How Vampire Survivors Made Me Rethink The Concept of the "Core Gameplay Loop"

I first saw Vampire Survivor as demoed on Northernlion’s youtube channel and it struck me as “just another game”. The gameplay looked simplistic, the art looked rough, and the concept didn’t seem like a very big innovation. I didn’t really look at it with any seriousness until I saw “20 Minutes Till Dawn” and “Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde”. That’s when it occurred to me: this is kinda a big deal. Vampire Survivors only hit the internet in late 2021 and already it has many clones, often by relatively new studios, sometimes even veteran studios. These studios either decided that this should be a trend and would be so big that it was worth the months of development to try and ship a competitor, or were themselves so infatuated with Survivors’ concept that they needed to try their own ideas.

Point is, this game is a pretty big deal and I don’t think I’m alone in having initially thought this game didn’t look like much. Its core gameplay loop seems hilariously simplistic: kill enemies to get gems to gain experience, level up, and kill more enemies. One could probably describe very well-respected roguelites like Slay the Spire and Rogue Legacy the same way, but I think many would also point out the boss battles, the lore, and how skill-based those games feel. I want to put a pin in the skill part for now and focus on bosses and lore, which are not necessarily a part of the core loop, but I think are key to understanding Vampire Survivors.

It took me quite a while to understand Vampire Survivors on a level deeper than “some people find ‘bullet heaven’ fun” and that led me to question the utility of thinking of core gameplay loops as simple loops.

I usually hear this discussed in terms of micro and macro; micro being what you’re doing now and macro being what will happen soon. For Vampire Survivors, the micro would be the loop I described above, but the macro is a bit more interesting. When you go into a stage, you might have a goal such as “explore a specific part of the map,” or “collect gold,” the meta-progression resource. You might be completing a challenge which will unlock some new content upon completion, some of which are to “evolve” a weapon (upgrade a weapon to the max level while having a specific item in your inventory). To accomplish this goal, you might have a specific build in mind. But just having goals or higher level objectives doesn’t seem like enough for a game to  be special. What’s the secret? It takes a moment to explain…

At the start of the game, you have just one weapon and every time you level up, you might gain an additional weapon which changes your build, get an item which enhances the build, or upgrade a weapon which scales your damage. As time goes on, waves get stronger and you need these upgrades in order to match your damage output to keep up with the enemy spawn rate which is also increasing over time, or at least be able to outrun them. On a good run, at some point, you will have outpaced the spawn rate and just mow enemies down–what is often referred to as “bullet heaven”, and from then on the player is unlikely to lose until the timer expires and the reaper comes out. Even from a very simple mechanical base, Vampire Survivors is able to evoke a number of different emotions in the player at different stages. It creates different feelings across each stage which makes them feel more compelling, less monotonous.

This is what I really missed when I looked at Vampire Survivors before, and what shows me the flaw of viewing a core gameplay loop as just a loop. You could look at it as a spiral, too. As the game continues, the loop of kill -> collect -> level -> kill changes and recontextualizes over time. At first, you are weak, but enemies are infrequent, collecting EXP is slow. As you gain another weapon, your ability to chase down enemies increases and you can gain EXP a little faster. Eventually the enemies start to come in faster than the player can kill them and there’s this push and pull as you need to run away to not get killed, but you also need to circle around to collect the EXP they drop. After a few level ups, you get a weapon evolved and become overpowered and nothing can touch you. Leveling up goes from just trying to gather a few extra weapons so you don’t get outpaced to trying to optimize the damage output as quickly as possible and trying to set up evolutions, to maximizing your weapons, to finalizing the build, and finally just cleaning up whatever upgrades are left to collect. Every part of the loop changes as you progress through the game and so after going a few cycles through it, you find yourself not actually in the same place as where you started.

I’ll refer to this as the “core gameplay spiral”; the way that iterations around a core gameplay loop alters the dynamics as the game changes over time or just in general progresses. By breaking the ideas of the core loop, progression systems, and time apart, it becomes harder to understand how they relate to each other and especially treating the core gameplay loop as static discourages understanding how it evolves over time. The core actions you’re doing never change, but how they feel does change, as do the dynamics they create. I further posit that games will probably, generally, be more interesting when their core loop is not static, and this extends to meta-progression, too. 

The one backtrack I have to make is that the “core gameplay loop” is typically only a mechanics-deep analysis that does not consider extraneous elements like dynamics or progression. So maybe saying “core spiral” isn’t a great name because it suggests that the spiral is just the core loop unraveled. It is not, they are separate concepts for different layers of abstraction.

Earlier, I did briefly mention that I think one aspect of Vampire Survivors that might lead some to disregard it is that it appears to have a low skill floor;  that is the minimum amount of skill required to be proficient at a game. Even the skill ceiling doesn't seem particularly high. But I  hope it’s clear that this doesn’t actually matter very much since the progression of the core gameplay loop more than makes up for this. Both “Spirit Hunters: Infinite Horde” and “20 Minutes Till Dawn” add much more skill-based elements with their faster gameplay and “20 Minutes” even requiring that you manually fire your gun, yet I feel they just miss the point. Their core loops are static in comparison to Vampire Survivors. In “Spirit Hunters”, the stats of weapons can change, but the weapons themselves change very little, they don’t evolve, and only occasional pets will give global bufs to your hero. Every round has largely the same goal: collect gems (the meta-progression currency) to unlock more on the web (a very large skill tree, essentially). “20 Minutes”  has more characters and weapons to unlock and you can freely mix and match them, but there is less to unlock, it all unlocks fairly quickly; and since you manually control the weapon and it always fires bullets from the same point, there are just less dramatic changes to the core loop throughout each run. They are both good games and some may prefer one or both over Vampire Survivors, but in my opinion they aren’t quite at the same level.

The insight I have gained from this analysis is that when I’m thinking about my own designs, I want to think primarily about this core gameplay spiral. One with a simple loop at its base that is expanded as the player spends time in the game and creates different dynamics at different points along the spiral. And what I want to avoid is thinking of the gameplay loop, micros and macros, and progression systems as parallel entities. As a practical example, while working on a deckbuilder roguelite, I asked myself “why does picking the second card feel different from picking the first?” and after doing so, I’d realized it did not. I had the progression systems, the loops, and all the features I thought made a good game, but I didn’t have decisions properly compounding on each other and thinking about how the loop should change over time pushed me to make some significant changes to my mechanics, hopefully for the better. And so I hope that this analysis might similarly help others see their own projects in a different way, ask the right questions, and find better solutions.

Game Design as a Dialogue

Media criticism is one of my favorite uses of Youtube and somehow, the platform unearthed a really great set of critics to choose from, for movies. There are  Lindsay ellis , Folding Ideas, Filmento, CJ the X, Filmento, etc., but in games we have far fewer. GMTK is the current gold standard, then there are  Adam Millard, Design Doc, Dunkey, Noah Cadwell, Psych of Play, and a few others strewn here and there. Furthermore, comparing channels focussing on game design or analysis vs movies and books, I always felt something was missing.

For a case study of good media criticism, I want to look at Lindsay Ellis’s video essay, “That Time Disney Remade Beauty and the Beast”. The essay discusses the history of Beauty and the Beast, differences in adaptations, social context, political context, how it fits within the Disney brand and how this impacted the motivations of the film, thus creative choices in its development. Then, with all this context, when we arrive at what is the core issues that Ellis takes with the plot, we not only gain a greater understanding of how the creative decisions affected the piece as a whole. but how those decisions form part of a dialogue that extends beyond the movie itself, This grants us new insights on the film and the culture that produced it.

It’s this dialogue that I feel is most absent from discussion of video game criticism and analysis. Many channels discussing design of a specific topic in games, like jumping physics, will happily discuss all the different ways jump physics may be implemented, and how that affects the way in which the different games play, much more rare is a discussion of the dialogue between different designers and between game makers and players of different games and how and why they chose different jump physics. The kind of analysis seen most often serves as more of a collection of useful ideas and it’s left up to the watcher to pick among the options they like. While this kind of content is unambiguously good and we could use more of it, we also deserve deeper analysis that engages with the larger dialogue, not just describes its existence. The problem is that without engaging in this dialogue, the viewer does not gain insights they could not have otherwise gained by just being aware of the games being discussed.

For an example, I’d like to use Design Doc’s “How Do You Improve Turn Based Combat?”. This video serves as a good 101 course in understanding what kinds of turn based systems have been experimented with and various ideas in it. DD does a good job of talking about how the systems work and how they affect the player, and what components go into turn based combat design. Again, this is unambiguously good content, but it doesn’t contain entirely novel ideas that add to the discourse or do much to explain why one game might have chosen one system over another.

For contrast, Hbomberguy’s (Harris Michael Brewis) more focussed video, “Bloodborne Is Genius, And Here's Why” is one if the most influential discussions of game design, for me, personally. The central bit that always stuck out was his story of a friend of a friend who didn’t so much get the Dark Souls games, but perhaps learned to play them differently by Bloodborne conditioning them to approach them in a new way. This led to them having more fun. Through this story, we gain some insight that the way we play can affect our  enjoyment of a game, and the how a game is structured can impact how we play. To get to this point, Brewis discusses the history of Dark Souls, how it relates to other games, personal motivations and ideas about games, references other works and discussions of game design. Importantly, one point I really don’t want to overlook is how Brewis includes the player in the dialogue by referencing how other players respond to Bloodborne and relate to it rather than speaking entirely from their singular perspective.

To add my own critique to the pool, I want to talk a bit about dodge/parry canceling and why it’s a very important, but frequently omitted feature of action games and Dark Souls (DS) in particular. DS is so synonymous with “difficult” that it is often considered the defining feature and almost any difficult game is inevitably compared to it. Hidetaka Miyazaki allegedly didn’t set out to make a hard game, telling metro.co.uk in an interview, however

“I personally want my games to be described as satisfying rather than difficult. As a matter of fact, I am aiming at giving players sense of accomplishment in the use of difficulty.”

As Noah Cadwell points out in their video, “I Beat the Dark Souls Trilogy and All I Made Was This Lousy Video Essay”, the series is more inviting to players of all skill ranges than the “git gud” crowd seems to think. 

As a game synonymous with “difficult”, difficult games seem to have taken some of its design ideas from DS. The one I find most puzzling is the omission of dodge and parry canceling or even the omission of parrying altogether, not because DS doesn’t have parrying, but because it’s underutilized. 

In DS, attacking involves patience, planning, spacing, and strategy because starting an attack locks you into its animation which can only be canceled after its active frames have completed. This gives DS a slower, more deliberate pace in contrast to the twitch reflex feel of more action-oriented games.

For twitch-based action games, dodge canceling encourages more aggressive behavior from the player since they can always hit the “get out of danger” button at any time. To incentivise more skilled, less risk-averse play, games like Beyonetta reward the player specifically for dodging at just the right time with some slow-mo where the player can deal significant damage before the enemy can respond. YS VIII gives slow-mo for perfect dodges and temporary invincibility for perfect parries and allows players to potentially have both buffs at once. A well-timed dodge feels good any day of the week, but many designers seem to have wanted to embellish this feeling with extra mechanical satisfaction.

When FromSoftware made Sekiro after DS3, dodge and parry canceling were indeed features, but the game had a different aesthetic. DS featured a dark, sinister, and cruel world where punishing the player for impatient and poorly-timed attacks added to this dark aesthetic. You are a nobody; a simple, clumsy soldier facing foes far above your weight class. While Sekiro features a similarly dark world, you play as a named protagonist with a refined fighting style, use stealth when it suits you, picking when and how to attack. DS wants you to feel powerless, Sekiro wants you to feel powerful and so it gives you a dodge cancel, even giving a high-damage, cinematic counter attack for a perfect parry.

Yet, many contemporary action games such as Death’s Door and Sifu are missing this. Why? Death’s Door in particular has combo strings where every attack in the string uses the same animation and the string is of an arbitrary length determined by the weapon’s upgrade level and cannot be canceled out of. The most I ever heard about why the combat system was designed the way was just a snippet from a noclip documentary where one of the team said for this kind of game, you want faster, instant attacks compared to some other games. Was dodge cancellation discussed and omitted for specific reasons? Would the game be better or worse with it? Is this a holdover from Dark Souls’ legacy as part of some anti-dodge canceling movement in game design or an isolated decision?

Now, I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m negging on Death’s Door’s omission of dodge canceling for no reason, but I do think it’s an interesting example of a lacking in the discourse surrounding game design. When I hear people discuss the game, people will often reference the story, funny writing, art, music, creative bosses, and presentation while spending little time discussing the combat despite players spending a large portion of the game immersed in battles. And that’s kind of interesting in its own right. Perhaps the combat is as good as it needs to be, but not really a central focus of the player’s enjoyment, or perhaps the other elements of the game are just that good. That in itself gives us some ideas about what might be most important to players and how they view games. But designers spend a lot of time deliberating over small decisions like what features to include, what are must-haves and what might be stretch goals, and trying to figure out if they matter–if so, why?

Personally, I think the absence of dodge rolling in Death’s Door is interesting because it follows a trend in contemporary action games, but also in that it might suggest its roots in 2D Zelda games. Sifu references older beat ‘em up while feeling very modern (despite also feeling like PS2’s God Hand). Both games fit into modern gaming as having retro inspiration with modern twists, asking us to look back at gaming’s past to see if there’s anything we’ve missed before we continue forward.

This brings me to why I decided to write this piece. A dialogue exists between designers and between designers and players, but it is all too often not spoken. Someone makes a game, another developer sees this and is inspired to make their own, borrowing or stealing ideas, adding new ones, and over time the craft matures. Players develop an aesthetic sense of pleasurable and unpleasurable experiences, they discuss them on social media, they buy games or they don’t. This dialogue permeates all of gaming culture and the games industry, influencing what game makers make and what gamers play. Yet, when we discuss individual game design decisions, we often discuss them in a vacuum rather than as a part of a complex web of desires, motivations, aspirations, and ideas that play off each other. Every decision a games studio makes, from the color of a health bar to the nuances of the mechanics, are a part of a story that extends back to pong and further, and will continue being written as long as people make games.

So, when looking at a game and appreciating that it is fun, or has generally high production values, or just is interesting in some way, I would encourage the reader to think about this game as part of this greater dialogue. What does it say about how games should work? What does it add to the discussion? What may be left out? What were the intentions of the designer and what kind of experience did they want players to have?