Luca Galante

Who Luca Galante is

Luca Galante is the creator of Vampire Survivors and the founder of poncle, the studio that develops and publishes it. poncle's own press material describes the studio as founded by Luca Galante, and the same wording, used in a release dated 6 June 2026, says that what started as a solo project by Luca Galante during the pandemic grew into a wider international team. A poncle release dated 21 June 2023 adds that he developed Vampire Survivors as a pandemic pastime after working on a series of HTML5 projects.

His own byline appears on platform-holder pages. Xbox Wire published a post on 10 November 2022 announcing that the game had joined Xbox Game Pass for Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and it opens with his introduction: My name is Luca Galante, and I'm the creator of Vampire Survivors. In the same post he wrote that he began the game as a lockdown project and that after he put it on PC thousands of people started playing, then millions, which he said he had not expected.

Quick facts

Steam's store page for Vampire Survivors lists poncle as both developer and publisher, gives a release date of 20 October 2022 and an Early Access release date of 17 December 2021, and records the v0.1.0 build as released on itch.io on 31 March 2021. A poncle press release dated 21 June 2023 states that he founded the studio and that it is based in London. In an Xbox Wire interview published on 20 November 2025 he is introduced as Poncle founder and CEO. A poncle press release dated 6 June 2026 again describes the studio as founded by Luca Galante.

How did Luca Galante start Vampire Survivors?

Official accounts place the start of the game in the pandemic and treat it as his own work. The poncle release of 6 June 2026 says the studio's story began as a solo project by Luca Galante during the pandemic. The release of 21 June 2023 says he developed Vampire Survivors as a pandemic pastime with the stated aim of improving his skills as a developer, and describes the studio at that point as a small game dev studio. Neither release names a month or a year in which he began.

The store page dates the first public builds. Steam records v0.1.0 for itch.io on 31 March 2021 and for Steam on 17 December 2021, with the full release on 20 October 2022 and poncle named as developer and publisher. Summing up the game's first year in his Xbox Wire post of 10 November 2022, he said he had spent the previous year working on the game, adding extra content, quality of life improvements, easter eggs and silly jokes, and that all of those updates would be included in the Xbox version.

What has Luca Galante said about poncle's next games?

Platform-holder interviews still put him at the head of the studio. Xbox Wire's post of 20 November 2025 covered the world premiere of Vampire Crawlers at an Xbox Partner Preview broadcast and introduced him as Poncle founder and CEO. In that interview he described the game as just a spin-off of Vampire Survivors, hopefully the first in a series, and said the aim was to apply the core pillars behind Vampire Survivors, which he listed as accessibility, immediacy, affordability and replayability, to existing genres.

He also described when that spin-off began and what follows it. The project started shortly after the initial success of Vampire Survivors, he said, and had been in the works for almost four years by November 2025. Asked about a sequel to Vampire Survivors, he answered that the studio was working on something but was not talking about it yet. He said Vampire Crawlers was planned as a whole game with a global release rather than another Early Access title, and that it was expected in 2026.

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