Fans of the roguelike and roguelite genres have had some real gems to enjoy in recent years, with great games like Dead cells and last year’s awards Hades serving some incredibly satisfying race-based dungeons on the Switch.
Curse of the Dead Gods is another example that has been steadily building its fan base on Early Access on Steam for some time, and developer Passtech Games is bringing its crisp, vigorous combat and beautiful particle effects to a Nintendo console near you very soon – it will be released on Switch eShop on 23 February. The word on the street (well, on Steam at least) is ‘Very Positive’, so you’ll want to pay attention if you like energetic and crunchy fighting and explosions.
We caught up with Margaux Saly of Passtech to find out more about the studio’s history and inspirations, how the team sees comparisons to the god-filled top-down action title from Supergiant Games and what we can expect from the Switch version of this multiplatform roguelite …
Nintendo Life: For those who may have lost, can you give us a brief outline of Curse of the Dead Gods and what is it about?
Passtech Games: Curse of the Dead Gods is a Roguelite action set in a cursed temple. You seek eternal life, but end up in your own trap. You will face a horde of enemies in the dark corridors of the Jaguar, Eagle and Snake Temples; you will fight the champions and mortal bosses of these places, only to die again and again. But you will get up and get stronger as you find ways to escape death.
The Temple is ruled by the God of Death, Xbeltz’aloc, who takes malicious pleasure in using his greed against you. Pay with your own blood on altars to get better equipment, but face the consequences by suffering Curses that define the course of each race through random modifiers. Defeat your enemies, but be prepared to outwit the shaded traps. Light is your best ally in the Temple!
Tell us a little about 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 grew over the years, as projects became more and more ambitious. All the main members of the team joined Passtech Games a few years ago, and we already knew each other from previous projects in different game studios.
We launched four games together in total: a Tower Defense called Space Run, its sequel Space Run: Galaxy, a top-down adventure game called Anima Masters, 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 in Early Access for some time – how long have you been working on the game and how did the ideas behind it develop?
We started working on the Curse of the Dead Gods concept in 2018, just before the release of our previous game, Masters of Anima. We knew we wanted to move on to a much darker and more forceful game, so we spent a lot of time creating the combat system and the artistic direction of the game. We are inspired by our favorite games – mainly Darkest Dungeon for comic book art style, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for rendering 3D cell shading.
We liked the way the roguelite genre worked, we thought the top-down camera fit in well with the game mechanics we were testing at the time. It was also a genre that allowed us to offer a challenging and skill-based experience; while incorporating a big progression curve and lots of content. Right away, Early Access seemed like the perfect choice for Curse of the Dead Gods, as it involved the community in development!
How did the early access period for the game shape and change the final product?
The Early Access format contributed a lot to the game’s development. Of course, we had our own guidelines with all the main content that we wanted to integrate into the game, like the Temples of the Serpent and the Eagle. The community helped us a lot, however, by expanding our list and testing the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been modified thanks to direct feedback from the players. Early Access is really a great tool to balance a game and bring new ideas to concepts. Although we had a very precise view of our game, it was always interesting to take the suggestions of the community into account and try to integrate them into the existing mechanics.
The community helped us a lot, however, by expanding our list and testing the game mechanics on a large scale. In fact, some of the ideas have been modified thanks to direct feedback from the 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 questioning and pondering about the ideas. For example, we would receive some negative feedback about the Final Curse (which is very bad and it’s like that), but it came from players who did not really understand the purpose of this Curse. On the other hand, the players told us when we made a bad decision as to how to reward them with meta coins, so we decided to listen to them and adapt the concept.
Anyway, it was great to see all these players getting involved in Curse of the Dead Gods and getting to know him so well that they knew what could and could not be added.
Launching a game on multiple consoles is always a challenge – how smooth was the process of getting the game running on the Switch?
A real challenge, for sure! But we are very proud of the game’s appearance on Nintendo Switch and other consoles. It does not betray the PC version, even if it is clear that we have made some concessions in graphics rendering and game performance. Today we are satisfied with the result of the 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 much appreciated for a game where reflexes and fluidity are fundamental. Of course, if we have the opportunity to further optimize the game on the consoles, we will!
After Supergiant’s success with fellow roguelite dungeon-crawler Hades last year (another game that went through a long initial access period), did the reaction – and initial comparison – to that game affect your approach to COTDG in any way?
First of all, we were very happy to see such an incredible reaction for Hades and Supergiant Games. It’s always good to see a game succeed, especially when you can see that they clearly put a lot of passion into it.
As for comparison, for us it is no longer a top-down action roguelite. They are two radically different games in the way they are presented. Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move must be thought to prevent it from falling on us, while at Hades you can get carried away by the superb frenzy of fights. Hades’ success and comparisons in no way affected our approach to Curse of the Dead Gods. Our game was already in development before the announcement of the Supergiants and, as I said before, they remain two fundamentally different games. Still, it was very interesting to see what they managed to do with the genre, as it was really innovative and effective. After all, we can only be flattered by this comparison.
Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move must be thought to prevent it from falling on us, while at Hades you can get carried away by the superb frenzy of fights.
How much impact has the past year or more of global turmoil affected the game and the team?
Fortunately, we are in an industry that is not badly affected by the pandemic. Almost all of our work can be done remotely, and this is a great advantage, especially when we are in the middle of developing our game. The blockade in France started right after the release of Curse of the Dead Gods in early access and we had to readjust our working methods. Of course, it affected our productivity in the beginning because 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 entire team was ready to work from home. But it is true that when it came to exchanging ideas, fixing bugs, mechanics, etc., it was not very practical. Our early access suffered to some extent, because we would like to be able to integrate even more content, but we had to make choices and cross things off the list. We hope to be able to add them after the game launches, if successful.
Once the game is released, do you have any concrete plans for the post-launch?
We are currently working on the first post-release patch, which should be released within the first two or three months after the game’s release. It brings new content such as new weapons, relics and curses, and even a nice surprise for Roguelite fans! We won’t say anything else for now, but you will know all about it soon! After that, we’ll take a step back in developing Curse of the Dead Gods to see what the players and the community have to say about it, and we hope they enjoy the game as much as we do so that we can keep adding new things!
Is there anything else you would like to mention that we haven’t mentioned?
We look forward to sharing Curse of the Dead Gods with the Switch gaming community and hope you enjoy our cursed temple!
Our thanks to Margaux and Passtech for answering our questions. Curse of the Dead Gods will be released on Switch on February 23.