Elliot Cannon, Creative Director
Looking forward to the community playtesting the Abyss Lord this week. (See Jason Yu’s post below.) I’ll be jumping in on that after hours late at night. The more tire-kicking on this dude the better. Feedback on his active defense playstyle will help us make him rock. We want to know about the subtleties and things you like and don’t like, especially minute details. Everything else is percolating along and I don’t want to steal anyone else’s thunder in the Dev Log, but I do want to squeeze in an off-topic: go, go, Connor @TheNotoriousMMA
Jason Yu, Associate Producer (@urfyness)
If you want to get involved in the Remote Playtesting Group and help us test the Abyss Lord, contact dani.moore[at]trendyent[dot]com!
Working really hard to get the Abyss Lord out to our community playtesters so they can give us their first impressions on him. The build is somewhat unstable right now, but we’re working really hard to get one together. Thanks for your patience.
Also, I can tell this week is going to be crazy already. This morning, our lead programmer, Javier, tells me that he worked all weekend to put in the first-pass implementation of account leveling and committed it into the build. He also worked on optimizations when first loading into the game. That’s some dedication!
It’s almost guaranteed that these changes have broken other systems in the game, so our designers and QA will be working with Javier throughout the week to fix and document these issues. Changing our leveling system from individual heroes to account wide will be an interesting experiment!
Tim Shannon, PS4 & Live Producer (@TimmyTrashTier)
In the PS4-verse we’re moving forward on the Harbinger and Carnival work. We’re focusing on UI engineering and memory optimization that will make your heart skip a beat and give you that sensation of butterflies in your stomach (well… it would if you could see it, honest.)
On the live team side of things we have a brand-new patch that is all kinds of shiny and chrome. We've heard your feedback so far on the new Monthly Mission. We're trying to find rewards that aren't new pets for the Monthly Missions, so please head to this thread to let us know what you think would be rewarding for future Monthly Missions! We’ve turned on client logging so we can get some better information on some of the core technical problems with the game. Onslaught rewards should now have proper iPWR ratings. Finally, Poison Tips should no longer cause server stability issues.
Steven Collins, Lead Level Designer (@Esorath)
Moving forward with some prototypes on enemy and tower adjustments. This is part of the way we want to introduce more strategy to the game so cookie-cutter builds are less desirable ways to complete maps.
Joshua Javaheri, Lead Do-Er-oF-All-The-Things (@Javahawk)
The last few weeks, the art and features teams have been working hard to redesign a few systems - and in the process, the visual design of our user interfaces to be simpler and cleaner.
James Reid, Software Programmer (@Driscan)
It’s been an intense last couple of weeks hammering out these new UI flows. I can give you a quick tease here, but if you want to see the full direction we’re going, you’re gonna have to tune into the Devstream on Friday. Now that the design/flow is mostly hammered out, the implementation should really take off and by the Devstream after this you should really see it come together.
Here it is in all its glory! It’s so pretty! Remember this is nowhere near close to final art, style, or information. This is the wee beginnings of the implementation stage.
Super early work on the new UI. Check out the Devstream on Friday to see what it'll look like when it's finished!
Chris Flores, QA Lead (@likethatwhenigothere)
So this week we’re continuing to work on the hotfixes as they come out. But more importantly we’ve opened the testing floodgates on the Abyss Lord and some very, very early prototypes of the Account Leveling. So we’re gonna evaluate the Account Level stuff, learn how it works and then get ready to test it when it’s available -- all while poking fun at the Abyss Lord so he feels bad about himself and gets in shape before he releases. (Hit the gym, fatty!)
The PS4 is also in our hands now, and we’re working on MS21 (the Dragonfall Carnival + Harbinger update) so that it can ship on ********** (that’s a secret). [Ed. Note: Secret as in we don’t have a date yet!]
Also, I believe O’ Irish Dani Moore is getting some playtest builds and groups together to get some earlier feedback and sneak peaks at the Abyss Lord. Contact him for details if you’re interested. And if he’s not the person to contact, screw it. Bother him anyway.
Jesus Diaz, World Builder (@N3oDoc)
We’re almost done with our first Dungeon type level, so at this point we are adding some final touches and waiting for some feedback.
Daniel Diaz, World Builder (@DanielKaMi)
We can't describe the fun we are having working on the dungeon level! It's coming pretty fast and there are more to come!
Dani Moore, Remote QA Manager (@Dani)
I can already feel my inbox burning from your emails. Oh my.
Josh Isom, Community Manager (@iamisom)
Poor Dani.