Hello everyone,
The alpha for our next update is live!
This update will be all about making Dead Cells more accessible to everyone. It's been five years since our Early Access release, and it's about time that we made sure that Dead Cells can be enjoyed by as many people as possible.
We're trying to achieve this in two ways – one is a bunch of new accessibility options such as outlining sprites in-game, holding a button to jump/roll a second time, or button remapping (full list below).
The other angle is an Assist Mode with sliders to adjust elements of the game such as enemy damage, enemy health and trap damage, options for slower parry window and trap speed, plus auto-hit and continue mode options.
There's also a rework of 8 weapons, and the cost of early game weapons is being heavily reduced to allow players to unlock weapons while working towards the crucial upgrades like health flasks and gold.
So, why are we adding the accessibility options?
Well, Dead Cells is intended to be tough but fair - sure, you die a lot, but you grow your skill while gaining new weapons & powers until you can beat the final boss, then add a Boss Cell to up the challenge and die to a rat on the next run. And so it begins again...
This is our vision of Dead Cells and we encourage players to try to beat the game as it is, however, we've received quite a lot of feedback that this experience is just inaccessible for a decent chunk of players with the game in its current state, for various reasons.
These new options are designed to allow specific adjustments of the game, to make this tough but fair gameplay accessible, while leaving other parts of the game the same.
We hope that these changes can let more players enjoy Dead Cells as we intended, and if the unaltered version of Dead Cells already hits the right balance of challenge and progression for you, then these changes are all optional - just leave the game as it is and continue having fun :)
What are the new options?
All the changes that are described below were tested (and are still being tested) with a panel of players with various impairments at Able Gamers, but if we're not addressing a need or are attempting to address it in the wrong way, please let us know how we could do better in the comments or on Discord.
Input
- Hold to second jump
- Hold to roll
- Shield toggle option, instead of long press
- More options to customise controls, especially actions that require a long press or a complex input + joystick action
Additional input options
Control customisation menu
Visual
- Customisable interface size and transparency
- Choice of game font styles (including pixellated)
- Game font colour customisation
- Stats colour customisation
- Display stats icons next to character stats
- Options to outline the Beheaded, projectiles, enemies, active skills and secrets
- Synergy and stat icons in equipment menu
- No-blood mode
- Adjustable particle limit
Making the text size adjustable is on our list too, but the game really, really, hates it when we make the text bigger. This was requested a lot, so we're not giving up yet, but we can't promise that it will be in the update.
Font colour menu
Stat icons displayed next to items
Outlines applied to Beheaded and enemies (plus customised stats colours in bottom left)
Synergy and stat icons in equipment menu
Sound
- Adjust volume of different sound effects separately
There are some other options that we'd like to add which are proving a bit tricky to implement, so bear in mind that this isn't a complete list of what might be in the update at the end.
We're also working on creating an accessibility menu to gather all these options in one place as they're all spread out in the options menu at the moment, but again the UI is being a bit tricky!
Assist Mode
- Continue mode – each time you die you can resurrect from the beginning of the biome (this effectively already existed by quitting the game when you die, now it's just 'official')
- Auto-hit mode – automatically target nearby enemies with your primary melee weapon. The one time that the mobile version was ahead of us!
- Adjustable trap damage, enemy damage and enemy health in % increments
- Option for slower parry window and trap speed
Weapon Reworks
This update also brings some reworks of older weapons, which were in pretty dire need of a tune-up:
- Barnacle: new crit condition on bleeding or poisoned targets to make it less awkward (and bad).
- Tentacle: lots of bug fixes. It should be way more reliable now.
- Crowbar: new crit condition on stunned enemies to make it less awkward too.
- Magnetic Grenade: full rework: it doesn't send enemies flying around (often in your head) but instead pulls them towards the explosion.
- Biters pets: now way more resistant to attacks and effects that don't specifically target them.
- Corrupted Power: now in % instead of a flat bonus. No other difference functionally speaking.
- Wings of the Crow: lots of bug fixes.
- Decoy: can be manually detonated after a few moments (it's not a grenade, but you don't have to awkwardly wait for it to explode if you don't want to)
Obviously this is an alpha so we might have been over eager with some of these changes. Have fun with that while you can, because we will be adjusting them where needed!
Early-game item cost reduced
The cost of most of the beginner items has been drastically cut, to make the early game less tedious for new players and to make new items a viable unlock option while trying to get your flask, gold and other useful upgrades. This should also make it easier to catch up on your item pool when starting a new save.
How to access the alpha:
Back up your save first. The alpha shouldn't affect your saves but better to be safe than sorry (and if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here - https://steamcommunity.com/games/588650/announcements/detail/1696100248017690442
Then follow these instructions to access the alpha:
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.
As always, everything is still being tweaked according to feedback. So some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.
If you want to leave feedback you can do so in the comments here, or on our official Discord - there are two channels called accessibility-alpha-discussion and accessibility-alpha-feedback specifically for alpha conversations, so please use them!
Well, that's it for this post, and if you know anyone who bounced off Dead Cells because they found it inaccessible then let them know what's coming!
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT