![]() ![]() Because we wanted to have a game that hooks you, we did use this experience to make the gameplay of Dead Cells. But because we had also this kind of experience, it made things a little bit easier when we made the roguelike part. When you make a PC game it’s more about, of course the quality, but just making good gameplay rather than a lengthy game or the tools to make people pay. “It’s totally different because when you make a free-to-play game you really think about the lifetime of the game. Motion Twin has 17 years of experience in developing browser and mobile games, but Dead Cells is its first game of this scale, aimed at PC and console players. And so that’s what we did! We removed a lot of elements from this old side-scrolling tower defense, including multiplayer, mobile and free-to-play elements and it led to this Castlevania kind of game that we made.” And at first it was really just a joke but at one point we were like: ‘Wait, maybe he’s right, maybe it would actually be a good idea to cut everything’. A friend of mine told us: ‘Maybe you should keep the single-player prototype because it’s actually more fun than the multiplayer thing’. “At this point we decided it was maybe a good idea to cancel it but we made a single-player prototype to show at events like Gamescom. It reached the prototype phase so we did have an alpha version that we showed to people and it didn’t go well, because it really wasn’t fun, like really not,” he laughs. ![]() It started as a free-to-play kind of game, a tower defense, something different. “At this time, Motion Twin was still making mostly web games and a few mobile titles but we wanted to make some kind of spiritual sequel to an older game that we made called Hordes. “It started something like three or four years ago,” lead developer and game designer Sébastien Bénard starts explaining. Dead Cells is no exception to the rule: before becoming the critically-acclaimed roguelike-meets-metroidvania title we know, it started life as a multiplayer tower defense game. Mitigating the tedium of repetition is the fact that players are able to gain permanent upgrades that boost their chances for more accomplished runs and open up new pathways for traversal.Video games development is all about iteration and for one good idea there will be hundreds of scrapped prototypes and failed projects. In other words, the game asks players to explore a world where death returns you to the beginning of the game, and the environments somewhat rearrange themselves. This summer, I was reminded of those Summer of Arcade days while playing “Dead Cells,” a mechanically-rich roguelike game that borrows from the Metroidvania genre. Those games, in particular, emerged as some of my favorites from that generation because they were more offbeat and focused than a lot of their big-tent competitors. During the Xbox 360 era, I used to look forward to the annual (2008-2013) Summer of Arcade promotional period where polished smaller titles - “Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons,” “Bastion,” “Limbo,” etc. Traditionally, summer is a slow period for video game releases as large publishers often hoard their wares until fall to take advantage of the holiday season. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |