For their new roguelite, the Dead Cells team scrapped 2 years of work on combat and redid it in just 3 weeks: 'We need to be able to dare to kill a feature when it doesn't work'

Developers from Motion Twin, best known for incredibly popular roguelite Dead Cells, are in on the joke when they talk about the process of making their new game meaning they had to throw away tons of progress and start over. «We fail all the time. We're like, OK, what we did is pure shit, let's try again. It's a roguelite production,» said designer Yannick Berthier, as he walked me through Motion Twin's new action game Windblown.

The studio's first new project since Dead Cells is also a roguelite—art truly imitates life, I guess—that plays substantially faster than their previous 2D action, with an incredibly zippy dash move key to staying alive in the now-3D combat environments. Also key to combat is the weapon system, which lets you swap between two weapons on the fly to combo attacks into unique finishers. «Every weapon has a hidden, super powerful attack that can only be triggered by playing with the other weapon equipped,» said Berthier. 

Motion Twin artist Thomas Vasseur, who was driving the demo, chimed in to elaborate. «The goal for us is to have a lot of synergies between weapons, so every time you unlock a weapon you'll have to think about how it will work with another one.» For example, some weapons can reach the end of a combo string very quickly, so you can more quickly unleash the special technique, called an «alter attack» from your second weapon—perhaps a heavier greatsword that would've normally taken longer to get up to speed.

Different weapons will trigger the alter attack of their partner in different ways. The shield, for example, doesn't activate its alter attack by doing damage, but when you take damage you can parry and then immediately trigger an alter attack… if you're good enough. Windblown's reaction timings look tight, and learning the game clearly isn't going to require just mastering how the weapons play, but how they affect one another. There are currently 11 weapons in the game, and the system looks so polished that I was shocked