Hey all,

Man what a day! We’ve been hard at work getting everything ready to launch the Hand of the King update onto the main branch, thus exposing all the rest of you poor souls to the final major content update before we leave Early Access!

If, like some in Northern England you’ve been buried under 20 foot of snow, your internet down, living by candlelight wondering what’s been happening in the outside world and you missed our last update on what’s new… Then here’s a brief recap:

• New boss! - He’s a real stinker, very little room to maneuver around him, rapid attack patterns and of course stacks of damage.
  
• New level: Originally named “The Castle” it’s all shiny and fit for the habitation of some royal highness. We’ve made up for the bogus name by including some familiar, but interesting enemies.
  
• Nightmare Difficulty: Mouhahaha (Dr Evil style laugh). Ok really it’s a fourth difficulty level designed to induce controller smashing rage in the truly masochistic. You asked, we delivered... Just bear that in mind when you’re holding the smashed remains of your controller in your hands.
  
• Loads more stuff: We’ve updated the roll, shortened a bunch of levels, added more weapons and of course done a bunch of balancing.
  
• Check out the patchnotes here and the previous more detailed beta post here.

For those of you who can’t be bothered reading fiddly patch notes, check out our latest vlog entry! It sums up everything we’ve done for this update and a little of what we’re planning for the next few months (spoiler: polishing, lots of polishing).

https://youtu.be/D7EXiu-jFNs

For anyone who doesn’t like to suffer alone, those who like to share and the real sadists out there… The game is on sale! Tell a friend, lure them in with “oh man the controls are so nice…” then make some popcorn and settle in.

It’ll be 33% off most of this week so get it while it’s hot!


The intrepid DocFirebird has put together a little video for people getting started in the game, or those who might be wanting to start pushing further into the game. Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/RFCN0hGxo8s

Hey all,

Man what a day! We’ve been hard at work getting everything ready to launch the Hand of the King update onto the main branch, thus exposing all the rest of you poor souls to the final major content update before we leave Early Access!

If, like some in Northern England you’ve been buried under 20 foot of snow, your internet down, living by candlelight wondering what’s been happening in the outside world and you missed our last update on what’s new… Then here’s a brief recap:

• New boss! - He’s a real stinker, very little room to maneuver around him, rapid attack patterns and of course stacks of damage.
  
• New level: Originally named “The Castle” it’s all shiny and fit for the habitation of some royal highness. We’ve made up for the bogus name by including some familiar, but interesting enemies.
  
• Nightmare Difficulty: Mouhahaha (Dr Evil style laugh). Ok really it’s a fourth difficulty level designed to induce controller smashing rage in the truly masochistic. You asked, we delivered... Just bear that in mind when you’re holding the smashed remains of your controller in your hands.
  
• Loads more stuff: We’ve updated the roll, shortened a bunch of levels, added more weapons and of course done a bunch of balancing.
  
• Check out the patchnotes here and the previous more detailed beta post here.

For those of you who can’t be bothered reading fiddly patch notes, check out our latest vlog entry! It sums up everything we’ve done for this update and a little of what we’re planning for the next few months (spoiler: polishing, lots of polishing).

https://youtu.be/D7EXiu-jFNs

For anyone who doesn’t like to suffer alone, those who like to share and the real sadists out there… The game is on sale! Tell a friend, lure them in with “oh man the controls are so nice…” then make some popcorn and settle in.

It’ll be 33% off most of this week so get it while it’s hot!


The intrepid DocFirebird has put together a little video for people getting started in the game, or those who might be wanting to start pushing further into the game. Check it out here:

https://youtu.be/RFCN0hGxo8s

Concept by Thomas. 1920 x 1080 version available here

Hey friends,

A little post to let you know that the Alpha bug hunting phase is pretty much over so now is time for the beta balancing phase.

The sixth update, code-name: A four-star Castle according to TripAdvisor, is bringing in a big new chunk of content:

• A whole new level, called the Castle, which is, as the sharpest among you may have guessed from its name, a castle. We know, it’s a very risky choice for an action-platformer, but what can we say? We're all about innovation around here.

Concept by Gwen


Ingame render

• Two new enemies: will provide a suitable distraction while you’re strolling around in the castle, admiring its breathtaking portraits and daring architecture.

Let it gooooooo


We're not safe anywhere these days...

• The HotK (yes, that’s what the cool kids are calling the Hand of the King these days), is the final boss of the game. I won’t lie, he doesn’t go down easily. Try to remember that WE are the culprits before throwing your innocent controller at the wall. Also try to bear in mind that we do love you, in spite of what that boss might lead you to believe.
  
  
• Of course, if the boss isn’t hard enough for you, you will now be able to access the 4-cell “nightmare” difficulty. If you do decide to play on 4 cells, maybe book an appointment with the nearest doctor, because something is definitely not right with you.

• Colour balancing: the HP you get when collecting a scroll depends on the colour; Survival will get you more HP than Brutality, which will give you less HP than Tactics. Also, the grenades are now Brutality items by default, with some being dual-coloured (Tactics or Survival). All in all, Tactics has been slightly nerfed.

• The dodge mechanic has been tweaked to let you roll in the middle of a series of strikes without rebooting the attack pattern of your weapon, which can be especially useful for weapons with a long windup followed by quick or stronger strikes.

• Fog Fjord/Graveyard/Sepulchre/Ossuary‘s level design have been reviewed. The reduced length of these levels is the most notable difference.

• New weapons and skills: you can now punch your enemies to death, if it’s your thing. It might even help you manage your stress levels when playing on nightmare difficulty...

That pretty much covers it all, however you can find a detailed list of changes by clicking here. We’re planning to stay in beta for approximately a week, which should be enough time to get your feedback and do a bit of a balance pass. Please note the emphasis put on the conditional in the previous sentence. The implicit, subtle, carefully hidden, message here being that it could be shorter (lol, as if) or longer.

Time for the ever incredible highlights from the most excellent community:

The prisoner, as seen by @EyedSiU and some black and white goodness, by The Dumbs Khaotix




An original take on the electric whip by Davi Sa




Thank you for reading, and more generally speaking, for bearing with us this long!

Best,
The MT team.

Concept by Thomas. 1920 x 1080 version available here

Hey friends,

A little post to let you know that the Alpha bug hunting phase is pretty much over so now is time for the beta balancing phase.

The sixth update, code-name: A four-star Castle according to TripAdvisor, is bringing in a big new chunk of content:

• A whole new level, called the Castle, which is, as the sharpest among you may have guessed from its name, a castle. We know, it’s a very risky choice for an action-platformer, but what can we say? We're all about innovation around here.

Concept by Gwen


Ingame render

• Two new enemies: will provide a suitable distraction while you’re strolling around in the castle, admiring its breathtaking portraits and daring architecture.

Let it gooooooo


We're not safe anywhere these days...

• The HotK (yes, that’s what the cool kids are calling the Hand of the King these days), is the final boss of the game. I won’t lie, he doesn’t go down easily. Try to remember that WE are the culprits before throwing your innocent controller at the wall. Also try to bear in mind that we do love you, in spite of what that boss might lead you to believe.
  
  
• Of course, if the boss isn’t hard enough for you, you will now be able to access the 4-cell “nightmare” difficulty. If you do decide to play on 4 cells, maybe book an appointment with the nearest doctor, because something is definitely not right with you.

• Colour balancing: the HP you get when collecting a scroll depends on the colour; Survival will get you more HP than Brutality, which will give you less HP than Tactics. Also, the grenades are now Brutality items by default, with some being dual-coloured (Tactics or Survival). All in all, Tactics has been slightly nerfed.

• The dodge mechanic has been tweaked to let you roll in the middle of a series of strikes without rebooting the attack pattern of your weapon, which can be especially useful for weapons with a long windup followed by quick or stronger strikes.

• Fog Fjord/Graveyard/Sepulchre/Ossuary‘s level design have been reviewed. The reduced length of these levels is the most notable difference.

• New weapons and skills: you can now punch your enemies to death, if it’s your thing. It might even help you manage your stress levels when playing on nightmare difficulty...

That pretty much covers it all, however you can find a detailed list of changes by clicking here. We’re planning to stay in beta for approximately a week, which should be enough time to get your feedback and do a bit of a balance pass. Please note the emphasis put on the conditional in the previous sentence. The implicit, subtle, carefully hidden, message here being that it could be shorter (lol, as if) or longer.

Time for the ever incredible highlights from the most excellent community:

The prisoner, as seen by @EyedSiU and some black and white goodness, by The Dumbs Khaotix




An original take on the electric whip by Davi Sa




Thank you for reading, and more generally speaking, for bearing with us this long!

Best,
The MT team.

Heya friends,

Hope everything is going well for you! On our side, the first month of 2018 has been an opportunity to reflect on the past year and the crazy journey we began with you 8 months ago, when we launched Dead Cells into Early Access. It's definitely not the same game we started with, and we owe the community for many of the improvements we’ve implemented since then.

It's now time to lay out what's left to be done before coming out of Early Access. Of course, everything is subject to change, we're only humans in a world full of uncertainties, etc. etc. you know the usual disclaimers, but here is how the things are planned for now:

We're almost done with the development of the last level and the final boss of Dead Cells (before the release). We're reopening the Alpha Branch soon to let the most dedicated players take on the game breaking bugs and bring us the first batch of feedback we need to tweak these two majors additions. Then, the content will be made available on the Beta Branch, opening it to more players and letting us polish it until it’s up to our usual standard of completion.

From here the team will be breaking up into smaller tactical strike groups. We’re close to V1.0, but there are still stacks of things to do. Some of us will be working on the next “mini updates” that will be coming out between now and launch. Some of the devs will be completing the Mac and Linux versions of the game. Pretty much all of us will have a lot of QA work to do. Finally, there will still be some of us working on new content. Let’s take a look at the details.

After the 6th update goes live in March we’ll push 1 or two (depending on time) mini-updates that will contain some extra content that we’ve been working on; challenge room re-works, more tinkering with the Forge mechanic, UI and cosmetic changes, balancing, QA updates, bug fixes and all of that other good stuff that will help us move towards something that we can call “finished”.

This also when we will be looking to finally bring the game to the Linux and Mac communities, as promised. We hope you can forgive us for having to reschedule the release of these builds until much closer to the end of the early access, it was done to keep us from losing time maintaining multiple builds.

Some lucky beggars (next round is on you by the way) will be focused on finding clever ways of implementing the lore of Dead Cells for the 1.0 release. We're still experimenting in order to find the right process of telling the story without messing with the pacing of the game. This will probably take a while and is the last major missing piece of the puzzle.

But wait! It doesn’t end with 1.0. We think we’ve shown that we’re committed to doing Early Access right, but we’re also all about doing games right. So, as we approach the final release, we’ll have some of our guys hard at work thinking up our first free DLC content addition. And by content, we mean playable, explorable, fightable content. This will come soon after the V1.0 release of the game and did I mention that it’ll be free?

Here is a TLDR; version of the roadmap to make sure we're all on the same page. We’ll also mention some events we wish to attend, so you can come insult us or buy us a beer, or even both, depending on where you side on the whole "Dead Cells coming to console" deal.

February: Opening the Alpha branch (and then the Beta branch in the course of the month) to the player willing to test the 6th Update.

March: Release of the 6th Update. Team breaks up into tactical assault teams. Some take the plane for San Francisco where we will be attending the GDC.

Mid/Late April: Release of the first mini update. We will be in Boston for the Pax East and London for the Rezzed expo.

May/June: Linux and Mac builds available.

Q3/Q4 2018: Release out of Early Access.

2 to 4 months after the release: Content heavy Free DLC

Beyond: No idea, but if you got some, put it in the comments!

Finally, to address the concerns that porting the game to console will slow down the dev. We’ve always had a technical team here working behind the scenes on optimizing the game and making sure our tech works on all the different rigs out there. We’ve hired an extra technical developer, so he and another technical team member are responsible for making the console things work. This means that the gameplay guys, the team that has been building your levels/bosses, the same guys in charge of finishing the game, will be free to continue doing their thing without having to slow down for anything other than gameplay related issues (or life, one of them is expecting their first kid in March for example). Seeing the reactions… Well, it maaaaaay have been a good idea to mention that last week when announcing the console version, so apologies for the undue heart palpitations.

Now to finish up on a high note and draw attention to the great people out there who fill our days with cool drawings, funny memes and awesome comics.

Peace out,
The Motion Twin Team


Community Highlights

Dead Cells' icons for Twitch, done by Cyanmigou for our streamer friend
Peeve



An awesome comic by Life In Aggro!



Dead Cells Fanart, by daemonstar