BLOOD MONEY

Luca Galante remembers clearly the first time Vampire Survivors was copied. "It was immediate," he says. "Even before the game got popular." At the time, he took it as a compliment.

- BY JULIAN BENSON

After all, this was a game made years after Galante had given up any hope of working in the game industry, and one he'd prototyped over the course of a single afternoon. It was inspired by auto-shooter mobile games, which he was playing a lot at the time. "These games had something interesting about them – the auto-attacking, the very simple controls – but they were terrible," he says. "They were super-frustrating to play because they were full of advertisements. You had to play very short rounds, and then immediately they would try to sell you something." And so Galante decided to make one of his own.

After combining his initial prototype with a Castlevania-themed sprite pack he'd bought online, he "fell in love with what I saw on screen". This was a new experience for Galante. Normally, when prototyping game ideas, "I'd get tired of them when I saw the system working," he says. "The moment that I need to start writing support for big data structures, for basically creating the tools to add more content, I usually lose most of my motivation." In this case, though, he kept returning to his project. "Every day, I'd just add a little something."

Galante was pleased enough with the result to publish an early version on Itch.io in October 2021, and shared it on the Discord server for Phaser, the HTML5 framework he'd used to make the game. "I was just showing people what I was doing, what they could do with it," he explains. "One person was super-inspired, and they started to make their own version. It was very cool to see someone take the game so much. But those were the early days, where people were inspired for real."

Things soon changed. Galante likens it to a "gold rush," with copycat stages developed by the millions. Unless his game has racked up. This isn't a new phenomenon, of course: the success of Hay Day