of expertise we tried to move to mobile, we released
a few games and some of them were well received.
However there is a very specific type of development
that exists on mobile. Everything is about metrics
and numbers. You basically need a team that is 70%
marketing and analytics and 30% development and
creative. That’s not what we wanted to do.
It was at this point that we realised something had
to give. We needed to either do something radical or
go full speed ahead on the mobile front. So we said,
screw it, let’s make a game for us, a hardcore game
designed for PC/console and let’s all do it and to hell
with the consequences. This was a reckless decision,
but one that’s thankfully paid off.
How did you come up with the idea for Dead Cells?
Dead Cells started out as us trying to do what we did
best. It was supposed to be the spiritual successor to
Die2Nite. So it was going to be web/mobile F2P and
have tower-defense and co-opetition (yes that’s right)
mechanics. You’d play online with real people and try
to defend against waves of zombies doing what you
could to stay alive.
The problem was that it looked good non paper but
we couldn’t make it work. However we liked the
universe and the idea, so we turned it into a solo PC/
Console tower-defense/action-platformer type thing.
Again we really struggled with the Game Design
(GD).
At this point a little new blood in the team brought
new ideas and eventually culminated in the decision
of “screw this let’s do a game for us”. That was in
December 2015. From that moment on we started
from scratch, We kept the universe, but we changed
the GD completely to a rogue-lite/metroidvania.
Well it was more iterative than that, but we really
took ownership of the hardcore side of the game.
pervasive, because it colors all of your instincts without
you realising it. So really having to reprogram ourselves.
The next issue would be team size. Steam is a tough
market these days. The bar has been set really high
and if you want to be able to survive as a studio you
really have to be looking at making a top 5-10 game
in a certain genre. This means quality, particularly
in the mechanics and the art, having one Game
Designer and one Art Director who are supposed to
do it all… That requires real support from the team
and even financial risks in employing new people to
take up the slack.
Next and one of the tougher ones is the indifference
off gatekeepers. If you work at Sony or Kotaku or
whatever, you’re looking for the next hit, you see
hundreds and hundreds of pitches a year so you’re
looking for something spectacular, something
that stands out. When your pitch is “2D pixel-art
rogeVania with souls-lite combat” you get a whole
bunch of “meh” in response.
Gatekeepers don’t really care about what has worked
and anyone trying to take that and make something
new with it, they want something new and shiny.
So that was a big risk and we knew that from the
start. We really had to punch above our weight to
make that work
Dead Cells has a really strong pixel art style. Was
this the intention from the beginning, or did you
experiment with other styles?
No that was the intention from the beginning.
We wanted to have the oldskool retro thing going
on, but then we also wanted, 3D lighting, modern
shaders, fancy FX and particles… So that’s what we
planned for. Thomas, our Art Director, realised that
being alone, animating and doing everything wasn’t
going to be possible, so we designed a 3D workflow.
Then it was an iterative, collaborative process with
all the members of the team constantly playing the
game, testing games in the same genres talking about
them, ironing out wrinkles we didn’t like and just
going over and over it until we have what you see in
front of you. All the characters are 3D models rendered in
pixel art. This means that if we want to change the
feeling of a weapon by changing its timing, we can.
Tom just redoes the 3D part and exports the new
animation to a sprite sheet, instead of having to
start from scratch all over again.
What are some of the challenges you’ve had to
overcome working on Dead Cells? This is what gives us that “wow” effect when you hit
the Ramparts for the first time. It’s all 3D lighting
that we’ve built from the ground up, iterating over
and over until we had something that we really
thought was going to make people happy.
Old mentalities. We had 15 years experience doing
one thing, that takes a while to get over. It’s kind of
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