Each weapon is taken from its game and transformed into Dead Cells’ fast-paced action combat, which is harder for some games than others! We’re still not sure how we managed to bring the deck building game into Dead Cells…
While it’s a bit convoluted, we’ve learned quite a bit from our first standalone crossover update. Take a weapon from another game into Dead Cells and match it to the feel of the game, keep it different from the 150+ other weapons & skills already in the game, and respect the way weapons are built. shown in its source documentation, was, unsurprisingly, very difficult but also an interesting challenge for our dev team.
However, the inspiration & ideas you get from being allowed to work with your favorite material and have been playing for hours really make it easier. On top of that, you often work with people you know and have shared ideas and experiences with before. This is how this update came about, for the community in the context of independent development.
To expand on this, we need to go back to the first standalone 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 as a “Wouldn’t it be great if…” conversation in the break room. Soon, we realized that the independent scene is very open, friendly, and supportive. Most people know each other to some degree, so why not contact the other studios directly? Well, we did exactly that and received a lot of enthusiastic feedback in a few days, simple as that!
After talking back and forth with them about our ideas for several months, we ended up releasing the update without really knowing how people would take it. It’s been the most visible update outside of DLC since we launched, and we’ve released over 30 updates! Turns out indie gamers just love seeing other indie games supported…
Obviously, this is a really fun kind of update to make, as we get the chance to bring elements of our favorite games to Dead Cells in our own way. But the fact that the first update had so much visibility really convinced us to do a second cross update. We helped increase the knowledge of the game in the first update for our audience, and their audience already knows more about Dead Cells.
This is a big deal because, unless you really love indie games, not many gamers (especially console players) are familiar with more than a few indie titles. so getting together really helps expose players to more indie games that they can be like, hopefully increasing appreciation and player base for these types of games this.
This is part of the supportive atmosphere in the indie scene we mentioned earlier – it’s rare that there’s any stiff competition in the indie space, people here are always happy when other studios are successful and actively want that success to happen.
To emphasize this point, the folks at Re-Logic created Terraria, a standalone game that’s still 11order Best selling game of all time (at least according to Wikipedia), has been looking forward to being a part of this update and will bring Dead Cells content to Terraria in the near future. We’d be quite shocked if other best-selling titles from the bigger studios wanted to take the time to get in on something like this, but collaborating and helping each other seem to come naturally. in this space.
So our point is, we love indie games and want a lot of players exposure to the creativity and community they offer. We hope that this update can achieve some measure of getting more players to actively participate in the indie scene through the games they already love.