Each weapon is taken from its game and translated into the fast-paced action combat of Dead Cells, which was trickier for some games than others! We still don’t know how we managed to integrate a deckbuilder game into Dead Cells…
While it was tricky, we had learned a lot from our first indie crossover update. Bringing a weapon from another game into Dead Cells and adapting it to the gameplay feel, keeping it different from the 150 other weapons and skills already in the game and respecting how the weapon is depicted in its source material is, unsurprisingly, very difficult but also a fun challenge for our development team.
However, the inspiration and insights you get from being allowed to work with source material you love and have played for hours has really made it easier. On top of that, you often work with people you know and have shared ideas and experiences with before. That’s how this update was born, thanks to the community in the indie development scene.
To expand on this, we need to go back to our first indie crossover update in November 2021 with Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Guacamelee, Skul: The Hero Slayer, Blasphemous, and Curse of the Dead Gods.
This idea started with a “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” conversation in the break room. Right after, we realized that the indie scene is very open, friendly and supportive. Most people know each other to some degree, so why not just contact the other studios directly? Well, we did just that and had several enthusiastic responses within days, it was as simple as that!
After working several months with them on our ideas, we ended up releasing the update without really knowing how people would receive it. This ended up being the most visible update outside of DLC since our launch, and we’ve released over 30 updates! It turns out that indie gamers love to see other indie games supported…
Obviously, this is a really fun type of update to work on, as we get the chance to bring elements from our favorite games to Dead Cells in our own way. But the fact that the first update was so high in visibility really convinced us to do a second crossover update. We helped raise awareness of the games in our first audience update, and their audiences became more aware of Dead Cells.
This is a big deal because unless you’re really into indie games, few gamers (especially console gamers) know more than a few indie titles, so banding together really helps expose gamers to more indie games that they might like to hopefully increase the appreciation and player base for these types of games.
It’s part of that supportive atmosphere in the indie scene that we mentioned earlier – there’s very rarely aggressive competition in the indie space, people here are always just happy that other studios are doing well and actively want that success to happen.
To emphasize this point, the guys at Re-Logic who made Terraria, an indie game but still the 11e best selling game of all time(according to Wikipedia at least), were excited to be part of this update and will be bringing Dead Cells content to Terraria in the near future. We’d be pretty shocked if other big studio hits wanted to take the time to get involved in something like this, but collaborating and helping each other just feels natural in this space.
So our point is that we love indie games and want more players to be exposed to the creativity and community they have to offer. We hope this update will bring more players actively into the indie scene through games they already love.
