Elliot Cannon, Creative Director
Hope you guys and gals are enjoying the Dragonfall Carnival! Keep your eyes peeled for an influence vote on Fun vs Power later this week. We want to hear what you think about the prizes so when that event circles around again, we can make it better. Right now, we’re midstream working on future hero content, (she’s mechanically awesome) <-note the word choices. Working on UI look, feel, and flow improvements for PC and PS4, solo and group play scoring systems, forming groups, better social hub UI, progression gear sets, new hero experience, hero deck interfacing that works better for all platforms. (Notice how we extracted the core intellect of James Reid’s brain and duct taped that to a super robot using a laser focus modulator that’s part bionic, and organic, but not a cyborg.) Tons of work kicked off, with both short and long-range goals to make the game better.
This past week was crazy large. QA tested like fiends and our programmers burned mega brain cells making sure things were tight. Incredible effort. Amazing commitment levels like that is what makes game development a passion. The developers here prove they’re brilliant - constantly. Even the sleddog family game rigs ran testing long into the night to try and help QA. (My wife is a hardcore Huntress DPSer, so her HD TV is bigger than mine.) There’s tons of magic happening here. Gotta keep pushing. More soon.
Daniel Haddad, Design Director (@Blacksmith)
Working on two new hero designs and wrapping up the Abyss Lord. Also writing up some designs for set items, a means for free players to earn heroes, and some enemy redesigns for the far future.
Danny Araya, Art Director (@DannyAraya)
Working on concept art for awesome new heroes!
Tim Shannon, PS4 Producer (@TimmyTrashTier)
Hammering out the plan for getting the Carnival on PS4 and other stuff. Super hype about the new global submission set-up Sony is creating!
James Reid, Software Programmer (@Driscan)
H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K
H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K
I’m beginning work on the H E R O D E C K. Lots-o-neat-stuff coming down the pipe. Not a lot to show at the moment, but tune in next week for some WIP pictures.
H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K
H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K H E R O D E C K
Jeffrey Bickel, Technical Level Designer (@TE_Jeff)
I’m doing a lot of work this milestone on enemy scaling and progression through our game. Right now, leveling as a Monk or a Huntress solo is a pretty awful experience, and I’d like to change that. On the other end of the spectrum, a lot of our enemies aren’t where we want them to be in NM4, and those changes need to happen as well. So, lots of math (or, for our UK fans, lots of maths) in my immediate future.
I’ve also been storming some brain on how Onslaught should change this year and have put together a pitch. It’s still in a very early stage and scheduling concerns might take us elsewhere, but it’s something I’d like to see happen.
Steven Collins, Lead Level Designer (@Esorath)
Glad to see some Nightmare IV Carnival runs being successful! The Abyss Lord is in full swing now. ;)
Chris Flores, QA Lead (@likethatwhenigothere)
Helping to take care of some of the issues affecting the live game (can anyone say memory hog??). We’re also working on getting some hotfixes out this week and next week. Hopefully by the end of next week, things will have slowed down enough so that we can clean up our database a bit and get started on the Abyss Lord. At the same time gotta start factoring in the PS4 into our day-to-day shenanigans.
Abraham Abdala, Lead Tech Animator (@Broham)
All kinds of prepro and prototypes for a new hero, maybe some new pets. When time allows, I’m also creating V2 of our most important animation and rigging tools, expanding them with more features and such.
Adam Stow, Project Manager (@TE_Stow)
We hope you enjoy the carnival. Hope you’re not afraid of (dying to) clowns! The team is switching gears to the next patch’s content now, and we’re accelerating in a new direction. Please look forward to it--and check out the Devstreams if you haven’t since we’re talking about these things before you see them written here!
Jason Yu, Associate Producer (@urfyness)
We worked through the weekend to wrap up the Carnival. There’s always much more we want to do, and not enough time to do it. Still, I’m extremely proud of our team, and we all hope you guys enjoy it.
This week, we’re kicking off the new milestone for our next release. The major points are the Abyss Lord and a ton of UI work to help the flow. He’s going through final VFX and Audio passes for the content team and final balance pass for the design team. We’re also starting work on features that will go beyond this milestone and into the next. It’s going to be an exciting few weeks!
Jesus Diaz, World Builder (@N3oDoc)
Working on a new level that will be used as a training level for the Abyss Lord!
Daniel Diaz, World Builder (@DanielKaMi)
This week we're starting to work on a tutorial level for the Abyss Lord!
Dani Moore, Remote QA Manager (@Dani)
Whilst folks are resting up from the Carnival prep and setting the gears in motion for our next big thing/s, I just wanna say thank you to all the folks in both the RQA and RPG teams that have put in a lot of time and care in helping make the Carnival that extra bit special.
We will also be opening the recruitment doors again soon, but we’re taking some time to do some planning and making some changes. More details shortly!
Really excited about some of the love and care going into planning our next content. It’s really inspiring and exciting for me to see what’s coming up. The awesome folks here at Trendy that will be diligently making it all happen, are some really talented folks.