Hope you're doing fine, enjoying spring and having half your body explode with allergic reactions! On our side, we’ve just released the latest update for everyone on the main branch. Speaking of which...
Legendary weapons, new challenge rooms, What's new in the "Baguette" update?
The Seventh Update is finally live! Initially we had some issues on the localization side, hence the "Baguette update" as half the game was still in french, but it's all good now. Well, apart of the usual batch of typos, for which we're sorry in advance.
As usual the full patch notes can be found here, but here’s a fairly decent summary of the main features.
Back to the roots: The Forge has been reworked. Again. Turns out, the previous system of weapon upgrades was really kinda locking people into only one build and a few weapons… Since the variety and fun of the gameplay are mostly down to playing with different weapons, it made the runs feel a little too repetitive.
So we decided to re-introduce more randomness to the formula. Instead of allowing you to upgrade specific weapons, now the cells you invest at the forge will go towards unlocking a guaranteed percentage of weapons dropping at higher quality levels. So for example; it might be that 10% of all weapons with drop with + quality, meaning you should eventually see ALL weapons drop with + quality… I’m gonna come back and have another crack at this paragraph once you all tear it to shreds...
For players having already invested in the Forge, some of your progress has been imported to the new system. It’s not a 1:1 match, but you shouldn’t have lost too much of your progress.
Legendary Items!: Okay, calm down, I know it sounds clickbaity but give me at least five seconds to explain myself before hanging me to the nearest tree! In the same vein as the Forge rework, we have introduce legendary weapons. These weapons are different from the "S" quality (the highest available through the Forge). Like colorless items, these items scale with your higher stat, but without the +20% damage taken. They are very powerful items with a lot of affixes, some of it exclusive to Legendary items.
You have a guaranteed legendary drop each time you defeat a boss (apart from the last one, we're not quite horrible enough trolls to give you the best weapon ever and then NOT let you test it... Or are we? (No, no we're not, promise). There is also a slight chance to loot one from regular or elite enemies.
These legendary drops are chosen from among the entire (almost) pool of existing items in the game, even if you haven't found the blueprint or unlocked the weapon yet. Again, the idea is to make some items you would have never used viable… and if you get the legendary version of your favorite weapon, you can bring the champaign!
Affix reroll and sharpening: Guillain brought a friend and pulled some strings to get him an internship under the Blacksmith's supervision. Anyway, this new guy is now able to reroll the affixes of your weapon… for a small tribute of gold. He can also sharpen your weapons, upgrading the quality of your items by one degree (from + to ++ or from ++ to S). This should compensate a bit if you have been unlucky and didn't find anything worth taking or buying while exploring.
Challenge room rework!: We did it! After 10 months having this delayed again and again for higher priority features, we've finally found the time to rework the challenge/ portal rooms. You get the chest when you enter, and the portal closes behind you if you decide to open it. Now the challenge is in finding them, not in perfecting them. No more monsters, just our nastiest trap rooms yet...
New UI: Putting in an HD font and a modern UI instead of the old-school one we had before was a hotly contested decision in the office. Was that incoherent with the pixel art aesthetic or, to the contrary, perfectly fits the mix between modern and retro games that is Dead cells? Words we will regret for eternity have been pronounced. Friendship has been broken. Jaws, too. But in the end, the majority (among the members still standing and able to speak) were in favour of the new UI. ¡Viva la revolucion!
Heaps of balancing: The usual batch of bug fixing, level design tweaks and balance changes. Most notably, the nerf of the cooldown reduction mutation make it less a no brainer, the Nightmare difficulty has become nightmarish-er, and the gold economy has been tweaked.
We hope you will like the changes! In any case, please give us your feedback in the comments.
August release date
After (almost) one year in Early Access, we seem to finally be heading toward a proper release. We've run the numbers several times and apparently we should be out by August* (unless the office burns down, half the team falls sick with ebola or zombies happen (in which case you might find us running with the zombie crowd looking for a tasty tartare of brain).
This Seventh Update is the first of a few smaller updates before the lore arrives at launch and we are hard at work on the Mac and Linux versions! Don't forget we’ll be pushing a big juicy FREE DLC post release…
*Date non contractual: Acts of god, unexpected lottery wins and irresponsible drinking habits may delay launch of game at any time.
Community Highlights
http://Discord.gg/deadcells The largest community run Discord server has been verified - it's now the "official" discord server of Dead Cells. There are heaps of nice people there who can help you with the game and who are more than ready to discuss ideas and critiques about Dead Cells with you.
While we’re celebrating the Discord, here’s a little of the community's handiwork!
"drew something that represents my hurtful moment. what's yours?" by @Elkopolo
Hope everything is going your way! On our side, the next update is coming along nicely. Well, actually, for the braves out there, it's already available on the Alpha branch, ready to be playtested and broken down by the finest analysts of our community. Exceeeeeeept that 30% of all the texts are still in French (that will change before beta normally).
A note on the French: basically we’re still in the US after the GDC and haven’t had time to get the translations done in house (Steve you lazy bastard!), however the pros will be sending through a first draft during the week if all goes according to plan… In the meantime… Omelette du fromage.
By the way, if you're looking to talk about Dead Cells with other players, there are a couple of places where you can do so outside of the Steam forums:
Discord: One of the most active Discord (but there are a few others out there).
DocFirebird's YouTube channel is also a great place if you're looking for an in-depth analysis of the meta and a look to the general usefulness of every weapons.
Current additions to the game are listed there if you want the complete list. There is a bunch of quality-of-life improvements as well as a complete rework of the Forge and weapon upgrade system. And also new challenge levels! We will go into more details when the update will be ready for the Beta branch.
As a final note, we just left the GDC which was an amazing time to meet many other indie devs out there! Thanks again to the Indie Megabooth for featuring Dead Cells in their line-up. We're now heading to Pax East in Boston, where we hope to meet as many of you as we can!
Hope everything is going your way! On our side, the next update is coming along nicely. Well, actually, for the braves out there, it's already available on the Alpha branch, ready to be playtested and broken down by the finest analysts of our community. Exceeeeeeept that 30% of all the texts are still in French (that will change before beta normally).
A note on the French: basically we’re still in the US after the GDC and haven’t had time to get the translations done in house (Steve you lazy bastard!), however the pros will be sending through a first draft during the week if all goes according to plan… In the meantime… Omelette du fromage.
By the way, if you're looking to talk about Dead Cells with other players, there are a couple of places where you can do so outside of the Steam forums:
Discord: One of the most active Discord (but there are a few others out there).
DocFirebird's YouTube channel is also a great place if you're looking for an in-depth analysis of the meta and a look to the general usefulness of every weapons.
Current additions to the game are listed there if you want the complete list. There is a bunch of quality-of-life improvements as well as a complete rework of the Forge and weapon upgrade system. And also new challenge levels! We will go into more details when the update will be ready for the Beta branch.
As a final note, we just left the GDC which was an amazing time to meet many other indie devs out there! Thanks again to the Indie Megabooth for featuring Dead Cells in their line-up. We're now heading to Pax East in Boston, where we hope to meet as many of you as we can!
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 patchnoteshere 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).
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!
Tuto video from DocFirebird:
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:
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 patchnoteshere 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).
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!
Tuto video from DocFirebird:
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Alright, but you may know someone who only owns a console or something… Okay, who I am I kidding? We're just super happy and can't keep ourselves from telling the world about it. So there. I said it.
What about, ya know… Updates?
We have a few thing to figure out, but more info will be coming next week on our current plans for the following months.
Also if you're interested in some more technical details on how we get that fluid pixel art animation going on... Our talented Art Director Thomas Vasseur put together this blog post on the process.
Signing off on some awesome artworks done by the community!