“There was a story about the first time one of them had pitched the vampire idea to the rest of. That was around the time that Castlevania season one had come out, and people were just super into Dracula already, so they did a bunch of research and got super into it.” And then a little bit later down the line, the idea of vampires occurred to someone. “After experimenting around a little pitching some ideas, people said that they wanted to do something survival-y.

On how Stunlock Studios came up with the idea for V Rising, Fielding points to two big milestones: watching the first season of Netflix‘s Castlevaniaand eating veggie burgers. That way you don’t feel deceived, and I think that’s important – trust is super important.” We wanted to tell you exactly what you would be getting, and then when you get there, you get more of it. “People don’t want to feel like they’re being lied to, and a lot of gamers today feel like that – they feel like companies are just trying to trick them. “We were all pretty confident with the idea because the last thing you want to do in this space is deceive people,” says Fielding. Underselling V Rising may seem like a bold move – Fielding admits that gaming is “such a competitive space” right now – but Stunlock Studios was reluctant to make “impossible promises” to land sales. “I think that really played well for us, especially as an Early Access game – people didn’t expect us have as much content as we did, which surprises us because that was actually something we were worried about,” explains Fielding, who adds that V Rising may still hold a few surprises for many players as “there’s some things that I still don’t see people talking about very much, big jump scares in the game that I really love.” We knew what was in our game, and we wanted players to still have secrets to find – we didn’t want to share everything!” “When we went into this, we had the idea in marketing that we wanted to under promise and over deliver. Though Fielding may not have expected V Rising to take off in the way it did – “I guess the word of mouth was just really strong!” he exclaimed during the interview – he says that Stunlock Studios deliberately avoided hyping the game up to excess. I think it would have been ridiculous for us to expect the sort of response we got – we’re super happy!”

We thought we had done a good job, and we knew that we would find an audience, but the sheer scale of the response was way more than we could have ever expected. “We had faith that our game is good and we were happy with our efforts with marketing. READ MORE: ‘Occupy White Walls’: the art-minded game breaking open the gallery doors.Speaking to NME, Stunlock Studios‘ community manager Jeremy Fielding says that although the development team knew V Rising was something special, they had no idea just how well it would do. It took just one week in Early Access for this survival game to sell a million copies, and that number has now more than doubled. The survival genre has sunk its fangs into Steam for years, but last month’s vampire-themed smash hit V Rising may have taken one of the bloodiest bites yet.

When does v rising come out