# The survivor-likes we tune ours against > Tag: PLAY · Peer games. Published 2026-06-17 by Tom and Ollie, FOXFIRE developers. Mirrors https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/survivor-likes-we-tune-against/. Tuning a survivor-like means playing every survivor-like you can get your hands on. Five games we keep going back to as reference points, and what each one teaches us when we put it on a screen next to FOXFIRE. --- ## Vampire Survivors — the auto-fire rhythm The reference everyone names. Luca Galante's original is the cleanest study of how to make simple weapon animations feel like they individually have weight and impact rather than being simply fireworks on a screen. **What we take:** the pacing of the first three minutes. Vampire Survivors layers its systems clearly and early — weapons fire, enemies arrive, XP gems drop, level-up offers a choice, enemy formations offer challenge, elite arrives, chest drops — and the player never feels lost because each system arrives as a single new thing to process. **What we don't take:** the frictionless WASD. Vampire Survivors works because movement is a stale machine as old as *Snake*; FOXFIRE bets survivor-like fans want the version where movement is an immersive part of the challenge. --- ## Brotato — build depth as the only progression Brotato's secret is that weapons are differentiated primarily by the decisions they force the player to make. The pistol rewards repositioning, the minigun rewards standing your ground and maintaining fire, and the slingshot rewards timing and target selection. Weapons that initially seem weak become powerful when paired with the right build, and the plethora of stats make for endless theorycrafting. **What we take:** every weapon in FOXFIRE should be the answer to a different question. The Mining Laser is for the player who wants to clear a path. The Ballistic Gun is for the player who likes to even-out their crowd dispersal. The Anchor is for the player who can't stop accelerating and wants to wipe out huge swathes of enemies with sharp turns. **What we don't take:** the arena. Brotato runs are static, un-immersive cubicles with short timers; FOXFIRE runs are boundless exploratory missions. Environmental dangers, fresh enemies and undiscovered lore all await beyond the screen's edge. --- ## Nova Drift — the closest peer in mechanics Justin 'Pixelblade' Stander's arcade-roguelite ship combat game. Thrust-based ships with modular gear that stacks across runs. The closest thing to FOXFIRE's ship-as-toolkit philosophy on the market. **What we take:** thrust physics doesn't have to be punishing. Nova Drift handles inertia generously — new players acclimate to inside a run, and the high-skill ceiling reveals itself through modifier choices rather than pure piloting. FOXFIRE's starter ship embodies that lesson. We added rotation and damping specifically because Nova Drift and play-testing taught us that space-accurate physics-based movement needed to be somewhat tuned for player enjoyment. **What we don't take:** the arena, again, and the modular ship. Nova Drift is a single ship the player customises through runs; FOXFIRE has five distinct ships that don't share parts. --- ## Cobalt Core — run pacing within a roguelite Not a survivor-like — it's here because nobody in the roguelite space has built better run-to-run momentum than Rocket Rat Games. **What we take:** a run should know it's ending before the player does. FOXFIRE's last 100 seconds are the FTL escape window because the run's structural climax should be a beat the player *feels*. **What we don't take:** the deckbuilder layer. Different game. --- ## Halls of Torment — environmental density and threat reading Chasing Carrots took the Vampire Survivors loop and re-tuned it around Diablo's visual language: the screen reads as a place, threats arrive with telegraphs, build pressure forces decisions. **What we take:** the threat-reading model. FOXFIRE's offscreen indicators owe more to Halls of Torment's ranged threats than to any space-sim ancestor. "Things you can't see should still be legible" is a major design goal for FOXFIRE's HUD, and helps create the sense of immense scale that defines good space games. **What we don't take:** the dungeon. FOXFIRE's stages are open space; Halls of Torment's are walled rooms. --- ## What we learned this week Two playtests ago, FOXFIRE's Stage 2 was leaving players in a quiet patch around minute eight. Low spawn pressure, too-spread-out level, level-up rhythm peaked too early. We re-read how each of the five games intervenes to adjust pace at their mid-game equivalents. - Vampire Survivors: opens the evolution window - Brotato: escalates wave intensity, not wave count - Nova Drift: opens a new system tier - Cobalt Core: changes the music - Halls of Torment: introduces offscreen ranged threat that demands repositioning What we did for Stage 2: introduced three beam artillery weapons that fire simultaneously from offscreen, telegraphed across two beats, that the player has to actively hunt or actively dodge. Closer to Halls of Torment than the others. Three more playtests since and the eight-minute slack is gone. That's the work. Test and re-test our game, find the slack, ask what each peer has done. Then take the lessons we can and combine them to engage our players with our own FOXFIRE-flavored twists of existing systems. --- ## Where to look next - https://getfoxfire.com/game/ — FOXFIRE systems overview - https://getfoxfire.com/dispatches/ — Dispatches index - https://store.steampowered.com/app/4714090/FOXFIRE/ — wishlist on Steam Last updated: 2026-06-18