Fans of the roguelike and roguelite genre have had some real gems to enjoy in recent years, with excellent games such as Dead cells and last year’s awards ceremony Hades serving up some incredibly satisfying run-based dungeon crawl 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 its crunchy, punchy combat and beautiful particle effects to a Nintendo system near you soon – it launches on Switch eShop at 23rd February. The word on the street (well, on Steam at least) is ‘Very Positive’, so keep an eye out if you have a taste for spicy, crunchy fights and explosions.
We spoke with Margaux Saly from Passtech to learn more about the studio’s history and inspiration, how the team looks at comparisons to Supergiant Games’ God-filled top-down action title, and what to expect from the Switch version of this multiplatform roguelite …
Nintendo Life: For anyone who may have missed it, can you give us a quick overview of Curse of the Dead Gods and what it’s all about?
Passtech games: Curse of the Dead Gods is an action roguelite that takes place in a cursed temple. You seek eternal life, but you end up in your own trap. You will face a horde of enemies in the dark corridors of the Jaguar, Eagle and Serpent temples; you fight against the champions and deadly bosses of these places but die again and again. But you will rise and grow stronger as you find ways to escape death.
The temple is ruled by the God of death, Xbeltz’aloc, who takes an evil delight to use your greed against you. Pay with your own blood at altars to get better equipment, but suffer the consequences by suffering Curses that determine the course of each run through random modifiers. Defeat your enemies, but get ready to outsmart the traps covered by the shadows. Light is your best ally in the temple!
Tell us a bit 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 a one-man studio as he only worked on the first game. It grew over the years as the projects became more ambitious. All core members of the team joined Passtech Games a few years ago and we already knew each other from previous projects at various game studios.
We released a total of four games called a Tower Defense Space Run, the sequel Space Run: Galaxy, a top-down adventure game called Masters of Anima, and of course the curse of the dead gods. Today we have a dozen permanent members in the team, and sometimes more during the production phases.
COTDG has been in Early Access for a while – how long have you been working on the game and how have the ideas behind it developed?
We started 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 to a much darker and spicier game, so we spent a lot of time developing the combat system and the artistic direction of the game. We mainly took inspiration from our favorite games Darkest Dungeon for the comic book art style, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for the 3D cell shadow view.
We liked the way the roguelite genre worked, we thought the top down camera was appropriate as well as the game mechanics we were testing at the time. It was also a genre that allowed us to provide a challenging skill-based experience; while it has a large progression curve and a lot of content. Early Access immediately seemed like the perfect match for Curse of the Dead Gods as it involved the community in its development!
How did the game’s Early Access period shape and change the final product?
The Early Access format has contributed immensely 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 Serpent and Eagle Temples. However, the community helped us a lot by expanding our list and testing gameplay mechanics on a large scale. Some ideas have even changed thanks to direct feedback from players. Early Access is a really great tool for balancing a game and bringing new ideas to concepts. Even though we had a very precise vision of our game, it was always interesting to take into account the community’s suggestions and try to integrate them into the existing mechanics.
However, the community helped us a lot by expanding our list and testing gameplay mechanics on a large scale. Some ideas have even changed thanks to direct feedback from players.
On the other hand, we had to trust ourselves as developers, because the goal of Early Access is not just to blindly accept all feedback from the players. There was necessarily some degree of questioning and contemplation about ideas. For example, we would get some negative feedback about the Final Curse (which is pretty bad and is meant to be), but it came from players who didn’t really understand the purpose of this Curse. On the other hand, players told us when we made a bad decision regarding the way to reward them with meta currencies, so we decided to listen to them and tweak the concept.
Regardless, it was great to see all these players get involved with Curse of the Dead Gods and get to know it 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 Switch?
A real challenge, for sure! But we are very proud of the way the game looks on Nintendo Switch and other consoles. It doesn’t betray the PC version, even though we’ve made some concessions to the game’s graphics and performance, of course. Today we are pleased with the result on the Nintendo Switch with a resolution of 920p when the console is docked and 720p in handheld style, as well as 30 stable frames per second, which is greatly appreciated for a game where reflexes and smoothness are paramount. . If we have the opportunity to further optimize the game on consoles, we will of course!
After Supergiant’s success with fellow roguelite dungeon crawler Hades (another game that went through a long period of early access), the reaction – and go-to comparison – to that game has taken your approach to COTDG. affected in any way?
First, we were very happy to see such a great response for Hades and Supergiant Games. It’s always nice to watch a game succeed, especially when you can see that they clearly put a lot of passion into it.
As for the comparison, for us it stops being a top-down roguelite action. These are two completely different games in the way they present themselves. Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move has to be invented to keep it from falling back on us, while in Hades you can get carried away by the awesome frenzy of the combat. The success of Hades and his comparisons did not affect our approach to Curse of the Dead Gods at all. Our game was already in development before the Supergiants announcement, and as I said before, they remain two fundamentally different games. Still, it was very interesting to see what they could do with the genre, because it was really innovative and effective. After all, one can only be flattered by such a comparison.
Curse of the Dead Gods is almost a strategy game where every move has to be invented to keep it from falling back on us, while in Hades you can get carried away by the awesome frenzy of the combat.
How much impact has the past year or so of global tumultuousness affected the game and the team?
Fortunately, we are in an industry that is not too affected by the pandemic. Almost all of our tasks can be done remotely, which is a real boon, especially when we are in the midst of developing our game. Lockdown in France started shortly after the release of Curse of the Dead Gods in Early Access and we had to adjust our working methods. Of course, this affected our productivity in the beginning, as we had to get used to a new rhythm and new ways of working together. At Passtech Games we already worked remotely from time to time, so the whole team was ready to work from home. But it is true that it was not very practical when it came to exchanging ideas, bug fixes, mechanics, etc. Our Early Access suffered in a way, as we would have liked to have been able to integrate even more content, but we had to make choices and things from the list. Hopefully we can add them after the game’s release if we can.
Once the game is out, do you have any concrete plans for the post-launch?
We are currently working on the first post-launch patch, which should be released in the first two to 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 more about it for now, but you’ll know all about it soon enough! Then we’ll take a step back from the development of Curse of the Dead Gods to see what the players and the community have to say about it, and hopefully they will enjoy the game as much as we do so we can keep adding new things !
Is there anything else you would like to mention that we have not covered?
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 taking the time to answer our questions. Curse of the Dead Gods launches on Switch on February 23.