Level Design Analysis : Dead Cells

Hi everyone, this post will talk about Dead Cells level design.

First, a quick summary of this post content :

What is Dead Cells
Some of the main choice
Art style

1 - What is Dead Cells :

In It's early development stage, Dead Cells was a tower defense in a fantasy world. Let's directly jump on today state of this game. It is a Castlevania-inflected action dungeon-crawler, this name might sound kind of barbaric so let's break it down :

Castlevania is a sidescroller game developed by Konami. In this game you roam around in a castle killing monsters and bosses. Following a story line.
In Dead cells, you get the same feeling, you need to explore every room of every level to find weapons and other useful items.
Dungeon-crawler is a type of game, when I think about this type of game the first thing that come in my mind is Diablo from Blizzard. Your character is in this dungeon and to get to the end of the level, you need to kill every monster that get in your way.

To conclude this introduction to the game, I would say that Dead Cells is a game with strong links to old and new level design methods.

2 - Development choice :

As I said earlier in the post, Dead Cells wasn't designed to be a RPG, but that play style didn't fit the idea of the creator so let's directly jump to the last version...
Like many games today, Dead Cells environment is procedural, which means every level is generated randomly using patterns and other rules to make it coherent.

As a example, let's take the first level you spawn in when you start the game. The first part of the map isn't randomly generated for the player to recognize this place every time he dies and restart is adventure.

After doing that level over and over again, I kinda get the pattern and the rules.
I would say that the first rule is : "The doors to the next areas". They represent the end of the level and tell the algorithm to stop when it "meets" them. So the first level of Dead Cells is composed of two paths leading to the two next areas with chests and other rewards for the player on the way.

3 - Art Style

At last let's talk about Dead Cells art style, it has 2D graphics look. But many of the entities of that game are 3D prerendered models. Using the 3D models you get fluid animation and then you can add your pixel art on top of it to make it look like it was handmade.
Other part of the game are hand painted such as the background. For more details on that part I would recommend checking out this website : https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=59381.40

Well this is the end of this little breakdown of Dead Cells level design, I hope you found it interesting. If you have any suggestion on the format and the content for the next post just tell me in the comment. Many of the information comes from my own experience in the game since copying a other article on some other website isn't really interesting.
See you next week !