Andreas Firnigl started his career as a tester on Big Mutha Truckers, way back on Gamecube. He founded Nosebleed Interactive almost 15 years ago as CEO and creative director.
In 2023, an old contact I had worked with 15 years ago – and who is now at Poncle – came to us with the amazing opportunity to collaborate on a Vampire Survivors spin-off.
Luca Galante, the creator of Vampire Survivors, had come up with the idea for a card game spin-off and had already developed an early prototype, but Poncle wanted an external studio to help turn it into a complete game. So lead designer Luke Wintflint and I worked with Luca and Poncle to evolve that idea into what became Vampire Crawlers.
After 15 years making games and working with other studios, Nosebleed Interactive has learnt a lot about how to treat someone else’s IP and how to collaborate with external partners. We learnt even more on Crawlers, and I want to share some key lessons that you can take away and apply at your own studio.
Show you understand the IP
Naturally, understanding the IP you are working on is vital. Yet it’s even more important to demonstrate to the client that you understand it.
I’ve put a stupid amount of hours into Vampire Survivors in order to understand all the little nuances and tics that most people won’t notice. This kind of intense playing helps you to understand what is changeable and what is not. Some things will be fundamental to the experience and will have to be incorporated, while others are things that, frankly, players don’t care about all that much. Knowing what can and can’t be changed is a sign you are working on something you understand, rather than doing a half-arsed superficial imitation.
The fundamentals of Vampire Crawlers came together very quickly. A pen and paper version that we played in the pub during the early days of development was surprisingly close to the final game. However, in those early months, we paid less attention to the IP and were instead focused on adding content, throwing in random stuff willy-nilly as a placeholder. We knew it would be quick and easy to fix later on, and knew enough about the IP to do it right – but Poncle didn’t.
We had the bones of a great game, but it wasn’t clear to Poncle that we had a good Vampire Survivors game. So we downed tools on everything else and focused on fixing that – making sure all the names were right, matching up how stats would transfer from Survivors to Crawlers, and so on. As soon as Poncle saw the next build, they gave us the green light.
In short, do that work of understanding your partner’s IP – but make sure you show them you have that understanding, too.
Embrace a bit of ignorance
Fans of the IP will naturally be interested in playing your new game, but you also need to make sure it works for people who don’t know the original title. This is why it’s important to get feedback from people who haven’t played the IP at all.
There were a couple of people at Nosebleed who hadn’t played Vampire Survivors, and rather than encouraging them to try the game, we asked them to avoid playing it at all. Having some folks on the team who are coming in clean, as it were, was a real help to balance the onboarding, which is so important in this kind of game. Relying too much on knowledge of the existing IP could make it less attractive to new players.
Forget what you know
Your partner is working with you because you have something to bring to the table (there’s certainly a lot of Nosebleed’s DNA in Vampire Crawlers). So lean into your strengths – but be humble. Be prepared to learn from how your partner works, and what works for their IP.
Before Crawlers, we’d just come off Arcade Paradise, where the density of every pixel had to be exactly correct. Would Poncle do that? No.
We asked them about fancy attack animations. Their response? “Nah, we don’t need those, just flip the sprites around and move them forward a second.” That’s what works for this IP.
Once you are prepared to forget your assumptions of what is important and how games should be made, it frees you up to focus on what matters for that IP.
Speak face to face
Unless you’re in the unlikely scenario where a partner gives you an IP and says, “Do whatever you want with it, we don’t care,” you’re going to have some degree of feedback process.
Emails, Slack and all that stuff has its place, but I can’t emphasise enough the importance of face-to-face video calls, or even in-person meet ups. You can feel when someone is getting excited and you know you’re on the right track. You can also feel when they are resistant, and you can ask them why. Either way, that direct back and forth often generates the best ideas.
We were in regular contact with Luca from start to finish, and that benefitted the game massively. One specific example of how our regular face-to-face communication paid off was during a lunchtime meeting late in development. Luca said, “We don’t have a publisher breathing down our necks, we haven’t announced a release date. I know the game is great right now, but we could make it even better.”
I knew our producer Gordon Bell would be crying at the prospect of us adding things to a nearly finished game, but we discussed how the game could be improved. That lunchtime conversation led to the development of the Gems system, and the game is far better for having it.
Intent is what matters
I’ve already explained why you should be prepared to learn from your partners, but there will still be times when you think something isn’t working or isn’t quite the right approach. This might be a specific suggestion from your partner, or it might be about trying to transfer something from their IP.
The key to dealing with these situations is to forget the “thing” itself and instead think about the intent. Why are we doing it like this? What is it you want the player to feel? What do you want the end result to be? That way, if the “thing” is creating some kind of friction with the game’s other moving parts, you can mould it into something with the same intent that satisfies the game’s needs in a more coherent way.
Create a unified vision
We’ve covered identifying the core pillars of an IP that can’t be deviated from and finding where your wriggle room is. But then there are two things you need to do. The first is to communicate where you are heading. It’s easy enough to say “we are making a card game based on Vampire Survivors,” but how should the game feel, and why?
Many deckbuilders are about slow, thoughtful, strategic play, but that approach is fundamentally opposed to the ethos of Vampire Survivors, with its incredibly low barrier to entry. Once the whole team understood that we were making a game that was supposed to hit the same beats as Vampire Survivors rather than being a typical deckbuilder, we saw huge leaps. Making sure everyone understands where they’re heading and why they’re doing things in certain ways is crucial.
The second and probably most important thing is to give everyone in your team a stake in that vision. “Here’s what we are doing, now get on with it for the next two and a half years” is a very boring way to work. The whole studio needs to be energised and enthused by what they’re creating.
Giving the team real ownership of what they’re working on will give you a much better end product. In other words: “Here’s the boundaries within which we’ve got to stay, here’s where we have flexibility, here’s what we want to achieve, and here’s some problems we need to solve. How do you think we should do this?”
You’re going to get the best out of a team if they have the freedom and flexibility to really make the project theirs. When the ball is in their court, they can come up with answers to your questions rather than being told what to do. That’s where the magic really happens.
