Dead Cells dev says early access is key to help them make good games, but "it depends on the game you want to do"

The team behind Dead Cells are journeying down the early access route once again with their next gorgeous roguelike Windblown because, to them, reacting to player feedback is crucial in making good games.

Speaking to 12DOVE, Motion Twin developer Thomas Vasseur muses that there's one throughline that lets the studio create bangers: "I think it's players that give us feedback... players are very, very helpful to make games like that."

Yannick Berthier explains that the team has already been taking feedback onboard, well before Windblown's official Steam early access release date of October 24, as 200 to 300 players took part in a closed alpha test months ago - not to mention the feedback rolling in from friends and fellow developers even before that.

"They already shaped the game in a lot of ways, in a lot of systems, even small, just funny stuff that makes the overall experience really cool or memorable," Berthier continues. "To nailing some weapons and their game feel to ideas of systems for the shop or for the co-op and so on. They already really made an impact on the game, and there were only 200, so hopefully we'll have more players in 15 days, no pressure. I should not say that word... At the end, it's for the player. So you need to know what they think."

While early access might be crucial for the developers at Motion Twin, they wouldn't necessarily recommend it to other teams. "It depends on the game you want to do," Vasseur says. "The roguelite formula is very cool for early access because it's replay value based, so you can loop and everything, and you can add content very easily. I would say it's a bit difficult if you want to do maybe a narrative game, or, for example, a Metroidvania game." Vasseur notes that changing something seemingly simple like a character's moveset in a Metroidvania means you also need to "re-level design everything," so developers need to think about whether their genre would benefit from letting players in mid-development. 

"Yeah, the more modular the game systems, the more you can add, remove - we put one biome there, we put two there, we removed one, we put it at the end," Berthier adds. "All of that makes it way easier to update the game along the way. When you have some systems that are monolithic and need to not move to have the game work, then yeah, it's harder. Maybe it works, but we never experienced that."

Dead Cells developers felt “pressure” to match the roguelike’s high bar in their next game: “It’s awful and very, very cool at the same time.”