GDC 2019 Talks - Into the Breach and Dead Cells

April 11, 2019

2019 GDC Vault

Talks

GDC 2019 - Into the Breach' Design Postmortem

By: Matthew Davis

From: Subset Games

GDC 2019 - 'Dead Cells': What the F*n!?

By: Sebastien Benard

From: Motion Twin

Into the Breach Design Postmortem

Constraint Focused Design: This basically has them set constraints as early in the game design process as possible that help direct and restrict future design choices. This can be something like a genre, or a game mechanic like health.

Gameplay focused design: They approach making games by starting the the main gameplay they want to create, and then building everything else to fit around that. Everything such as narrative or theme ends up following the gameplay.

They used a very board game inspired design for "Into the Breach". They like to keep numbers small, easy to understand, and meaningful. The difference from 1 to 2 should be impactful. This also leads into how they designed enemies. There is a "chess-like" feel to enemies, and the overall gameplay in general, in that the player should have a good understanding of how a piece operates and its zone of danger it creates and be able to play around that.

Randomness was something to be kept to a minimum. This went very well with the idea of having the enemies forecast their attacks. Again, this also ties in with making as much information available to the player as possible. Even though they wanted to reduce randomness to a minimum, they still implemented it when they deemed it a much better option.

As most game designers do, they wanted a strong focus on interesting decisions. This led to keeping out a lot of complex systems that were too difficult to use for what they really brought to the game. This was also done a bit differently on their team since they only have two people, so they could iterate quickly and often and scrap ideas and designs much more easily.

'Dead Cells': What the F*n!?

They really wanted to focus on "permadeath" as a game mechanic. Focusing on this led them to some core mecahnics to "make death fun". The core of this was death being a way to progress in the game. It gave you a way to improve your character's abilities, as well as access previous areas again (since the game does not allow back tracking).

They wanted to focus the design on combat, NOT platforming. Even though it is still a 2D platformer, they really wanted the player to use their skills for fighting and limit or even remove punishments for platforming. To achieve this, they used many small mechanics such as allowing players to jump a few frames after leaving a platform, teleporting the player onto a platform if they missed a jump by a few pixels, and implementing an edge grabbing mechanic.

This player helping system in platforming got carried over into over mechanics as well, such as helping aim attacks. If the player is facing the wrong direction when going for an attack, the game can actually assist them and switch them around the other direction. I initially was very against this concept, but I appreciated their take on it and was much more accepting after their explanations. This helped reduce the mechanical demands for the game, rewarding the player much more for strategic combat gameplay. Then in this way, this actually allowed them to make the game more difficult in some respects since the player wouldn't be punished for these less important game aspects.

Just a small note, since they use a lot of community feedback to update their game, they will leave comments in the patch notes stating who inspired the change. This is just a good way to let the community know how impactful they are and make them more willing to help in the future.