Why Early Access?

“TLDR: Dead Cells is lots of fun right now, Early Access will make it even better. It'll last about 8 - 12 months. We will try to double the content. Right now you have about 16 - 20 hours on average for one playthrough. The price will probably increase during/after the EA. We will work very closely with the community to improve the game.

Now the full version:

Early access is a fantastic way for us to put what is already a fairly solid game in your hands and take the time to turn it into something really special. The Steam community is loaded with experienced rogue-lite fans and we don’t want to miss out on taking advantage of your feedback, suggestions and ideas.

In its current state, the concept and mechanics are definitely far enough along to give the community a good idea about what we want to do with this title. However it’s still early enough for us to catch any mistakes that we might have made, or to take on board new concepts and propositions. This is why we think now is the right time to be part of Early Access.

Fresh perspectives from what we hope will be a bunch of qualified and implicated players? That’s how you take a step back and improve your game, beyond what you could have done all alone in your studio.

Dead Cells is currently in Beta, which means that while it is relatively bug free and feature complete, we’re planning on breaking things and trying out new ideas. Get involved if you like what you see, bring us bug reports, ideas, complaints or cookies.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“We will need at least 8 months to implement everything that we already have planned. Taking into account community feedback and requested features, we could go up to 12 months or even more.

We feel like this is a reasonably accurate estimation of the time we'll need, as we've been working on this iteration of the game for a bit over a year now, starting from the ground up. Of course this is early access, anything could happen and our crystal ball refuses to be drawn on the result of the French elections or the exact date we'll leave Early Access.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“Ultimately we would like to come near to doubling the currently available content. So that means more; levels, enemies, items, bosses and meta skills. The core of the game right now is very fun, the combat is tight and punchy, the difficulty is pretty well balanced and there is a solid amount of variation in monsters and levels.

However we plan to iterate over every aspect of the game until it is as close to perfect as you can get. That means everything is subject to change, we might add; new locked areas that need new powers to access, new weapon classes, new meta game systems, new skins for monsters, basically if it’s not 150% awesome and you let us know, we’ll make it better.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“At day one of the Early Access we have:

• 11 Levels - Each one with varied monsters, level designs and secrets to discover.
  
• 2 Bosses - We're really hoping to do these guys right, so go forth and destroy them.
  
• 50 or so weapons and skills
  
• 2 special powers, for unlocking new areas (metroidvania gear lock items)
  
• 1 Complete, fluid and fun to play combat system
  
• Hours of fun (depending on your skill, anything from 10 to 30 hours or more)
  
• A few rage-quits

In practical terms Dead Cells is an attempt at combining the progressive exploration of a Metroidvania, with the high stakes replayability of a Rogue-lite. Special powers that unlock new areas and paths, secret rooms, big boss battles and character progression, with randomised loot, permadeath, fast paced punishing combat and massive replayability.

On the game design side of things, we've got the monsters, combat and loot system down. All of this takes place in hand designed levels that are proceduraly assembled each run, meaning you never know where the secrets are or exactly where you're going. However we're still building the world you'll be exploring, so you'll be playing regular updates with new levels, bosses and ways to explore the levels and progress through the game. Meaning that the game will only reach its full potential as we keep adding content.

But don’t worry, what you see here is well and truly enough for you to risk losing your job because: “one more run”.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“Yes. We will probably increase the price during or after the early access based on the amount of content available and feedback from the community.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We're looking forward to working with the community on a number of fronts:

Balancing the game:
We want a tough but fair experience. Unjust situations should be hunted down and eliminated. We’re aiming for that sweet spot between a (very) challenging game and a broken controller and we’re counting on the community helping out alot with this.

Suggestions and ideas:
We actively encourage members of the community to contribute their ideas on how to improve the game with new content or design ideas. We have a pretty clear vision of what we want to create, but we'd like to be able to incorporate any awesome ideas we receive from you where possible.

Bug hunting:
We’ve done our best to provide as bug free an experience as we can. However, there will inevitably be crashes or performance issues. Whether they're caused by thousands of players with thousands of different rigs and a gazillion configurations, or just us having a brain fart while coding, we want them bugs! I gotta get me my bugs Morty! I need my bugs MORTY!

Translation:
We are currently investigating ways of letting the community help us translate the game and bring Dead Cells to as many people who want to get involved. More to come on this.

Test Branches:
During the Early Access, two versions of Dead Cells will be available to players. A beta branch will allow the most hardcore of the hardcore to come and test out our latest ideas. It’s here that we’ll do most of our patching and fixing. Once it passes muster we’ll push it to the rest of the community and then clean up any mess that we made coding without coffee.”