Every once in a while, an indie game rises out of the blue to the very top of Steam sales. In 2017, that happened to Dead Cells, an extremely popular roguelite-Metroidvania game that sold several million copies over the years.
Now, French developer MotionTwin is back with a new game, Windblown. Announced at The Game Awards 2023, it's another roguelite game, although with quite a few differences from the studio's big success. In Windblown, players become Leapers, warriors fighting to protect their home (The Ark) from the gigantic and deadly Vortex and its Sentinel minions. They will dash freely through open stages that the developers promise will be filled with secrets to uncover. Players will have to overcome relentless battles against the Vortex's Sentinels, hell-bent on defeating them and starting their run anew.
Leapers will absorb the memories of the fallen warriors who came before them, learning to master the fighting styles of their predecessors to unleash their full potential. Players will switch between multiple weapons and are also able to change their build on the fly. As they unlock more memories, they'll collect more powerful and complex weapons. Windblown will support solo play as well as teaming up for online three-player co-op.
At GDC 2024, we met with MotionTwin's Yannick Elahee (Creative Director) and Thomas Vasseur (Artist) to discuss their upcoming game, which is due to launch on Steam Early Access later this year.
This has a drastically different art style from your previous title. Did you have to learn a completely different way to design the characters, or are you using similar designs from Dead Cells?
Thomas Vasseur: The thing that came directly from Dead Cells is the way I animated the character in order to make the game feel right. It has to be animated in a very specific way to get this feeling. This is exactly the same way in Dead Cells. That's why maybe some weapons look like they move in the same way.
There are other similar similarities. Like in Dead Cells, there are two weapons and two trinkets. The difference here is that weapons respond to each other, but you will feel at home if you come from Dead Cells because this is the same layout. But there are a lot of new things. For the art style, after Dead Cells, we wanted something bright to change our minds from the darkness. But hey, it will be dark too.
It's colorful to make a tonal rupture in the story. You begin with the flowers, the butterfly, and everything. But those kids will encounter a very hard reality. I can't tell you what it is now because it's a secret, but it will be in the narrative.
Yannick Elahee: We wanted something welcoming to show that the game was friendly. We also wanted to broaden the player base somehow. Some were a bit afraid of the castle in the night with zombies.
But then, as they play more, they will discover that the plot is a bit tough if they are interested in that. We are not story-driven like Hades, for example. We are more gameplay-driven. We do have a story, and we do have lore, but we don't want to interrupt the multiplayer. If you wanna do the whole game with your friends, we don't wanna interrupt you with text and cinematic. When you have the time, you can access that information.
Thomas Vasseur: But the lore will be deep. It will ask a lot of questions to the player and you will have to find the answers in the universe, kind of in the Dark Souls way of telling stories.
You said there are five biomes.
Yannick Elahee: Right now, we have four steps, and we have two alternate versions of the first one. But that's for the start of the early access. We'll be there for at least a year or maybe more. The game is ready when it's ready and filled with all the content, so we'll add more along the way.
The idea is that then you will have branching. You will have to explore all of those. Even now, you cannot see everything in one run because you have to choose for the first step. That's the beginning of this formula.
The formula for Dead Cells is you would routinely unlock alternate biomes. So you finish the first level and you can choose which path you want to take going forward, and that diverges how you proceed through.
Yannick Elahee: Yeah, it's part of the fun and it's actually something we wanna work on with the multiplayer of Windblown. We have a lot of ideas for that. We haven't had the time to prototype it, but we want to work on how can we make the multiplayer and the single-player kind of merge. Maybe during this exploration that will come along the way,
Right now, the Closed Alpha is only single player. Then, we'll start with basic multiplayer. On those kind of ideas, I think we'll work along with the players because you need to have the feedback of the community to see if what are you doing is really meaningful or not. There are such different kinds of players with different tastes and everything, so you need to have enough feedback from enough people to think that, OK, that was really a good idea. It took us four years to reach that point, and those questions, I think, are maybe tougher than the ones we answered.
Thomas Vasseur: The game is already playable for up to three players, but it has not been tested with a lot of people. So we have to stress test it. Players are waiting for us to make multiplayer work because if it's a crash at the launch, it would be catastrophic.
When you're playing through with two or three players, how does the challenge scale up to account for the additional players?
Yannick Elahee: It scales up directly. For example, if you start with three players and then suddenly someone has to leave, then all of the game is rebalanced instantly, which means the amount of damage, the number of mobs that will be generated in the next chunks, which also means their life. That will obviously impact the amount of rewards that are generated when you kill someone.
Thomas Vasseur: There is a part of things you have unlocked that you can share with your friends. If I have unlocked something and I play with a friend who hasn't, you will see it; you will experience it, and maybe you will be crushed by it. You can show your secret to others and maybe you want to unlock those features, too.
Yannick Elahee: At first, we wanted to make a game where you can play together. It was not supposed to be a roguelike, actually. We weren't like, okay, we create another roguelite. It was not a goal for us, we just wanted to create an action game you can play together.
Then we reached that point where the question was, if I played 100 hours and you played two hours, how can we have a meaningful experience together? How can we avoid that issue in World of Warcraft where I'm level 100 and you're level five, you can just watch me and it's the only thing you can do because you're just pointless. You don't do enough damage.
We weren't thinking about the roguelike part, but it fixes the problem because when you start the run, you reset most of the progress you got. In the long run, it's not like the new weapon you will get will do twice or 10 times the damage of the first one.
We see the progress more like you will get more possibilities and, fulfilled by your knowledge, you will be able to use those. We can give you that along the way and the new players, they can benefit from that.
Actually, we see the multiplayer in Windblown a bit like it works in the Dark Souls games, where you would invite a friend, and then suddenly, being two makes it easier. One can take this guy and I take this guy. Suddenly, we can block them, and you cannot be crushed by the two of them together. It's natural. It's not like we will suddenly say, oh, you hit twice as hard or whatever. It's more organic in the way it works.
One of the big things about Dead Cells is just how expansive the loot pool can get as you're unlocking new weapons and new affixes and such. In Windblown, you're unlocking new souvenirs. Now, at the risk of diluting the loot pool, if players don't want to use burning stuff as often, can they banish the unlocks from that loot pool?
Yannick Elahee: Right now, no, but we have thought about that. We actually worked on that for quite a long time and then we reached a point where we said, let's first make a lot of meaningful stuff before removing it. So, it's not implemented in this version.
Thomas Vasseur: The dilution problem has been addressed from the beginning with the deck, though maybe the simplest way would be to just ban what you don't want to see in your run.
That's an idea. This is something we'll talk about with the community, I think, because they might have good ideas.
The downside of having a deck system is players may not want to experiment as much. They may just want to use certain things every single time.
Thomas Vasseur: The tricky part is that a roguelite is a fight against having a 'sedentary build'. If you give the player the certainty of having a special build, it will be cool for two or three runs, but it will get boring very fast.
I have written about this deck thing in the first design document. You can choose hundreds of boons and discount some you don't want. In each run, we will pick 10, but only in the deck you choose.
Even Vampire Survivors has something like, say, 180 unlocks in a loot pool, and you can spend permanent upgrades to banish up to 10 of them. Then, you can pick and choose to toggle some of them on or off, but you can only remove less than 10% with the final upgrades.
Thomas Vasseur: Maybe we will have a system where the player can spend a little currency to make this specific weapon or specific gift to appear in the next run. We really need to find a good solution to address this issue.
Have you guys played Balatro yet?
Thomas Vasseur: Yes, I did, and I like it a lot.
I wondered if we would ever see the sense of scale and how your power curve ramps up in Windblown to be comparable to that of Balatro, where you're just exponentially more of a badass.
Yannick Elahee: For us, we would like to avoid having someone having his build on the second bio and then just keep it. We will always fight against that. Not because we don't want the player to be happy to enjoy the stuff, but because he will do that again and again and again and then he will just win the game because he already has done all of the defense yet.
Compared to Dead Cells, here we are using something a bit more linear in terms of stats but granting you more stuff that requires you to play; it's not automatic. It will be more contextual, so more based on your knowledge. Stellar players should be able to reach that gap. I think that's cool.
Do you have plans to implement something similar to like a Boss Cell system where you make future runs more difficult?
Yannick Elahee: It won't be available at the start of early access, for sure. But this is something we are interested in, though first, we want to address the experience for the broader audience so they can have the base core, decent and polished experience.
Also, we don't look at early access as a way to debug our game at all. It should be like final quality but not everything because we are only nine poor mortals and we need to sleep a bit.
Thank you for your time.
