A game as a guide
I decided to build a Dead Cells like… Now let me be clear, by no means would my #deadclones game be close to the quality of Dead Cells. This was to be a small free fan game I would build alone. What I had in mind was using Dead Cells as a strong guide for my project. Now, I want to tell you why I did this and how it helped me.
As many around here, I have lot of idea for games. In my dream world, I could combine all my best idea in terms of settings, story, game play and visual styles in one game…It would be a story-rich platformer metroidvania with RPG mechanisms…but this will not happen in this life. So, I have been going for a small but proper game, for people to have some fun playing.
With limited time on the project and everything to learn, I had to be efficient in everything: programming, drawing and game designing (is it english 😛 ?). Having Dead Cells in mind, I have saved a lot of time on defining the game mechanisms. Without it, I would have maybe assembled concepts from various game that would have asked me for a lot of testing, a lot of tweaking and at the end of the day may not have been consistent all together. I could not afford a lot of mistakes (even so I still have done a lot). Designing is a lot of fun but I did not have time to do it for everything in my game. So I took inspiration for many mechanics.
My second point comes from who I am. I am a creative and a dreamer. I find everything inspiring and I easily change my mind. I lack the strong-vision skill you would expect from a game lead. And due to the few time I have, I work and stop on my game, so the idea and feelings I have when coming back to the game are not the same as 3 months ago. The risk of that is inconsistency and for an indie game to be good you need your concept to be very sharp. So in that sense, Dead Cells also helped me to stay on the track of a consistent vision and gave me a direction of what I needed to achieve.
Now, having saved time on some of the design, I kept some fun for me. I had organized the design for this game as two concentric circles. The core engine deals with the platformer movements, the basic fighting actions and the enemies behaviors. This I have really built with Dead Cells in mind. The higher-level engine deals with ROGUE-like mechanisms: how the levels are built, how challenges are defined and how the player can improve to face them. This I built with my own ideas. I took inspiration in the melting-pot of boards games I played. Inspirations again.
Now, I think we all build from everything we ran into: games, books, movies. I think mixing idea gives strength to your concept. It also make the project more challenging as you need to maitain consistency to your vision. At least this is the case for me. I don’t know for others… ?
Dead Clones game making 