Hey everyone!
It’s been a few months since the Steam page for Dreadful Defenders was created, so you might be wondering if Dreadful Defender’s development is making any progress.
Here’s what we’ve been working on over the past few months, where we are now, and what’s coming next.
What happened
When we put up the Steam page, the game was still in a very early stage of development. Since then, we’ve done a lot of testing and made several adjustments to the game. Here’s a (hopefully) digestible breakdown of the changes:
Bigger map & “fog of war” 🌫️
Before we get into it, a small point about how the path works in Dreadful Defenders. The path starts short (very short) and grows by one tile at the start of every wave. By default, it grows in a straight line but, if you placed a Defender—the little name of our “towers”—just before launching the wave, the path will go towards the last Defender you placed.
Onto the changes now!
Before, players could reach the end of the map with the path. Since you direct the path by placing defenders around it, it caused issues where it was hard to move away from the border of the map once the path got stuck on it. Our solution? Making the map so big that players will never reach its borders.
The issue with a big map is that there’s a lot to look at. The fog of war makes it so that, instead of spending the first half hour of every run looking at a huge map (most of which you won’t even use), you’ll spend a few seconds every wave looking at the few tiles that have been revealed.
More upgrades, more possibilities ⚙️
Defenders now go up to level 6 instead of 3. Since a defender gets a new Benediction every time it is upgraded, this increases the number of ways to build a defender by a lot.
(Benedictions are bonuses that range from simple stat buffs to special effects such as stuns, conditional stat buffs, and making killed enemies explode!)
Defenders’ new stats and special abilities 💥
At first, we wanted to limit as much as possible the number of stats that defenders have to keep the game accessible. I don’t think we’ve ever mentioned this online, so here’s the list of the stats defenders had from the start:
- Attack Damage—how much damage each attack does
- Attack Speed—the number of attacks a Defender does in a second
- Range—the range (in tiles) to which a Defender can attack
- Soul Drop Chance—whenever an enemy dies, you have a chance to gain souls. The number of souls is determined by the enemy killed (big enemy = big number), and the chance is determined by the Soul Drop Chance of the Defender that dealt the killing blow.
The problem is that Attack Speed and Attack Damage, being the only stats that increase damage output, were a must-have on every single Defender. To solve this, we added a special ability and the following stats all Defenders:
- Eldritch Power—strengthen Defenders’ abilities and the effects of certain Benedictions
- Mana Regeneration—the amount of mana your Defender gains in a second
- Maximum Mana—the amount of mana a Defender needs to gain to cast its ability. This is the one stat that you wanna keep low
- Critical Chance—the probability of an attack being a critical hit
- Critical Damage—the damage multiplier applied to critical hits
We’ve doubled the number of stats, so this is going to make the game a tad more complex. However, this will give us much more room to design cool benedictions, which will give you a lot more options to build your defenders, so we think the extra effort required to get into the game will be well worth it.
UI Rework ✨
Because we changed so many things, we had to update pretty much all of the UI. We also added a bunch of information and tooltips that playtesters suggested, and our amazing artist used the opportunity to make the new UI 100% cooler than before.
We’re not done just yet with the new UI, but you can expect to see the Steam page updated within the next few days.
Where we are now and what’s going to happen
Although we still have some tests to do, we’re mostly happy with the core mechanics of Dreadful Defenders. We don’t want to rush it, but everyone on the team can’t wait to arrive at the stage of development where we can focus on adding content and balancing it.
We’ll be participating in our first festival—the Indie Game Lyon #6—on the 10th of May, so our current focus is making the game as good as possible for this event! (By the way, if you're near Lyon don't hesitate to come play the game and chat with us!)
As soon as this event is done, we’ll keep working towards putting together a playable demo. We’re going to release it during the summer. You'll see a new Steam post as soon as we’ve actually fixed a date.
We’re also working on implementing procedural map generation. The map is currently hand-made, which is not great for replayability. Also, our game designer hates level design and our main programmer loves pain, so here we are.
That's all for now! Stay tuned for the next update and don't forget to wishlist the game, it really helps a lot!