Riding the wave: how Game Smithing managed to surf on the success of Vampire Survivors

Right game, right time. Soulstone Survivors arrived in Steam Early Access just as the wave of hype for Poncle’s Vampire Survivors was peaking in 2022.

When players were casting around for similar games to Poncle’s surprise hit, Soulstone Survivors was waiting, ready to receive them.

Nearly three years on, Soulstone Survivors has just emerged from Early Access. Now that the hype has subsided, the player counts are nowhere near where they were during that explosive 2022 debut – but they remain highly respectable nonetheless. And the game has sold over 1 million copies in total, garnering more than 21,000 Steam reviews in the process, along with a Very Positive rating.

Allan Smith, the founder of Soulstone Survivors studio Game Smithing, talked GamesIndustry.biz through how he was successfully able to leap on a trend – and the brutal effort it took.

Origins

Smith is based in the UK, but originally hails from Brazil. “My father is British,” he says, by way of explaining his untypically Brazilian name.

He’s been in the industry for around 13 years, starting fresh out of college. “I studied game design, and at the time in Brazil, finding a job in games was not easy,” he says. “So we got whatever little savings we had, and started trying to make mobile games.”

Smith helped to found Fire Horse Studio in São Paulo, and his team spent the next six years or so in mobile. “Not because we loved it, but because it felt like the only option for us,” he says. “The whole freemium model is a bit soul crushing.”

In 2018, he moved to the UK to work at Bossa Studios, about a year before the closure of their ambitious MMO, Worlds Adrift. After that, he ended up at another mobile-focused company. “But then they decided to pivot to crypto games, and I thought, ‘That’s the line I don’t want to cross’. Nothing wrong with it, I guess, but it’s just something I’m not interested in at all.”

So, he decided to set up another studio. “I was like, ‘Okay, it’s time I try again now I’m more experienced’.”

Given the sharp contraction of the games industry in 2022, it might not have been the most logical time to start a company. But Smith wasn’t thinking about that. “The move for me was, honestly, very based on emotion,” he says. “It was just what I wanted to do.”

While still working full time, he began developing an action roguelike called Rogue Soulstone during his evenings and weekends. “It was like, I love roguelikes, I love Risk of Rain, I love so many games like this: is there a world where I can make a very simple version of that […] that I can complete pretty much by myself in only a few months?”

“I just wanted to try and keep it as simple as possible, to try to make a game as quickly as I could”

Allan Smith, Game Smithing

“I just wanted to try and keep it as simple as possible, to try to make a game as quickly as I could and go to market, and just see how it goes, and learn from the experience.” If the game performed well, he reasoned, then he would add to it later.

This strategy stemmed from his negative experiences back in Brazil. “We stuck for so long with so many projects, like three, four year development timelines, and then the product would release to see nothing, to see so few downloads,” he recalls.

“And it made me learn that it’s not necessarily just the game, it’s seeing how the public responds, right? It’s really hard to predict. It doesn’t matter how good you think the game is. Maybe it’s not that good. Maybe it just doesn’t resonate.”

Riding the wave

Smith says he had a Steam page and a basic prototype for Rogue Soulstone ready after a month, and he put out a demo a couple of weeks after that. Within three months, the game had been wishlisted around 1,500 times.

But he was worried the game’s scope was becoming too big, too ambitious. He worried whether he was on the right path.

“That’s when Vampire Survivors was all the rage,” he says. “And I thought, you know, maybe I can try and play something more towards Vampire Survivors and see how that goes. Maybe if I take my [code] I have here and make a quick prototype… Let me try, you know, let me not be married to my first idea.”

By reusing code from Rogue Soulstone, Smith had the first prototype of Soulstone Survivors ready within a couple of weeks. “And I had a lot of fun with it. It just felt right. The original game felt like we needed to improve this or that, but this just felt good from the beginning. And that’s when I started to feel like maybe there is something here, you know, maybe this is what the game is supposed to be.”

“We got the demo on Steam in a month, and that was when we saw the magic happening.”

He remembers putting the demo up on a Wednesday night, thinking he would start promoting it the following day on Reddit and Twitter. “And I woke up the next morning, and there were like 1,000 CCU [concurrent users] on the demo. And I was like, ‘What the hell?’ I had no idea how. Obviously that comes from the trend, right, from people looking for other Vampire Survivors games, and there not being a lot of them.”

He thinks the speed of development was crucial to catching that trend. “This was seven months after Vampire Survivors really hit it off. So it’s not like it was immediately, but it’s still not a lot of time.”

It brings to mind the seven-month gap between PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds launching into Early Access in March 2017 and the debut of Fortnite: Battle Royale in September of the same year. If Fortnite had been later to market – launching in 2018, perhaps, at the same time as a deluge of other Battle Royale contenders – would it have become the behemoth it is today?

Brutal hours

But Soulstone Survivor’s speed to market came at a great personal cost. At the start of development, Smith was working 20-hour days.

“It’s not an exaggeration,” he says. “It was really insane hours, insane hours. I don’t recommend it, but it felt like it was what was necessary. To be really honest with you, the way I felt, and I still feel today, is I knew how lucky I was to have this chance, to have this many players looking for my game, and it felt like I owed it to them, you know, I needed to do the best I could in the time I had. I remember the last few weeks I would go three days without sleeping.”

Smith was still working at his day job during this time. Even when Soulstone Survivors started to blow up, he didn’t feel like he could quit and abandon his co-workers straight away.

“So there was this period where I was doing my best to help them, but at the same time I would sign off from work at 5, 6pm, and that’s when the journey begins – it’s another eight hours after that.” That pattern went on for five months.

Meanwhile, the game took off like a rocket. “I would see the numbers in disbelief. Like, how is this even possible? And that made me work even harder.”

“My wife, I tell her she was single for a year. She didn’t have a husband, because it was insane.”

How did she feel about that? “She really supports me. She knew how much it meant to me, how much I had worked before to try and get here. This was the dream – still is, to be honest. So she was very supportive, I wouldn’t have been able to do it without her.”

Risks of originality

Smith’s approach of leaping on a trend is the opposite of the strategy recently espoused by publisher Kepler Interactive, of championing highly original titles like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in order to stand out in a crowded market.

But Smith questions the aim of always trying to come up with a “genius idea” that no one has ever done before.

“That’s definitely something possible, but it’s also not only very hard, but very risky. It’s so much riskier to try and do something no one has ever done than trying to think of a formula that you are already familiar with, that you like, that as a developer is something attractive to you, and putting your own twist on it.”

Smith says Soulstone Survivors puts its own spin on the Vampire Survivors concept by offering complex character builds, as well as drawing inspiration from bullet hell shooters and the frantic boss fights of World of Warcraft.

The game’s success is almost completely down to organic growth. “Steam was the main source of traffic by a mile,” says Smith. “We would look at the numbers, and it was pretty much 95% Steam.”

As the initial demo gained traction, it attracted more and more players. “It’s very, very much a positive feedback loop,” Smith says. “The better you’re doing, the better you do.”

Game Smithing was also “super active on Discord” in order to engage with the game’s audience, says Smith. “We had this very prominent link inside the game to Discord, and I was trying to really build this community, trying to really show the players that we’re for real.”

“I think it was easy for players to feel like it was just an asset flip or just a crappy game or whatnot, so I wanted them to know there was a human behind it.”

Much of the publicity came from streamers who stumbled across the game, helping it to amass more than 300,000 Steam wish lists.

It was all down to that positive feedback loop, Smith says, “where this guy plays, and then the other guy sees and he plays, and someone else plays, and that definitely is what carried the game to where it was at the time.”

The wave has crested

The success of the Early Access launch prompted Game Smithing to target consoles as well. The studio did the porting to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S in house, says Smith, “because we wanted to learn the process”, but for publishing on consoles, they brought in Digital Bandidos (now home to former GamesIndustry.biz editor-in-chief James Batchelor).

Smith says he wanted a partner that would make the console publishing process a bit easier, because “there are so many requirements of the certification, and the whole process is a bit elaborate”.

The full version of Soulstone Survivors launched on PC and consoles on June 17, 2025. But Smith says the 1.0 launch was nothing like as big as the Early Access one. The hype wave has long since crested.

“It’s been two-and-a-half years, right? The game is already known for a lot of people. It feels like an old game, I guess, in some ways. The genre is no longer what it used to be, because there are so many games in it.”

“So even though the game is a million times better now than it used to be, it doesn’t attract as many people as it used to.”

Influencers who played Soulstone Survivors during its peak are no longer interested. “They will say, ‘Oh, no, sorry, but I don’t cover these games anymore’,” says Smith. “So some doors are actually closed because of the saturation, even though people enjoy the game.” The streamers are busy looking for the next big thing.

“Some doors are actually closed because of the saturation, even though people enjoy the game”

Allan Smith, Game Smithing

Game Smithing, too, is looking ahead. Smith feels like the work on Soulstone Survivors is pretty much complete. “We developed more stuff than I think the game needs,” he says, noting it has 22 characters and more than 500 skills. “We get comments now saying that the game is bloated.”

The success of the game has allowed Game Smithing to expand to 12 people. Right now, they’re mostly focused on post-launch support for Soulstone Survivors, but Smith says there are plans to revive Rogue Soulstone again.

“It’s still a project I really love. So now we have more people, we have more knowledge, we learned so much from Soulstone Survivors, I think we’ll be able to make a much better game now than we would have in the beginning.”

Whether that game will reach the giddy heights of Soulstone Survivors’ success is another matter. But then, who knows? Maybe there’ll be the chance to catch another wave.