Hello everyone,

While we're busy here making sure we're ready for next week's release, our good friends from Flying Oak Games have just published their new game on Steam ScourgeBringer in Early Access.

We met a few times with the good folks behind it and were lucky enough to play it during its development, and it's loads of fun jumping and slashing the poor mobs that get in your way.


Eurogamer described it as 'Dead Cells meets Celeste', which is giving us more honor than we deserve, but it does feature intense fast-paced 2D combat, damn pretty pixel-art and super smooth controls.

That said, I'm going back to work on the Bad Seed, but I leave you in good company:


It's an orchestral tribute to Dead Cells' music, recorded live and performed by the Orlando Contemporary Chamber Orchestra. It took place at The Abbey on the 12th of September 2019 and is now available on our Youtube channel.

Cheers!
Joan, EE and the MT team.

The Bad Seed key art - by Michel Donze

Hey all,

Hopefully everyone who’d been hounding us about the earlier versions of Dead Cells has now been basking in the nostalgia of the Legacy Update. For those of you that have been looking forward to tearing through something shiny and brand new - the Bad Seed DLC now has an official release date of February 11th 2020 at 6AM PT.

If you can’t wait until the release date, you can check out some of the new content in the gameplay trailer and concept art below:

Please take care of your new babies

As previously mentioned we are introducing two new early-game biomes to freshen up your runs as well as a host of new enemies and weapons, some unseen mechanics and a giant boss, so there’s plenty for you to explore.





In case you really don't want to miss the release, you can hit the wishlist button on this page and you will get a nice Steam email when it's out and ready to be played.

Got any burning questions? Well, we’re running another AMA on Reddit on 11th February at 15:00 CEST, so pop in and have a chat if you’re around.

There will be a ‘complete the set’ option available if you already own Dead Cells, which will save you 10% on the DLC. If you haven’t bought Dead Cells yet (shame! shame!) or if you know friends/family/coworkers/random people on the street who haven’t played, there will also be a full bundle of the main game + The Bad Seed coming out, which will also save you 10%.



Anyone who has streamed the game with viewers helping you out as the relentless Captain Chicken knows that the chat can get a bit… spammy. We have an extension coming very soon that will cut this out, so watch this space.
There’s much more that we want to add to the extension in the future to make streaming the game a smoother experience for you and your viewers, and if you have any thoughts or requests then give us a shout through these channels:

• Official Discord
  
• Official Reddit
  
• Motion Twin Twitter
  
• Dead Cells' Facebook

Thanks!
Matt, Evil Empire and Motion Twin



Finally, we haven’t included any fan art for a while so here are two awesome pieces that we’ve spotted recently.


By vtoroman


By pisti95

Hey all,

So that wretched Comic Sans infested update that we launched into beta last Friday night at like 8PM, actually didn't turn into a dumpster fire, which is nice. In fact it seems that you all really like the changes that Noja and the GPPs cooked up for you.

However... We're not actually done with just that.



The Legacy Update is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. As we moved towards regular updates and iterations on the game, we were always bugged by the fact that we were drastically changing the experience that a lot of people had come to love (something that you all have vocaly reminded us of on occasion).

From here we always wondered whether it would be possible to dig up the old versions of the game and store them somewhere, so that interested players and future generations of developers could look back at how our little game developed and grew into the Action Game of the Year 2018.

So, now you can load up every major iteration of the game from the first build of Early Access right up to present, and we will of course make sure that we stock all of our future major updates in there too. This way, the nostalgic, the ragers and the “it was better before” crowd will always have the option of playing the version of the game that they loved.

How do I access these mythical branches?
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select the version you'd like to play.
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.

On top of that everything that you got in the beta of the "Christmas Update" which was just us being tired and hungover, is included for everyone in the Legacy Update right now. So here's the breakdown:

I won't go so far as to call it a "fix" but we've now made it so that there is regularly a backup of your saves to a folder that SteamCloud can't get to and delete (which is how so many people have lost their saves up until now). So from here on it, you should, if you lose your save be able to find this backup folder and get it back... Emphasis on the should...

Here's how it all works:

Dead Cells now backs up your save files daily. This reduces the chances of losing your game in case of issues with Steam Cloud, crashes, accidental deletions, etc. Shall you ever lose your save, don’t panic, we’re going to walk you through restoring backups!

TL;DR for experienced users: The game now keeps daily backups of your saves. It creates backups as zip files in the “save” folder. To restore a backup, you must turn off Steam Cloud temporarily, and then you can extract one of the backup zips directly into the “save” folder.

Detailed step-by-step guide:

1. First, quit the game and turn off Steam Cloud for Dead Cells.
   This is necessary so that you can restore your save files. In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Updates, then uncheck “Enable Steam Cloud synchronization”.
   
   
   
2. Open the game’s local files.
   In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Local Files, then “Browse Local Files”.
   
   
   
3. Go into the “save” folder.
   In it, there’s a series of files named “backup”. Those are the ones that we need. More on those in a minute.
   You might also see a bunch of “user” files – those are your local save files. We’re going to replace them, so keep a copy of them somewhere else just to be safe!
   If you’re not seeing any files named “user”, no problem, that just means you’ve only ever used Steam Cloud, so your games had never been saved locally.
   
   
4. In the “save” folder, pick the backup file you want.
   
   In the save folder, you will find a series of zip files named “backup” plus a date code, such as “backup-2019-12-04-1.zip”. Try to remember the most recent date when your saves were still OK, then pick the corresponding zip file.
   
   
5. Unzip the backup file directly into the “save” folder.
   Right-click on the appropriate backup, click “Extract All”. In the window that opens up, make sure the path ends with “save” (if it doesn’t, you can delete the end of the path):
   
   Then click “Extract”. If Windows says that there’s already a file named “user_0.dat” (for example), pick “Replace”.
   
   
6. Start the game and check your saves.
   If the game asks you if you want to use Steam Cloud, it’s important to say no for now – we want to force the game to use the save files you have extracted locally.
   Then, look at your saves, make sure they’re the ones you expected. If they’re not the ones you want, go back to step 4 and try another backup.
   
   
7. When you’re satisfied, you can turn on Steam Cloud again if you wish.
   If the game asks you whether you want to transfer your local saves to Steam Cloud, it should be safe to say yes.

We’re adding in 2 new weapons/skills to the game, they are; the Ice Shield and Ice Armor. Crowd control and panic reduction are our main objectives with these weapons and we hope you’ll appreciate being saved right at the last possible second by your brand new panic button.

Game feel and being able to choose your playstyle has been a core design element of Dead Cells from day one, but let’s be honest, there have been times when the ideas that we had for weapons sounded great… But turned out to be total crap (I’m looking at you Spartan Sandals).

Because of this we’ve reworked the 3 least used (*cough* most *cough* hated *cough*) weapons, with the idea of bringing a lot more balance to the game.



We’ve added in two new mutations, which for the initiated is kind of a big deal as they have some very interesting impacts on game play for Survival players, allowing more synthesis with ice effects.

It’s Christmas, and why the hell not? So we added in a Santa (jolly fat drunk man) skin. Ho ho ho.

Patchnotes are available here.

Cheers,

Steve and the EE & MT teams.

Hey all,

It's 7:30PM the day after our office Christmas party (and Friday!) and I for one, am feeling a little worse for wear. As such we're breaking all the rules and doing something incredibly stupid!

Today, for the brave beta testers... You can test a new update that has not even been through alpha testing! On a Friday night!!!!

Ohhhh yeah!

BACK UP YOUR SAVES!!!!

- New items.
- Item reworks.
- Other stuff I'll do a real news about next week.


Alright, I'm going home to sleep.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Steve "The Hung Over" from the Evil Empire team.

Illustration by the much excellent Michel Donze.

TLDR:
- Announcing a new DLC with two levels and a boss over here (please wishlist it).
- $4.99 paid DLC will help us continue building more Dead Cells and MT’s next game.
- AMA on Reddit right now over here.
- We’ve got two years of Dead Cells content we hope to build.
- MT are finding the outlines of their next prototype.
- HD wallpapers available here.
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Hey all!

Today we’re super excited to unveil The Bad Seed DLC, which brings two new early game biomes and a big #$&%-off boss for you to bash your head against, at least until you’re steamrolling it to death in 3 seconds flat and back to demanding more content…

Here’s the link to the Steam Page, if you could spare the time to hit wishlist, that would be a big help!

Anyway, we'll release a lot more info as we get closer to release, but here's a little teaser trailer, a few screenshots and some provisional biome names for you to look at in the meantime:

Noja, the sadist in video editing action... ːsteamfacepalmː


The Arboretum, a tranquil level, with nothing dangerous of note...


The Swamp, putrid, tick infested cesspool inhabited by spear wielding, blow dart firing jerks.


Boss tease...

If you want to get your hands on the HD wallpapers, they're available here.

The DLC will be available for $4.99 and comparable regional prices.

Paid content will help support the development of the game, allowing the team to go forward with all of the ideas that we’ve got in our heads, continuing to produce free content, fixes and updates, while also ensuring that Motion Twin have the time to build their next game at the level you’ve come to expect from them.

As usual we’ll be doing the development iteratively in conjunction with the community, so please do hit us up in the comments, head over to Reddit and Discord to let us know what you think.

We're also doing an AMA right now over here.



However the real question is what’s next right? Well, if this DLC thing goes according to plan we’ll keep producing free content updates, be that systemic changes or playable content additions for the next two years at least.

You may have noticed that there is a “two handed weapon” in the DLC… This is a bit of a tease of the kind of content additions that we’re thinking of bringing to the game. On top of that there are glaring problems with the balancing of the game that we’ve been wanting to fix for years but just haven't had the time, the economy for example… These will be major systemic changes.

On the content front, anyone playing on the BC1+ difficulties will notice that we’re kind of at a moment where the monsters repeat themselves a little bit. We’re planning on changing this by building out a bunch of new creatures and replacing some of the more tired types with biome specific beasts, to keep you on your toes, you know… This will obviously mean new weapons will drop on each of these monsters, so stacks of content.

Secret areas and lore will also continue to see new additions, we’d like to make sure that you’re really getting the feeling of exploring and discovering new things (things that we might just have added to the game) with each run as you explore the world, so we’ve got stacks of ideas on that front.

We’ll have a little present for you coming up around the holiday season this year, it’s not quite finished and we didn't think we’d be able to pull it off, even though we’ve wanted to do it for ages, but we think you’ll like it...

More on that as we get closer to the release.


One of the big ol ticks that lurk in The Swamp.

As mentioned, the Motion Twin team are plugging away on a new prototype (well technically two at the same time). They’re a long way away from having anything that we can begin to hype up, but I’m excited by the promise of what they’re working on. We will of course keep you posted as we know more.

Evil Empire on the other hand are really excited to continue working on Dead Cells, but also to potentially make new additions to the Dead Cells universe i the form of other DC based games, we’re quietly building a few prototypes to see whether we can pull something like that off, but we’ll keep you posted as we get to a point that the MT team are happy with and really get stuck into production.

Anyway here are some of the concepts (non contractual!) from the MT team:







So essentially we really hope that you like the DLC and that you think it’s a fair way for us to continue supporting the game and work on our next projects. We’ve been working on free content since August 2018 and we would like to keep doing that for as long as we can. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and work closely with the community on everything that we build, so please do stay in touch.

All the best,

The Motion Twin and Evil Empire teams.

Hey all,

Happy holidays!

We're kinda late to the party, but if want to vote for us in the Steam Awards, give it a blast.

Also huuuuge thanks to @Sombras for the cool image!

Cheers!