Hey everyone, we've released the second Dead Cells crossover update in collaboration with other indie titles including Terraria, Rain Threat, Hotline Miami, Shovel Knight, Katana Zero and Killing Pin.
Each weapon has been taken from the game and turned into a terrifying dead cell battle that is harder in some games than others! We still don't know how to port Deck Builder to Dead Cells...
Despite the challenges, we've learned a lot from the first standalone cross-platform update. Porting weapons from other games into Dead Cells and adapting them to the feel of the game, distinguishing them from the over 150 weapons and abilities in the game, and respecting the way they are presented in the source material, is extremely difficult. But this is a very exciting challenge for our development team.
However, the inspiration and insights you get from working with original material that you enjoy and play for hours on end makes the job a lot easier. In addition, you often work with people you know and share ideas and past experiences. That's how this update was born thanks to the community of independent developers.
To test it, we'll have to go back to the first indie crossover in November 2021 with Hollow Knight, Hyper Light Drifter, Guacameli, Skull: The Heroic Assassin, Slanderer and Curse of the Dead Gods.
This idea came from a “Wouldn’t it be nice if…” conversation in the break room. We soon noticed that the indie scene was very open, friendly and welcoming. Since most people know each other to some extent, why not contact other studios directly? Yes, we did it and received a lot of enthusiastic responses within a few days, it's easy!
After months of working on our ideas, we finally released the update without knowing how people would take it. This is the most popular non-DLC update since our launch, and we've released over 30 updates! It turns out that indie gamers are very excited to see more supported indie games.
It's obviously been a lot of fun working on this update as we've had the opportunity to bring some of our favorite gameplay elements to Dead Cells in our own way. But the fact that the first update was so big in terms of visibility convinced us to make a second crossover update. We helped our audience understand the game in the first update, and their audience became more familiar with Dead Cells.
This is important because unless you're really into indie games, most gamers (especially console gamers) aren't familiar with a few indie games, so the integration really helps to expose gamers to as many games as possible. I hope this type of game will become popular as it grows in popularity and the number of players.
It's part of the supportive vibe of the indie scene we mentioned earlier: the indie space is rarely competitive, always happy when other studios succeed, and eager to succeed.
To highlight this point, the folks at Re-Logic created the indie game Terraria, which is still the 11th best-selling game of all time. (At least according to Wikipedia) We're very excited to be a part of this update and will soon be bringing Dead Cells content to Terraria. We'd be surprised if other best-selling titles from major studios took the time to do something similar, but collaborations and collaborations seem to happen naturally in this space.
So what we mean is that we love indie games and we want more players to know about the innovation and community they offer. Hopefully this update will help bring more active players into the indie scene with the games they already love.