dq2 DQ2 Progress Report for January 2023 I've started getting a lot of new art in from our artists, which I have been furiously integrating into the build.
ai Featured AI: Markets for Lemons, and the Great Logging Off What happens when most "people" you interact with on the internet are fake?
dq2 Featured Year end retrospective-- DQ2 Progress Report for November 2022 Now that we're into December, I think it's useful to take a step back and look at where things stand with the game, and review everything we've accomplished in the last year.
dq2 Content Push -- DQ2 Progress Report for October 2022 October marks the beginning of a concerted content push for the game.
dq2 Rebalancing -- DQ2 Progress Report for September 2022 Rebalancing levels in response to testing & fancy scripts to auto-balance the economy.
dq2 Featured Bug Hunt -- DQ2 Progress Report for August 2022 A month's worth of bugfixing, bigger portraits, and path tracers that won't give you a heart attack.
dq2 Buff Snakes -- DQ2 Progress Report for July 2022 New features include wave mutations and connected snake-like enemies. We're also nearing the end of our big level design push.
dq2 Fireworks -- DQ2 Progress Report for June 2022 New levels, new cannons, new abilities, new bosses, multiple things that catch on fire, and more!
defender's quest Tracing Lines -- DQ2 Progress Report for May 2022 We're proud to say that a full 25 levels are now "near final balance." It doesn't mean they won't change at all before the game releases, but it means that they're pretty dialed in and we feel the game is in a good place.
dq2 Finishing the Map -- DQ2 Progress Report for April 2022 We've roughed out all 50+ battle locations on the map with basic level designs and are now moving on to polishing up the first half.
dq2 Building a Better Wave -- DQ2 Progress Report for March 2022 Designing levels was taking too long, so we designed some tools to speed up the process and we've had great results.
dq2 Summoning Reinforcements -- DQ2 Progress Report for February 2022 I've been trying to do too much stuff myself. So I'm getting some help! Specifically, we have recruited two new staff members, a production specialist, and a level designer/coder, to help me out.
dq2 Sick Month -- DQ2 Progress Report for January 2022 My whole family got COVID; we're all gonna be fine but it slowed us down this month.
dq2 Distilling Skills -- DQ2 Progress Report for December 2021 Instead of stringing out skill point bonuses, it's way more fun if we concentrate the benefits.
dq2 Stoking Rivalry -- DQ2 Progress Report for November 2021 By merging both parties together, the White Hat leader was at risk of being overshadowed. Let's lean into that for both story and gameplay purposes.
dq2 Taking Hostages -- DQ2 Progress Report for October 2021 We mix things up in four new levels during which the White Hats and Black Hats briefly trade party members
Powering through -- DQ2 Progress Report for September 2021 Everyone's been sick for over a month but somehow I managed to get some work done anyway
dq2 Overcoming "Level Designer's" Block -- DQ2 Progress Report for August 2021 Our north star is making sure that each character's identity is established as solidly and clearly as possible before moving on. The player should instantly be able to grasp, "this is what this character is for."
business Degraded Blockchains The minute you connect your blockchain to an app frontend you now have a degraded blockchain, one that cannot even in principle guarantee immutability, trustlessness, and decentralization – at least not for assets that the app's customers actually care about.
Flow and Feedback -- DQ2 Progress Report for July 2021 This month's progress report is all about feedback, in both senses of the word: 1. Communications we've gotten from our community and playtesters, and 2. the way the game itself communicates pertinent info back to the player.
defenders-quest The Rule of Firsts in Game Testing -- DQ2 Progress Report for June 2021 The first thing you tell a player to do in your game will become the default way they expect to interact with everything, and this pattern repeats fractally through every one of your game's sub-systems
roblox Featured So You Want to Compete with Roblox My inbox is stuffed with pitches from start-ups wanting to compete with Roblox, that plucky Lego-ish multiplayer game-creation platform currently valued at 41 billion dollars. They shouldn't try, but here's how to maybe not fail if they insist anyways.
fnf Featured The Future of Games is an Instant Flash to the past The success of an open source browser game called Friday Night Funkin tells us where "instant games" might go. Hint: we've been here before.
dq2 Elements and Leeches: DQ2 progress report for May 2021 The presence of a leech in a battle gives the player a choice: 1) Dedicate defender(s) to killing the leech, taking them off the front lines? 2) Focus on the battle lanes and let the leech steal half your juice?
dq2 Balancing Defender's Quest 2's "minion" classes We just added 8 new characters to Defender's Quest 2. How do we keep all this stuff balanced?
