The archive · Games & Play · Product decision · 2020–2022
A weekend side project becomes 2022's indie hit — then a studio
Luca Galante built Vampire Survivors as a weekend game from an asset pack with no lore; weeks later it drew 50,000 players and he quit his new job.
poncle
What it had to solve
Galante, unemployed in 2020 and previously making flashy graphics for slot machines, kept abandoning projects because he got blocked inventing lore and meaning; he wanted to finally finish something, just for fun.
How it works
In 2020 Luca Galante was unemployed, with a background in flashy graphics for slot machines. He kept abandoning his own game projects, blocked by the need to invent lore, characters and meaning. So for Vampire Survivors he made a rule: stop overthinking, grab random sprites from a Castlevania-inspired asset pack, give them silly names, and focus on gameplay.
The result was a reverse bullet hell — the player only moves while weapons fire automatically and enemies swarm from every direction — inspired by mobile game Magic Survival. He launched it in Steam Early Access in December 2021, asking almost nothing for it and expecting only a small weekend game and community.
In January 2022 a viral video turned it into a phenomenon. SteamDB numbers went from 72 concurrent players on a Thursday in December to over 50,000 by early February. Galante had started a new job the week before and left it the next day, telling NME he 'just felt like I didn't have a choice' — the Early Access page was a promise he could only keep full-time.
The sales let him found poncle and hire friends and experts, shipping 1.0 in October 2022 and a mobile version that passed a million downloads in its first week. The game earned a Game Awards Best Debut Indie nomination and, a year later, a BAFTA Game of the Year win — all from a project built to finally finish something.
Why it lands
- Restricting scope to one verb (move) made the game completable by one person in his spare time.
- Deliberately skipping lore and meaning removed the blocker that had killed his earlier projects.
- A cheap Early Access launch invited players in early, turning a community into the QA and word-of-mouth engine.
- Letting fun win over polish — 'ugly to look at but really fun to play' — kept development fast.
- Saying yes to the viral moment (quitting the job, hiring help) converted luck into a durable studio.
What it did
Concurrent players went from 72 in December to over 50,000 by early February 2022; sales funded a company (poncle), hires and a 1.0 launch that October; the mobile release netted over a million downloads in its first week and the game earned a Game Awards Best Debut Indie nomination.
What you can take
Finishing beats perfecting: one developer shipped a random-looking prototype, let players find it, and turned feedback into a genre — shipped unpolished beats polished and unsent.
Since then
Galante's bet on riding the wave paid off: poncle grew into a small studio, shipped paid DLC such as Legacy of the Moonspell and Ode to Castlevania, ported the game to Switch, Xbox and mobile, and kept iterating with free updates. In March 2023 Vampire Survivors won BAFTA's Game of the Year, and Galante described the success as '1,000 times' beyond his expectations — while still claiming he has no idea why people love it.
Sources
- 'Vampire Survivors' creator Luca Galante talks quitting his job to fulfil his promise
- Will Vampire Survivors Ever Have an Actual Vampire? We Asked the Creator
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