Project: C.E.L.L. Weekly Devlog #5 - We Are Extremely Good at Weeks

Hi everyone!

First of all, sorry.

Our last weekly devlog was on August 31.

It is now October.

We have recently discovered that this is not, technically, what “weekly” means.

In our defense, we have been busy doing the thing these devlogs were supposed to be about: making the game.

And after a month of balancing, polishing, fixing bugs, submitting things to Steam, waiting for Steam, checking Steamworks, pretending we weren’t checking Steamworks, and then checking Steamworks again...

THE PROJECT: C.E.L.L. DEMO IS NOW LIVE!

You can finally play it.

This is the first time Project: C.E.L.L. is publicly playable, which is both extremely exciting and a little horrifying.

Up until now, whenever something broke we could simply stare at each other and quietly fix it.

Now you can see it too.

Progress!

The Demo

The demo gives you a proper look at the core of Project: C.E.L.L.

Break glucose, build combos, trigger increasingly unreasonable chain reactions, earn ATP and spend it on the skill tree until the cell becomes significantly more dangerous than any cell probably needs to be.

Over the last few weeks, most of our time has been spent turning the demo from:

“it works on our computers”

into:

“we are comfortable letting strangers download this.”

This turned out to be a much larger gap than expected.

So What Have We Been Doing for a Month?

A lot.

The economy has been balanced, rebalanced and then balanced again after we discovered several exciting new ways to completely destroy it.

The skill tree has gone through more changes.

Tutorials and readability have been improved.

Visual effects and sound effects have been polished.

Performance has been improved.

And bugs have been fixed.

We also created some new bugs while fixing those bugs.

Then we fixed those.

Game development appears to be an extremely complicated method of moving bugs around until nobody notices them anymore.

Playtesting

We’ve also spent a lot of time putting the demo in front of people and watching what happens.

This remains one of the most effective ways to discover that the giant glowing thing you assumed nobody could possibly miss is, in fact, completely invisible.

The feedback has helped us improve progression, tutorials, readability and the general flow of the demo enormously.

But internal testing can only get us so far.

Which is why having the demo publicly available is such an important milestone for us.

Now we get to discover entirely new problems.

Together.

What’s Next?

Right now, our biggest priority is listening to feedback from the demo and fixing anything that needs fixing before Steam Next Fest later this month.

If you play the demo, please let us know what you think.

What felt good?

What felt confusing?

What completely broke?

What upgrade did you accidentally turn into a weapon of mass destruction?

We genuinely want to know.

Project: C.E.L.L. started as our first game and has grown much further than we expected when we started working on it earlier this year.

Seeing people finally able to press the big green Download Demo button feels slightly surreal.

So thank you to everyone who has followed the project, wishlisted the game, read these allegedly weekly devlogs, or supported us along the way.

And if you haven’t tried it yet:

The demo is live right now.

Go break some glucose.

We promise the next weekly devlog will not take five weeks.

Probably.

— Under Stair Games