Hey there everyone!
We’re back from the EGX which was fantastic as usual! A great big thanks and congratulations to the organisers, particularly Matt Lambert for getting behind the indies and pushing them to the forefront of the show! Next year we’ll try and bring some goodies (t-shirts, posters and other merch) to reward anyone who can beat the boss in 3 attempts or less!
By the way what do you guys think about the idea of some Dead Cells merch? Would you buy a t-shirt or a poster with DC on it? Feedback very welcome.
We cloned ourselves and were simultaneously at the Tokyo Games Show to exhibit the game, and people really seemed to like it, so that’s definitely a good start for our plan of taking over Japan... Or maybe just having a Dead Cells mecha, depending on how things pan out… Baby steps...
That being said, let’s talk a bit about the development of the game until the final release.
Update on the roadmap to Dead Cells 1.0
We currently see Dead Cells as a fun, epic and enjoyable roguelite experience - with some welcomed elements generally associated with the metroidvania genre i.e, a handcrafted, fixed world layout with parallel paths to journey through which are progressively unlocked.
As we expand on the game, the incoming additions we have in mind will greatly benefit to the Metroidvania feel of the game, as the roguelite part is pretty much done.
Since the Early Access release, we’ve focused on progressively adding content. the Elemental update brought new weapons and the new gameplay that came with them, the Darkness update a new biome, the stress inducing Forgotten Sepulchre, and the Daily update added a new mode, the Daily Run, on which we can now iterate and improve with your help.
We’ve also tried to be very attentive to community feedback, making multiple modifications to elements that didn’t work as well as we had hoped. Adding content is great, but it felt equally important to us to keep adding quality life improvements and polish on current features. Or even totally rework it if that’s what it needed.
With almost five months of Early Access development behind us and hindsight on our side, we’re now better equipped to offer a realistic vision of what Dead Cells 1.0 will be and how the ride through the rest of the Early Access gauntlet is going to go down.
We see the fourth update as the turning point in the development of Dead Cells. Your feedback and suggestions have been an invaluable resource with experimenting on and making the core game great. Not only does the next update bring stacks of new content, but we’re also looking to remove or improve on the remaining mechanics that we consider lackluster while cementing their successors. From there, we can finish building the game on solid and stable foundations. Well… At least that’s the plan!
Last but not least, we wanted to keep you in the loop about the final release timeline. When we launched Dead Cells into Early Access we were aiming to stay there for 8 to 12 months or more if needed. The aim is not to rush but to deliver a polished game that doesn’t compromise our quality standards and meets the expectations of the community.
On that note we may have marginally underestimated the time needed to develop new features while still iterating on the core experience and making sure we don’t break everything while we’re at it… Therefore the scale now tips in the balance of a 12 month early access period rather than 8, so don’t expect to see us slow down on updates, bugfixes and the war on stuttering for a while.
Thanks again to all of you for your trust and continuous support! As a little token of our gratitude, here’s a little teasing of what’s coming with the fourth update... It’s a totally innovative feature that no game before ours ever imagined!!!
(And you better like it, because now we need to rework the level design of 500000000+ rooms and we’re already bored out of our minds!).