Character Selection: seven survivors, Mortaccio and his bone

About this game

Developer: poncle · Publisher: poncle · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Pixel art · Screen type: Character / Unit Detail

More Vampire Survivors screens in the Gallery

What to study

Vampire Survivors sets up a run with a phone book, not a build planner. Seven survivors are presented as portrait cards with a starting-weapon icon, and the only explanation anywhere on the screen is one sentence in the footer about the highlighted character, Mortaccio gets more projectiles every 20 levels. That restraint is the design: because weapons fire themselves and the player only moves, a character is honestly described by a picture, a starting weapon and a single passive rule, and the screen refuses to pretend there is more to decide. The same panel layout, title, gold purse, BACK, footer detail strip, is reused for the Collection and PowerUp screens in this trailer, so one learned frame carries the whole menu system. Frame at about 0:15 in the December 2021 - Early Access Release trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the panel is held settled, but the scene-change pass never fired on it). The Refreshed Trailer shows this screen's expanded modern form (a much larger roster flanked by a full stat column and a stage list) only as a zoomed pan whose edges are cropped; it is held as an alternate in the prep notes, and this complete Early Access state was kept instead.

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

portrait-grid roster-list detail-panel

Components

Parts on screen.

Card Menu Grid Data table Portrait

Screen inventory

• one centred slate-blue panel on the red-moon menu background: the title 'Character Selection', a gold purse reading 21883 at top centre and a single red BACK button at top right, the whole pre-run flow is this one panel
• seven character cards in two rows, Antonio, Imelda, Pasqualina, Gennaro, then Arca, Porta, Mortaccio, each card carrying only three things: the name, a large pixel portrait, and the icon of that character's starting weapon beside the portrait (a whip, a magic wand, a bone)
• Mortaccio, the skeleton with a small gold halo, is the selected card, marked by four small gold corner brackets, selection is a frame, not a highlight colour or a cursor arrow
• the footer strip repeats the selection as a detail card: Mortaccio's portrait, his bone icon, one plain sentence of rules text, 'Gets more projectiles every 20 levels.', and a green Confirm button; the card grid above never carries stats, the footer is where a choice is explained
• there are no attribute tables, no difficulty labels and no stage picker on this screen: in the Early Access build a run is set up by picking a person and reading one sentence about them

Top 3 colors

#0a0101 23%#4f506e 22%#450503 17%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© poncle, Vampire Survivors screenshot: Steam trailers (Refreshed Trailer / October 2022 - v1.0 Trailer / December 2021 - Early Access Release), poncle, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by poncle.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-24. verified 2026-10-24: manual extraction manual-character-selection-15.png @ ~15s in the December 2021 - Early Access Release trailer, MD5 7041bfb8a1950d008c8218057225aab9, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (21,040,322 B, MD5 b109e489d7cea1ef7c9a45cdc3034672; full decode to null exit 0, zero error lines, decode-steam-1794680-December-2021-Early-Access-Release.mp4.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the Character Selection title, all seven names (Antonio / Imelda / Pasqualina / Gennaro / Arca / Porta / Mortaccio), the 21883 purse, BACK button, Mortaccio footer text and green Confirm button all legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-24); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.