of the bullet heaven original.

Next is Card Customisation, which will appeal to veterans of the genre. Using Gems, players can affect a variety of cards and modify them to make them stronger, creating wacky combinations and even creating Weapon Evolutions.

This in-depth system includes a slew of regular modifiers, like damage multipliers, range, pricing, and then crazy, chaotic combinations that poncle is known for. Create decks that are counter-intuitive and wreak havoc on your enemies with head-scratching logic twists.

This is all but the first glimpse at Vampire Crawlers, and you can watch the systems in play on the first episode above! There's also an upcoming demo you can check out soon.