Sébastien Bénard

Sébastien Bénard (also written Benard) is a French game designer and developer best known as the lead designer and lead developer of Dead Cells, the roguelite that has sold more than 10 million copies. Since 2020 Bénard has worked alone as Deepnight Games, making original games and free tools for other developers.

Bénard started making games at seven or eight, after an older brother taught ST Basic on an Atari ST, then moved through Omikron Basic, Turbo Pascal, C and Flash before settling on Haxe. Bénard spent about 18 years at Motion Twin, the Bordeaux worker cooperative known for browser games, and became an associate there.

At Motion Twin, Bénard led Dead Cells, which began as a follow-up to the browser game Die2Nite and was reworked into a fast single-player action roguelite. It launched in early access in 2017, where Bénard estimated that 40 to 50 percent of the final features came from player feedback, and fully released on August 7, 2018. It sold two million copies within ten months and passed ten million by June 2023.

Bénard left Motion Twin in late 2019 and founded Deepnight Games in 2020. The studio released LDtk, a free and open source 2D level editor now widely used by indie developers, and the gameBase starter framework for Haxe. Its first commercial game, Nuclear Blaze, a 2D firefighting action game, came out on October 18, 2021. Between projects Bénard works as a gameplay and design consultant, including on Have a Nice Death.

The next game, Tenjutsu, was announced with publisher Devolver Digital in June 2024. Born from a Ludum Dare jam, it is a martial-arts roguelite with a non-linear boss order and is planned for PC and Nintendo Switch 2 in 2027. Bénard funds part of the tool work through GitHub Sponsors and is a long-time Ludum Dare participant.