Highlights
- Dead Cells owes its success to a strong relationship with its community, allowing the developers to create content that resonates with players.
- The game's continuous updates and attention to fan feedback have led to improvements desired by the players and a more engaged community overall.
- Dead Cells is currently developing an animated series that offers a comedic buddy movie style, which aligns with the game's underlying sense of humor and lightness. No release date has been announced yet.
Dead Cells has earned its place among the pantheon of indie games in the last decade that have become icons and inspirations for countless titles since its release. Originally developed by Motion Twin and now headed up by indie game studio Evil Empire, Dead Cells continues to be the gold standard for indie roguelikes, often being a reference point for people discussing the qualities of roguelike games to follow.
In an interview with Game Rant, Evil Empire COO Benjamin Laulan looked back on Dead Cells' history and gave his thoughts on how the game managed to become so successful. In particular, he felt that the game's strong relationship with its community enabled the developers to create content that resonated most with its players. Looking to the future, he spoke about the upcoming Dead Cells animated series and the team's plans for future game content.
Dead Cells Never Truly Left Early Access
Although Dead Cells has grown tremendously in terms of sales, the game has also come a long way when it comes to development. Dead Cells is 35 major updates into its life now, each time introducing something significant whether it's crossovers with other indie games or accessibility updates that allow players to customize the difficulty level to their liking. Throughout the process, Laulan says that the Dead Cells team paid close attention to its community and this has been key to the game's success.
We like to say that “we never left Early Access.” We keep on giving because the audience is here, the community is here.
I think if we can sum up the success of the game, it's thanks to our community. They're here for us, they want more, they're pushing us towards doing and creating more, whether it's content or it's purely creativity in new ways of playing the game, they allow us to keep doing it in some way.
So it's kind of a virtuous circle where we are doing this for the community and the community is here to keep playing the game and they keep telling other people to buy the game. So the game keeps selling and that allows us, on our side, to afford a team that is fully focused on this.
One example of this focus on the community is how Dead Cells' patch notes are often littered with changes and features that are labeled as community suggestions or based on community feedback. This devotion to the game's community has led to a positive cycle where the game improves in ways that the community desires, which leads to an even more engaged community. This transparent and personal approach is something that other games should heavily consider.
Dead Cells Is Getting an Animated Series
Each of Dead Cells' DLCs have come with animated trailers that, although brief, are incredibly well-done animation shorts that offer a unique perspective compared to Dead Cells' usual pixel art. Naturally, fans have long wished for Dead Cells to expand on these trailers, and the developers shared in this dream. It's good news, then, that Dead Cells is officially developing an animated series in partnership with the studio that worked on its past trailers.
So we watched some of the episodes and it's really, really fun. It's a bit different than what I thought in the beginning, but I can't say too much about that. It's a nice balance between exploring the Dead Cells world in a different way than we would have thought: a buddy movie! A lot of comedy and jokes and also action of course because this is Dead Cells and we're not here to wander around the castle, we need to get some zombies at some point. But yeah, that's the idea. I don't have any dates yet but it’s coming along nicely.
Although a comedic buddy cop movie style seems a bit unusual for a game like Dead Cells, it's not completely out of character since the game persistently maintains a sense of humor and lightness underneath all the slaughter and gore. There's no date set for the animated series, but fans can get an idea of what to expect by checking out the animated sequences for Dead Cells' past DLCs in the meantime.
Dead Cells is available now on Mobile, PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.