Fans of the genre roguelike and roguelite have had some real gems to enjoy over the past two years, with great games like Dead cells and last year’s awards ceremony Hades serving an incredibly satisfying dungeon crawl at Switch.
Curse of the dead gods is another example that has long been constantly building its fan base on Early Access on Steam, and developer Passtech Games is soon bringing its crunchy and shocking particle effect to a nearby Nintendo system: launch at Switch eShop on February 23rd. The word on the street (well, at least on Steam) is “Very positive,” so you’ll want to pay attention if you’re part of a crunchy, explosive fight.
We met with Margaux Saly of Passtech for more information on the story and inspirations of the studio, how the team sees the comparisons to the top-down action title full of gods of Supergiant Games and what we can wait for the Switch version of this cross-platform roguelita …
Nintendo Life: For anyone who has missed it, can you give us a brief summary of the curse of the dead gods and what it is all about?
Passtech Games: Curse of the Dead Gods is a roguelita action that takes place in a cursed temple. You seek eternal life but end up trapped in your own trap. You will face a horde of enemies in the dark corridors of the Jaguar, Eagle and Serpent temples; you will fight the Champions and Deadly Chiefs of these places, only to die again and again. But he will rise and strengthen as he finds ways to escape death.
The temple is ruled by the god of death, Xbeltz’aloc, who has a malicious pleasure in using your greed against you. Pay with your own blood to the altars for better equipment, but face the damn suffering consequences that define the course of each roll using random modifiers. Defeat your enemies, but be prepared to mock the traps covered by the shadows. Light is your best ally in the Temple!
Tell us a little bit about Passtech Games – how many teams do you have and how many do you bring together?
Passtech Games is a small French studio based in Lyon. It was founded in 2012 by Sylvain Passot as an individual studio, as he worked alone in the first game. It grew over the years, as the projects became more and more ambitious. All the core team members joined Passtech Games a few years ago and we already knew each other from previous projects at different game studios.
We’ve thrown four games together in total – a so-called defense tower Space Run, its sequel Space Run: Galaxy, a top-down adventure game called Masters of Anima, and of course Curse of the Dead Gods. Today we are about ten permanent members on the team and sometimes a little more during the production phases.
COTDG has been leading Early Access for a while: how long have you been working on the game and how did the ideas behind it develop?
We started working on the concept of Curse of the Dead Gods in 2018, just before the release of our previous game, Masters of Anima. We knew we wanted to move on to a much darker, sharper game, so we spent a lot of time creating the game’s combat system and artistic direction. We were inspired by our favorite games, mostly Darker dungeon for the artistic style of the comic i The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 3D cell shading rendering.
We liked the way the roguelita genre worked, we thought the top-down camera was adequate, as well as the game mechanics we were testing at the time. It was also a genre that allowed us to offer a challenging, skill-based experience; while incorporating a large progression curve and a lot of content. Early Access immediately seemed like the perfect fit for Curse of the Dead Gods, as it involved the community in development.
How did the final product set up and alter the early access period of the game?
The Early Access format has contributed greatly to the development of the game. Of course, we had our own guidelines with all the main content we wanted to integrate into the game, such as the Snake and Eagle temples. The community, however, helped us a lot to expand our list and test the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been modified thanks to direct feedback from players. Early Access is really a great tool for balancing a game and bringing new ideas to concepts. Although we had a very precise view of our game, it was always interesting to consider the suggestions of the community and try to integrate them into the existing mechanics.
The community, however, helped us a lot to expand our list and test the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been modified thanks to direct feedback from players.
On the other hand, we also needed to trust ourselves as developers, because the goal of Early Access is not just to blindly accept all player feedback. There was necessarily a certain amount of questions and reflections on the ideas. For example, we would get some negative comments about the final curse (which is pretty bad and is meant to be like that), but it came from players who didn’t really understand the purpose of that curse. On the other hand, the players told us when we made a bad decision on how to reward them with goal coins, so we decided to listen to them and adapt the concept.
Anyway, it was great to see all these players get involved in Curse of the Dead Gods and get to know him so well that they knew what could be added and what couldn’t.
Launching a game on multiple consoles is always a challenge: to what extent was the process to get the game running on Switch?
A real challenge, for sure! But we are very proud of the look of the game on Nintendo Switch and other consoles. It doesn’t betray the PC version, even if, of course, we made some concessions on the game’s graphics and performance. Today we are pleased with the result of Nintendo Switch with a resolution of 920p when the console is docked and 720p in hand mode, as well as 30 stable frames per second, which is much appreciated for a game where the reflections and fluidity are primordial. . Of course, if we have a chance to further optimize gaming on consoles, we will!
After the success of Supergiant with his fellow Rogades dungeons Hades last year (another game that went through a long period of early access), the reaction – and comparison – of this game has affected no way your COTDG approach?
First of all, we were very happy to see such an amazing reaction for Hades and Supergiant Games. It’s always good to see a game succeed, especially when you see that they clearly put a lot of passion into it.
As for the comparison, for us it is no longer a top-down roguelita action. These are two radically different games in the way they present themselves. The Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game in which you have to think of every move to keep it from falling on us, while in Hades you can get carried away by the magnificent frenzy of the struggles. The success of Hades and its comparisons did not affect our focus on Curse of the Dead Gods at all. Our game was already in development before the announcement of Supergiants and, as I said before, they are still two fundamentally different games. Still, it was very interesting to see what they were able to do with the genre, as it was really innovative and effective. After all, you can only flatter yourself with this comparison.
The Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game in which you have to think of every move to keep it from falling on us, while in Hades you can get carried away by the magnificent frenzy of the struggles.
What impact has the game and the team had on the last year or so of global turmoil?
Fortunately, we are in an industry that is not too affected by the frontal pandemic. Almost all of our work can be done remotely, and that’s a real plus, especially when we’re in the midst of developing our game. The blockade in France began shortly after the release of Curse of the Dead Gods in Early Access and we had to readjust our working methods. Of course, this affected our productivity at first because we had to get used to a new pace and new ways of working together. At Passtech Games, from time to time we already worked remotely, so the whole team was ready to work from home. But it is true that when exchanging ideas, error correction, mechanics, and so on. it was not very practical. Our early access suffered in some ways, because we would have liked to be able to integrate even more content, but we had to make decisions and discard things from the list. Hopefully we can add them after the game launch if it succeeds.
Once the game is over, do you have any specific plans on the post-release?
We are currently working on the first patch after the release, which should be released in the first two to three months after the game is released. It includes new content, such as new weapons, relics and curses, and even a nice surprise for roguelite fans. For now we won’t say more, but you’ll know soon enough. After that, we’ll take a step back in the development of Curse of the Dead Gods to see what players and the community have to say about it, and we hope they enjoy the game as much as we do so we can keep adding new things.
Is there anything else you want to mention that we haven’t played?
We look forward to sharing Curse of the Dead Gods with the Switch gaming community and hope you enjoy our damn Temple.
Our thanks to Margaux and Passtech for taking the time to answer our questions. Curse of the Dead Gods launches on Switch on February 23rd.