Vampire Hunters was a pleasant surprise when it dropped late last year on the Nintendo Switch. I personally awarded it 86/100, praising it for its addictive gameplay loop and well-thought-out mechanics, essentially combining Unreal Tournament with Vamprie Survivors, while displaying all of your weapons on screen. I enjoyed Vampire Hunters so much, that I reached out to Tiago Zaidan from Gamecraft Studios to ask a bit more about the development journey, where the idea came from, and what’s next for the studio…
Vampire Hunters is such a unique idea. How did it come about?
Hi Joshua, first of all, thank you for the invitation to this interview. It’s a pleasure.
Vampire Hunters was conceived at the beginning of 2022 during an internal game jam we held at Gamecraft Studios. The main idea behind Vampire Hunters was to incorporate the beloved gameplay mechanics from Vampire Survivors into a different genre, specifically, an FPS. We believed that an old-school FPS would be a perfect fit for this concept.
What games influenced the development of Vampire Hunters?
The two most obvious influences are Vampire Survivors and Doom, but we also drew a lot of inspiration from COD Zombies, Serious Sam, and Killing Floor. During development, we were additionally influenced by other survivors games like Soulstone Survivors and Brotato.
There appeared to be a sudden change in direction mid-development from VH Classic to the survival mode we have today. What led to that change?
The original version we released in Early Access featured a corridor-like gameplay mode, now called Classic Mode. During prototyping, it made more sense to have the gameplay focused on moving forward due to the sheer number of monsters players faced. However, after the Early Access release, many players requested an arena-style gameplay mode where you could move freely.
We took everything we had learned up to that point while developing Vampire Hunters and prototyped an arena-style gameplay mode. It worked fantastically, so we released it as Survivors Mode. After that, more people started playing the game, and they loved it even more. We became confident that we had made the right choice.
Did you always want to make a Switch port of Vampire Hunters, or was it something that came up after the PC version was done?
Our plan from the beginning was to launch Early Access on Steam and then release a Console + Steam 1.0 version. We were extremely happy when we managed to achieve that goal.
How long did the Switch port take?
About four months. We handled all the porting internally and worked on all consoles simultaneously. It was a lot of work!
Speaking of Switch, what’s your go-to game that’s not Vampire Hunters?
Nintendo-exclusive games have a special place in my heart, especially Zelda games.
What challenges did you face when porting to the Switch, considering the hardware limitations? How did you overcome them?
The main challenge was optimization. We were already expecting this challenge and there was a lot of programming involved to overcome it. In the end, many of the optimizations we implemented for the Switch were also applied to other platforms, which turned out to be a great improvement to the game.
Was there anything you wanted to include in Vampire Hunters that ended up on the cutting room floor?
We wanted to create a game mode similar to COD Zombies. We did a lot of prototyping but couldn’t find a way to make it as fun as we envisioned.
If you could collaborate and cross over with any other game, what would it be?
It would be super fun to include some Serious Sam weapons and monsters in Vampire Hunters.
What’s next for Tiago and GameCraft Studios?
Right now, we’re focusing on post-release support for Vampire Hunters, and we plan to continue that for some time. We’re also prototyping our new game, and we couldn’t be more excited about it.
How can gamers support GameCraft Studios?
The best way to support us is by playing our games and sharing them with your friends. It’s really hard to reach gamers nowadays, so word of mouth helps us immensely.
Thank you for your time Tiago! For those looking to try Vampire Hunters for themselves, you can check out the Eshop Link here – Vampire Hunters/Nintendo Switch/eShop Download