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Fans of the roguelike and roguelite genre have had some real gems to enjoy over the past two years, with great games like Dead cells and last year’s awards ceremony Hell serving insanely satisfying dungeon crawl dungeons on Switch.
Curse of the dead gods is another example that has been steadily building its fan base in Early Access on Steam for quite some time now, and developer Passtech Games is bringing their crisp, hard-hitting combat and cute particle effects to a Nintendo console near you very soon – it will launch on Switch eShop on February 23. The word on the streets (well, on Steam at least) is “ very positive, ” so you’ll want to be careful if you like hard-hitting, crunchy fights and explosions.
We caught up with Passtech’s Margaux Saly to learn more about the studio’s history and inspirations, how the team sees comparisons to Supergiant Games’ god-filled top-down action title, and what we can expect from the release. Switch of this multiplatform roguelite. …
Nintendo Life: For anyone who might have missed it, can you give us a quick rundown of Curse of the Dead Gods and what it’s all about?
Passtech games: Curse of the Dead Gods is a roguelite action that takes place in a Temple of Doom. You seek eternal life but find yourself caught 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 deadly champions and bosses of these places, to die again and again. But you will rise up and become stronger as you find ways to escape death.
The Temple is ruled by the God of Death, Xbeltz’aloc, who takes pleasure in using your greed against you. Pay with your own blood at the altars for better gear, but face the consequences as you take curses that define how each race unfolds through random modifiers. Defeat your enemies, but prepare to thwart shadow-covered traps. Light is your best ally in the temple!
Tell us a bit about the Passtech Games – how big is the team and how long have you been 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 was working alone on the first game. It has grown over the years, the projects becoming more and more ambitious. All of the core team members joined Passtech Games a few years ago, and we already knew each other from previous projects in different game studios.
We released four games together in total: a tower-defense called Space race, his suite Space Race: Galaxy, a top-down adventure game named Masters of the Animaand, of course, Curse of the Dead Gods. Today, there are about ten of us permanent in the team, and sometimes a little more during the production phases.
COTDG has been in Early Access for a while now – how long have you been working on the game and how have the ideas behind it developed?
We started working on the concept for Curse of the Dead Gods in 2018, right before our previous game, Masters of Anima, was released. We knew we wanted to move on to a much darker, more punchy game, so we spent a lot of time creating the combat system and the art direction of the game. We took inspiration from our favorite games – mostly Darkest Dungeon for the artistic style of comics, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for 3d rendering of cell shading.
We liked the way the roguelite genre worked, we thought the top-down camera was fine as well as the gameplay mechanics we were testing at the time. It was also a genre that allowed us to provide a stimulating and skills-based experience; while incorporating a great progression curve and a lot of content. From the start, Early Access seemed like the perfect fit for Curse of the Dead Gods as it involved the community in development!
How did the game’s early access period shape and change the end product?
The Early Access format greatly contributed to the development of the game. Of course, we had our own guidelines with all of the main content that we wanted to bring into the game, like the Temples of the Snake and the Eagle. The community has helped us a lot though, expanding our roster and testing the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been changed thanks to direct player feedback. Early Access is really a great tool for balancing a game and bringing new ideas to concepts. Even though we had a very precise vision of our game, it has always been interesting to take into account the suggestions of the community and try to integrate them into the existing mechanics.
The community has helped us a lot though, expanding our roster and testing the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been changed thanks to direct player feedback.
On the flip side, we also had to trust ourselves as developers, as the point of Early Access isn’t just to blindly accept all player feedback. There must have been a certain amount of questioning and thinking about the ideas. For example, we would have negative comments about the final curse (which is bad enough and it is meant that way), but it was coming from players who didn’t really understand the purpose of this curse. In contrast, players told us that we made the wrong decision on how to reward them with meta-currencies, so we decided to listen to them and adapt the concept.
Either way, it was great to see all of these players getting involved in Curse of the Dead Gods and getting to know it so well that they knew what could and couldn’t be added.
Launching a game on multiple consoles is always a challenge – how smooth has the process of launching the game on Switch been?
A real challenge, for sure! But we’re very proud of how the game looks on the Nintendo Switch and other consoles. This does not betray the PC version, although of course we have made some concessions in the graphics rendering and the performance of the game. Today we are satisfied with the result on Nintendo Switch with a resolution of 920p when the console is docked and 720p in portable mode, as well as 30 stable frames per second, which is very appreciated for a game where reflexes and fluidity are essential. Of course, if we have the opportunity to further optimize console play, we will!
Following Supergiant’s success with fellow roguelite dungeon crawler Hades last year (another game that went through a long period of early access), the reaction – and benchmark comparison – to this game Did it affect your approach to COTDG in any way?
First of all, we were very happy to see such an incredible reaction from Hades and Supergiant Games. It’s always nice to see a game succeed, especially when you see that it clearly puts a lot of passion into it.
As for the comparison, it ceases for us to be a roguelite for top-down action. They are two radically different games in the way they present themselves. Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move has to be thought through to avoid it falling on us, whereas in Hades you can get carried away by the superb frenzy of the fighting. The success of Hades and its comparisons didn’t affect our approach to Curse of the Dead Gods at all. Our game was already in development before Supergiants was announced, and as I said before, they remain two fundamentally different games. Still, it was very interesting to see what they were able to do with the genre, because it was really innovative and effective. One can only be flattered by such a comparison after all.
Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move has to be thought through to avoid it falling on us, whereas in Hades you can get carried away by the superb frenzy of the fighting.
How has the last year of global uproar affected the game and the team?
Fortunately, we are in an industry that is not too affected by the pandemic. Almost all of our work can be done remotely, and that’s a real godsend, especially when we’re in the process of developing our game. The lockdown 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 in the beginning as we had to get used to a new pace and new ways of working together. At Passtech Games, we were already working remotely from time to time, so the whole team was ready to work from home. But it is true that when it came to exchanging ideas, bug fixes, mechanics, etc., it was not very convenient. Our Early Access suffered in a way, as we wished we could have integrated even more content, but we had to make choices and cross things off the list. Hopefully we can add them after the game is released if it succeeds.
Once the game is released, do you have any concrete post-launch plans?
We are currently working on the first post-launch patch, which should be released within the first two to three months of the game’s release. It brings new content such as new weapons, relics and curses, and even a nice surprise for them. roguelite fans! We won’t say more yet, but you’ll find out soon enough! After that, we’ll take a step back from the development of Curse of the Dead Gods to see what players and the community have to say about it, and I hope they enjoy the game as much as we do so we can. Continue. add new things!
Is there anything else you would like to mention that we haven’t covered?
We can’t wait to share Curse of the Dead Gods with the Switch gaming community and hope you enjoy our Temple of Doom!
Thanks to Margaux and Passtech for taking the time to answer our questions. Curse of the Dead Gods launches for Switch on February 23.
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