Earlier today Playdigious announced that they partnered up with Motion Twin to port their award-winning roguelike metroidvania Dead Cells to iOS and Android. Ever since the game set the world on fire when it hit consoles and desktop last summer, there have been people wondering if a mobile port could be possible, as the prospect of carrying Dead Cells around in your pocket wherever you went was an exciting one. But? touchscreens. They aren’t the best for games that require precision and were built for physical controls in the first place. Could something like Dead Cells even work with touchscreen controls" Playdigious thought so. In a blog post from Playdigious lead producer Laura Saada over on Gamasutra, the process of making Dead Cells playable on mobile is broken down into a very interesting read.
First and foremost was to see if mobile devices could even handle running the game in the first place, never mind worrying about controls or anything. So Playdigious put together a really quick and rough build of the game for mobile just to see how its performance was. Spoiler: It was great. As Laura says in the blog post, “high-end mobile devices nowadays are very close to a Nintendo Switch in terms of technical power" so if you’re a developer who is already making a Switch game, keep a mobile port in mind as there’s a huge amount of reach on mobile beyond what you’re getting on consoles and PC.
The next big hurdle was figuring ...