The Rogue Prince of Persia is an upcoming roguelike sidescroller that draws from the best of the genre, as well as the Prince of Persia franchise, and features challenging gameplay, an addicting progression system, and trademark acrobatic platforming. Its developers at Evil Empire certainly know a thing or two about roguelikes after working on the iconic indie hit Dead Cells, and they're using that experience to make a fresh Prince of Persia game that hits all the notes fans of the series and the roguelike genre expect.

Game ZXC recently spoke with The Rogue Prince of Persia game director Lucie Dewagnier and art director Dylan Eurlings about how Dead Cells helped the team approach The Rogue Prince of Persia's gameplay. They spoke about how they wanted to keep a few ideas from Dead Cells while honing in on what players love about Prince of Persia, namely its acrobatic movement and storytelling.

rogue-prince-of-persia-key-art-1
Related
The Rogue Prince of Persia Hands-On Preview

Game ZXC wall-runs its way through The Rogue Prince of Persia, a fast-paced platforming-heavy roguelike from developers of Dead Cells.

The Rogue Prince of Persia Combines Dead Cells' Game Feel With Prince of Persia Acrobatics

rogue-prince-of-persia-combat

One of the reasons Dead Cells is highly regarded by its players is its all-important "game feel," which is the hard-to-describe relationship between the player's inputs and the results on screen. How high the player jumps, grabbing onto barely-missed ledges, and "coyote time" that gives players a brief opportunity to jump after walking off a ledge all lead to an experience that feels like the avatar is acting as an extension of the player. Due to The Rogue Prince of Persia's emphasis on acrobatic movement, tight-feeling controls were incredibly important. As Dewagnier described,

To make The Rogue Prince of Persia different from Dead Cells , we focused on the traversal elements and the movement. The game is all about movement. Everything moves. You always need to be asking yourself, “Where should I go and how should I go there?” You can move enemies, you can jump over them; everything is based on the movement.

The ovarching goal was to capture a similar game feel as Dead Cells, but to do so utilizing what makes Prince of Persia special. On top of that, the team considers storytelling as one of the pillars for the Prince of Persia franchise, alongside that parkour, and so the storytelling in Rogue Prince of Persia is more complicated than Dead Cells. However, in capturing tight mechanics, game feel, and storytelling, Dead Cells' developers have a lot of lessons learned.

The Rogue Prince of Persia Follows in Dead Cells' Early Access Footsteps

rogue-prince-of-persia-slide

Dead Cells also stood out as one of the best examples of an Early Access roguelike game thanks to constant meaningful development. Even beyond that period, the game was further improved under Evil Empire's stewardship. It looks like The Rogue Prince of Persia is on a similar path, as Dewagnier mentioned looking forward to iterating on the game alongside the community.

I’m excited to launch into Early Access because I want to talk with my players and I want to talk with the community. For Dead Cell s, during Early Access and post-release, working with the community was a blast. We will change a lot of things on the balancing side of the game. We will certainly change how our progression system will work because I’m pretty sure some progression elements will be dropped or added. With community feedback, I think we’ll change a lot of things.

Evil Empire doesn't appear to be married to the current state of the game's features, which may be good news for players, and they're even open to reworking the progression system if player feedback shows that things might need some changes. With responsive developers holding a track record for making good games better, The Rogue Prince of Persia is shaping up to be a roguelike worth watching as it enters its Early Access period next month.