Long time no see. First, apology for the long silence since the last news. We were still in the post-release/holiday mood, attending a couple of events and all three artists were in a two-week training session. And when half the team is away, the other half usually tends to feel a little lost.
That’s said, now that we’re all back and working, we’ve got a good chunk of new content for you. And by that, I mean the biggest update we've ever made to Dead Cells, with a few new additions, as well as custom games and many, many tweaks to the gameplay and balancing. Some urgent issues reported by the community have alsobeen addressed.
Overall, the Dead Cells version you can play in Alpha feels quite different to the one on the main branch. We’re expecting it to stay in alpha for quite some time while we tune the new balancing with your help.
Dead Cells - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Diego Arguello)
I start with only a bow and a sword, fighting against entry-level enemies and depending on my dodging roll for survival. During the next five minutes of Dead Cells, I have doubled my HP. I ve become stronger, and consequently, I begin to see myself as a walking killing spree that will leave no room hidden or treasure chest untouched, no matter how many enemies are guarding them. My damage is so high that I begin to ignore weaker obstacles. I just rush towards the boss, prepared to show them what I m capable of. And in that moment of confidence, I lose my balance. And fall prey to my own foolishness.
Dead Cells, one of the best action platformers on PC, has now been out for more than a month, giving the team time to go to the pub, hang out on a beach, and play games that aren't Dead Cells for a change—so they said in a new dev update. They also shared their plans for post-launch content, starting with a new game mode called Custom Mode, which will arrive in the game's beta test branch in late October or early November.
Custom Mode will give you more control over the game, "really giving you the ability to make 'your' Dead Cells". You'll be able to ban unlocked weapons from the loot table, for instance, or choose your starting gear. The team promise that "many other modifications" will also be possible.
In the same update, the devs will balance items, fix bugs, add some polish and improve mod support, they said.
After that, they will begin working on the game's first free DLC, which will be "focused on new playable content". They don't yet have an ETA, but they teased the below screenshots that give an idea of what's in store:
Looking even further ahead, the team want to gather feedback about how players want Dead Cells to change. "What do you guys think about paid DLC? Would you prefer regular light updates or more packaged, themed ones? More playable content in the vein of what’s already existing or exploring new ways to play the game through different modes? Everything is on the table...let us know what you want to see," they said.
Dead Cells - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alice O'Connor)
A ‘Custom Mode’ letting goofolk choose their gear and mysterious new pretties are among goodies planned for future updates to Dead Cells, the roguelikelike stab-o-platformer which I’d say has a fair chance of scooping our much-coveted “Bestest best game best of the best year best best” award in December. Developers Motion Twin have been taking it easy, sleazy since Dead Cells launched out of early access in August but say they’re about ready to crack on again. They’ve talked before about planning more free stuff (and maybe some not free stuff) for Dead Cells after launch, and now we know more about those plans.
We hope you’re all doing well. The 1.0 release is now a good month and a bit behind us, so it seems like a good time to start talking about what’s coming in the short/mid term, just so you don't think we're dead...
Becaaauuusse we're not. We're just super tired after 3 years of bringing this baby of ours to life, now we're hungover from our time in the pub, so it's time to go spend some time on the beach, or just at home playing our favourite games that aren't Dead Cells. That's why we've been quiet, we're all on holidays right now there are only 4 out of 12 people in the office... and that's going to be worse tomorrow and next week. But don't despair we're not done and we'll be back recharged and ready to go soon.
In fact, the first major post-release update is currently under construction and we’re hoping to have it in the beta branch late October/ early November. This patch will focus on heavily balancing, polishing and bug fixing, as well as new possibilities for customization with better mod support, and a new Custom Mode.
The Custom Mode is designed to give you a new layer of control over the game, really giving you the ability to make “your” Dead Cells. For instance, one of the most requested feature was to be able to ban some weapons from the loot table once unlocked, or choose your starting gear. Many other modifications of the standard gameplay will also be possible.
Then, we will get busy with a first (free) DLC, focused on new playable content. No ETA yet, but we’re already playing with a few ideas:
After that, we would like to sit down and have an honest discussion about future content. We would love to keep supporting Dead Cells on the long run, but we haven't really figured out exactly how yet. What do you guys think about paid DLC? Would you prefer regular light updates or more packaged, themed ones? More playable content in the vein of what’s already existing or exploring new ways to play the game through different modes? Everything is on the table... Let us know what you want to see.
Dead Cells - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (Alec Meer)
I’ve been away for a few weeks – NOT THAT YOU NOTICED – and my poison of choice during that time was the release version of Dead Cells. This Metroidvania/roguelike hybrid ticks pretty much every box I’ve got going, leaving my former flames The Binding of Isaac, Hollow Knight and Slay The Spire suddenly abandoned.
Like all the best ‘vanias, Dead Cells doesn’t tell you much, content instead to let you dash yourself against its rocks time and again until realisation – or reflex – takes hold. I’ve learned a lot by now (and I’ve got even more left to learn), and my runs are very different to my early, faltering ones. Because of the way unlocks work in Dead Cells, there’s a few particular things I wish I knew from the off – to the point that I’m even toying with a total restart.
Grand Theft Auto V - contact@rockpapershotgun.com (John Walker)
OK! OK! Look, thank you, yes, yes, I know, thank you. Yes, it’s very exciting that I’m here with this week’s Steam Charts, but come on, please, sit down now, that’s really enough. Oh, come on, all of you, you’re lovely, but it’s only little me. Goodness gracious! (more…)
Not to brag, but I have one hell of a Biro on the go at the moment. You know the kind of thing, right? Cheap disposable pens tend to have their own characters - the grindy one, the gritty one, the one that you're forever trying to coax back to life with mad eddies and whorls. This one, though, this one is the one you dream about. Oh man, it is glorious. A thick black line that just flows out onto the page. So smooth! Strangely rich. I feel like I could take that line anywhere, even if I'm just writing a shopping list or a phone number. The line makes me feel like writing. I am already starting to mourn this Biro a little, because I know it cannot last forever.
And - grinding sound - this sort of puts me in mind of Dead Cells, which I have been playing, it seems, for a good half of my magical Biro's lifespan. Honestly, this is not the miserable reach that I have made it sound like. Dead Cells is a hard game. How hard? The main menu says "Continue", even when you have actually died in a run, because life and death is all the same in a game like this. You die, but hopefully you unlocked a few more permanent perks for your next life. You will die again, of course, the predictable enemies swarming and overwhelming, the procedural tunnels and ramparts forcing you to lose your bearings. No matter, the game says: the line, as it were, makes you feel like you can take it anywhere.
I felt it instantly, too. My first steps into this game's deeply inhospitable world. People - including the people who made it - would like you to believe that Dead Cells is a bit like Dark Souls, and it is, it is, in a hundred different ways. But there's one way it's very different. When I started Dark Souls, I found myself cringing, retreating into a more compact version of myself, weighed down by the sense of all the awful things that lay ahead and deeply aware - this is the thing of it - of my complete and obvious inadequacy when it came to dealing with them.
The hero of Dead Cells is a living head on a reanimated body, or rather a series of reanimated bodies, each slightly more likely to succeed than the last. It's an apt metaphor for the game itself, which changed again and again even before going into Early Access. In its early days it was in a completely different genre, and somewhere in an alternate leg of the trousers of time there's a version of Dead Cells that remained a free-to-play zombie-themed tower defense game for browsers and phones.
Developers Motion Twin had previously made a browser game called Die2Nite, where 40 players work together to defend a town from the undead. Their plan for a follow-up was a game that let players not just build traps and defenses, but then position their characters as well so they had something to do during the attack phase. The concept was sound, but it didn't go much further than the prototype stage. Producer Steve Filby explains.
"The idea sounded pretty cool on paper and everything but once we started building it we realized that it wasn't particularly fun. It was OK for us when we were all playing online together in the office because we were here yelling at each other, 'Go over here!' But we very quickly realized with some playtests with the community that they just weren't enjoying it. It was no fun when you're by yourself."
In 2014 they took a single-player version of that game to an event called the Big Indie Pitch, a competition where indie developers have three minutes to sell their idea to a team of judges, and came second. That was all the motivation their lead designer needed to begin hacking away at Dead Cells, removing all the multiplayer elements and the free-to-play cruft, while their graphic artist suggested going even further and getting rid of the tower defense as well.
"We had two parts of the game," says Filby. "The preparation part, which was slow and contemplative, and the actual action part. So we got rid of all the contemplative part and kept the action part. That's the moment, the rest is history, but that period that probably took from the end of 2014 to about the end of 2015. A good year of fartarsing around before we actually said, all right, let's build an action-platformer."
The road to Early Access and through Early Access is littered with the bodies of failed games
Steve Filby
It took another year to get from there to the point where they felt ready to release in Early Access. Although Filby estimates the version of Dead Cells they put on Steam back in May 2017 was only about 30 to 40 percent finished, they wanted to make sure it felt tight even then—that moving and fighting was enjoyable even if the rest of the game was incomplete.
"The road to Early Access and through Early Access is littered with the bodies of failed games and failed developers who have then been smashed and blacklisted for their poor practices during development and so I was like, if we're going to do this we have to have something super solid, super polished, and super satisfying to play. We have to have that core gameplay, that core vertical slice."
With that in place, they began the process of iterating and expanding on their design. They expected it to be a roughly year-long process at the most, and it ended up being closer to 15 months—not too far off, given how these things usually go. Of the changes that happened to Dead Cells during that time, and there were many, a significant number were inspired by player feedback.
"If you go back and look through the Reddit for the first three to six months after the Early Access, there's some threads in there where guys are writing full essays, three-to-five thousand word essays on what they think, and debating amongst themselves—cordial discussion—and coming up with useful ideas. While we don't go, 'oh, this is amazing, we're just going to do what this guy says' it definitely helps."
The main value of player feedback was in identifying problems. A common thing to hear from developers is that it's worth listening to players when they say there's an issue, but not so much when they're suggesting solutions. So when Dead Cells players said the game balance felt off, lead designer Sébastien Bénard listened, then reworked it entirely. The effects of that were felt everywhere.
"It touches every aspect of the game," says Filby. "The balancing of the stats and the way that you think about powering up items through those stats is fundamental to the core of the game. That was one of the things that—we definitely didn't plan it—came along and it was a big job that took a long time. The Brutal Update was the major update where we pushed that out and then it took I think another major update before we finished the system by adding the Forge, and then another update of balancing and dealing with the fallout of the changes."
I think Early Access is an incredible tool for building better games because it does allow you to collaborate with the community
Steve Filby
The Forge is an interesting one. Its initial version let you buy upgrades for specific gear, which had the unintended consequence of encouraging people to stick with weapons they'd paid to upgrade. "Some of the feedback we got was from a dude on Twitter called Celestalon, who just so happens to be one of the lead designers on Hearthstone," Filby says. Celestalon pointed out that the Forge made players feel locked into builds, taking away the fun of experimentation. "[It] took away the fun of learning to play with items and playstyles that you probably wouldn't use. I sent that to Seb via Twitter and he sent something back via Slack saying, 'Aw, the bugger! I know he's right too so now I'm going to have do something about it.'"
One bit of feedback suggesting a feature rather than pointing out a problem did make its way into the finished game: elemental damage. People said they thought it would be cool to be able to electrocute enemies or set them on fire, and now you can. It's a relatively small addition but a fun one, a grace note on their symphony, or maybe a layer of sprinkles on their cake.
As for whether Motion Twin repeat this process for their next game, Filby says it's a matter of what kind of game they end up making. "There's a lot of guys in the team who wouldn't mind trying something a little bit more static, a bit more narrative and stuff like that, in which case it makes no sense to use Early Access. Personally I think Early Access is an incredible tool for building better games because it does allow you to collaborate with the community in the way that we have, and it does force you to really critically think about the game design decisions that you have made."
