Back in the Saddle: Defender's Quest 2 / my life progress report for May 2020

Time for an extremely overdue update on everything going on with Defender's Quest 2 development and my life in general.

Time for an extremely overdue update on everything going on with Defender's Quest 2 development and my life in general.

I'll spare you any complaining about my life given the current state of the world – chances are life for any of you is far more difficult than it is for me right now. And particularly so for a certain young man who lives in my area.

As always, if you need a refund on your preorder in these trying times, send an email to leveluplabs@gmail.com. No questions asked (other than the information necessary to locate your preorder record).

Here's an update about where thing stand –

Art Stuff:

First and foremost, we've been working with our artists, hammering out a style and preliminary assets for a few defenders and enemies. This is one of the more frustrating things to write progress reports for because you kind of just have to take our word for it. I've learned that if I show assets off too early a) they will live on the web forever and be the first thing featured in every article about the game ever, no matter how out of date they are, and b) it can set some wrong impressions about the game until we've been able to put things together into a cohesive package. But we're making progress.

Day Job Stuff:

This is the other big piece of news. These past three months I've sunk a lot of time into my day job over at Valve. For those of you who don't know, I've been a contractor there for a little under a year now, working on the Steam Labs initiative.

I had initially assumed that my contract wasn't going to be renewed at the end of May, and that I'd be looking for a new day job. Given this assumption (and the challenges of the pandemic), I cranked up my involvement in order to get my last remaining projects in a state where I could hand them off to Valve staff.

As it turns out, Valve has decided to keep me on to see those projects through, which is something I greatly appreciate during these difficult times. I'm greatly looking forward to sharing those soon, and I'm also looking forward to returning to the DQII schedule we had back in January/February, starting more or less immediately.

So that's what's up. Thanks as always for your patience.