DEFENDERS!

The day is finally upon us, Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is OUT NOW on Steam Early Access. This is a huge day for us as a studio, as it’s our first launch of a product out into the masses; it’s a huge step for Dungeon Defenders returning to its roots; and it’s a huge accomplishment thanks to your support, to get something this amazing out WITHIN A YEAR! With that said, you what we do, we get into it — let’s get into it!

Steam Early Access

This is time for us to deliver on our promise of having a release in February. This period is pivotal for us to get the game into the Defenders of Etheria’s hands and go crazy throughout the entire game. We used the 10,000+ pieces of feedback we received from our Beta, and used it to help mold the game into this Early Access state. There’s still work we’re polishing, but the state the game is in, we’re comfortable and proud to present it to you. We’ll go over a couple pieces of info we’ve gone over before, as well as discuss what to expect in this Early Access release.

If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, we’re on Steam right now. Click here to visit our Steam page!

Roadmap

Releasing into Early Access isn’t only going to be setting the game live in its early state and then providing the finished product months later. Instead, we’re going to be updating it over time, adding in features as they become polished and in a state we’re happy with. Thus, THE ROADMAP IS BORN!

As a studio, this is what we are sticking to as a studio. Should anything change, we are going to make sure that we keep all of you updated as soon as possible. We want this road map to serve as a look into where our focus is and as a promise for what we’ll deliver.

Why Early Access?

Going into Early Access on Steam allows us to get where the game is at into the hands of our players on PC. By doing so, we’re able to iterate quickly, getting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened into that 100% state as soon as possible, something we’re unable to do on consoles as fast as we want to iterate. We are still going to be honoring our Nintendo Switch exclusive deal with Nintendo, with our PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases coming in Q3 2020.

That said, this Early Access is not going to be like other games, or like Dungeon Defenders II. The Early Access period is going to be incredibly short, because we’re really spending this time to polish up the game and meet your expectations. Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is going to be fully released during Q2 on PC and Nintendo Switch. We want Early Access to be as short as possible so that we can get Dungeon Defenders: Awakened out to all of you as the best version of the game.

Teamwork makes the dreamwork.

This will give us a chance to make sure that the game is balanced, being easy or hard in the appropriate parts of the game; animations and art assets are looking great and working properly; working out any kinks when it comes to playing with others; making sure our network tech properly connects you to others and also properly saves your gear; and of course testing our flags, checks, and reactions from our anti-hack systems on a much larger scale.

What’s In Early Access?

Shown in the Roadmap above outlines what is going to be coming to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, and briefly goes over what is already in. We’ll blow it apart a bit more here!

Every heroic adventure starts in a really deep well, right?

Campaign

The Campaign is the progressive order maps are presented in, and on the full release will include story elements and bosses scattered throughout to help you understand what exactly is going on in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. In the Steam Early Access release, Campaign includes all 12 maps part of the whole campaign:

• Deeper Well

• Ancient Mines

• Lava Mines

• Alchemical Labs

• Tornado Valley

• Tornado Highlands

• Ramparts

• Throne Room

• Arcane Library

• Royal Gardens

• The Promenade

• The Summit

These maps are in a great state, but we are still open to feedback as you play through these maps, so please throw it our way through the in-game link seen on the Escape screen.

Alchemical Labs, Throne Room, and The Summit do not currently have their bosses implemented. As covered in the Roadmap, the Demon Lord arrives in March, the Goblin Mech charges in during April, with the Ancient Dragon approaching in the full release.

Difficulty

On this release, you have access to:

• Easy

• Medium

• Hard

• Insane

We’ve tested these extensively, and the progression through the campaign feels incredibly good. Our goal is to let people provide extensive feedback on these difficulties before we throw you into the terror that is Nightmare in March, which is going to push Defenders to take on some substantially harder enemies.  It doesn’t stop there though, as upon release you’ll have to survive the newest difficulty — Massacre. Both of these difficulties provide new enemies that only brave Defenders will be able to cull!

Survival

Making its triumphant return, the Survival game mode is going to be available on all difficulties and all maps provided in Early Access. Each map rewards a unique pet to join you in your adventures, while also boosting your hero in some way. There’s a lot to master through all 12 maps, we hope you’re able to survive!

While playing through Survival in Early Access, we are going to continue to optimize the maps to accommodate all the enemies that you are going to be fighting. As noted on our Road Map, there is going to be continuous updates to the game, and this include performance optimizations. If you run into frame drops or crashes, report them in feedback, as that’ll help us polish things up. For Defenders looking for a true challenge, try playing on Insane Survival Summit on very old hardware getting 1 FPS, outside in the rain, while taming lions (please don’t do this, this part is just jokes, play it normal and safely please).

Pets

There’s a lot of pets that are going to be in Steam Early Access that were not in Beta. Some pets are straight forward, boosting your stats and slapping enemies, however we brought back some revamped fan favorites *cough*Genie*cough*, and also some new pets that have never been seen before. We made sure that you have a wide variety of pets to use, trying to apply a variety of play styles to fit certain pets. There are even more coming past this, but we’re sure you’ll quickly grow to love all of these companions (the Ramster is so dang cute!).

Gear

There’s a TON of gear to earn. Going back to our roots, we wanted people to get excited for gear to hunt. Itemization feedback has been tremendous, and so we used words from Defenders old and new to curate some awesome pieces to hunt for. We brought back a lot of the systems that made Dungeon Defenders gear great to hunt. Gear rolls any and all stats that are on your hero, making it exciting to receive that one perfect piece that has all the defensive stats for your Tower Builder spec'd heroes, or well-rounded gear for any Defender who prefers a Jack of All Trades play style! Another exciting return is that weapons and pets are randomly colorized, providing unique looks to the loot you receive. White and Gold is one of the rarest combos you’ll find, so good luck!

Gear continues to get stronger as you progress through the game of course, with each difficulty providing new pieces to empower your heroes and defenses to new heights! While climbing also make sure to keep an eye on what armor you’re equipping, as gear sets are back in the game.

Accessories

Through your journeys, you’ll also be receiving accessories that visually change the look of your character. This was not something part of Dungeon Defenders original release, but they are so fun to acquire and add a great level of visual customization that we couldn’t just not do them! Masks, Bracers, Brooches, and Shields (Squire Only) are some of the pieces you’ll receive that you can uncover to add another layer to empowering your character.

Cursed Gear No More!

One thing you will notice that is different from Dungeon Defenders is that there is no longer any cursed gear. This was something a vast majority felt very strong as a detractor from the game, and made getting gear feel like a potential punishment if it had the one stat you wanted, but diminished others.

Tools of the Trade

There’s a lot of tools we wanted to provide to the players. One of them was an updated Tactical Map (tac map for short). There’s a ton of upgrades we made to this feature, trying to provide as much visual clarity on what’s going on and where. There’s also brand new additions, such as in the options menu, you can now select filters for the tac map to show specific upgrades and items that you’re looking for, making it easy to survey the land quickly and go get your items before continuing on.

There’s also a lot of the HUD and UI improvements. There are seriously too many to include here, and as noted on the Roadmap, there are more coming! Comparing items in your inventory, providing clearer definitions for upgrades, revamped stat names, and so much more.

Towers are also part of the UI improvements. You can now interact with your towers to see how they are performing and what their stats are. Even a deep layer, towers show you the important stats that matter based on what they do. This means seeing what’s important in how a Spiked Blockade performed is different than seeing how an Ensnare Aura performed. We can’t wait to hear your feedback on these features and make any improvements possible!

Kickstarter, BackerKit, and Preorder Rewards

Rewards are planned for our full 1.0 release. While we have already chipped away at getting these made, today is our final deadline for our backers to submit what they’d like. We recently got a ton of requests back from our initial surveying to people in appropriate tiers, so now we just need to get to work on them. Some of these things are absolutely beautiful, others are horrifying, and we wouldn’t have it any other way!

Early Access Note

We have an Early Access FAQ that we’ve put together. If some of your questions weren’t answered here, please give it a look and hopefully they are answered!

There’s some stuff that we are not covering in this post, but there is a ton to discover in this game. Some of it is intended, some of it may be bugaboos that need to be squashed, and some of it may be as Bob Ross put it: happy little accidents. This is a game that we’re proud to present as a culmination of developer work and extensive community feedback. We truly feel this is a game made for our GLORIOUS Defenders, and we hope you feel the same. We want to thank you for joining us on this journey so far, and we can’t wait to continue on and hope you’ll be there by our side.

What’s Next?

We’re going to keep working. As shown in the Roadmap, we’ve got some ground to cover still. We want to keep updates coming and to further enhance our transparency and direct communication with our community. We plan on having updates showcasing the work that has been done, continue introducing you to members of the team, and giving you a look at the work it took to make Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.

Chromatic Weekend Wind Down, Dev Streams, and more are going to be coming as we continue development. We’re very excited for everything coming out and are excited that all of you are along for the ride!

Next week some of our team is going to be at PAX East, Booth #12074, right next to the Nintendo booth! If you’re going to be there, stop by to play, chat with the devs, and maybe leave with some sweet sweet swag! We had a crazy turn out at PAX South, loved hanging out with our glorious Defenders and the new Etherian recruits we picked up, and would love for PAX East to be Chromatic Games At PAX II: Revenge of the Hangout Boogaloo the Game, the Movie, the Game Returns.

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team thanks you for your support. We’re working to make Chromatic Games a studio that is able to create games current and future that our Defenders are sure to enjoy, because our games are made for YOU!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

Good morning Defenders!

We’re almost there! Steam Early Access (check it out here) is just a few hours away, and on behalf of everyone at Chromatic Games, THANK YOU. To our players new and old, wider community, backers, and advocates, you have paved the way for us to continue to breathe life into this franchise, and Dungeon Defenders is truly stronger than ever!

I wanted to take a quick moment to drop a few fun never before seen pieces of content, as well as a message about what you should expect not only today, but in the coming months. If you’re new or haven’t already checked out the DDA Early Access Roadmap here, please be sure to do so.

As many of you know, we started on Awakened a little under a year ago. Making a game like Dungeon Defenders is not easy. For those who don’t know what goes into making a systems heavy game like ours, here are some numbers to give you better context as to how much we’ve gotten done and what is reflected in the Early Access experience you’ll be playing today and for the next few months...

• Characters: Over 40 (heroes, enemies, NPCs, and Pets)

• Maps: ~12 tile sets over 15 maps

• Unique weapons: Over 80, with over 80,000 total color combinations possible (be sure to grind for those rare white and gold weapons!)

• Unique armor pieces and accessories: 50

• Animations per hero: Over 50 each

• Animations per enemy: On average about 10

• Hand drawn / illustrated icons: Over 200

• 100’s of concept art pieces / illustrations

• Music tracks: Over 20

• UI Scenes and Widgets: Over 250

• Over 200 design documents

• Dozens of game features and systems, totalling over 90,832 lines of code and counting

All with under 30 developers, in a newly formed studio, in less than a year. The amount of work and love put into this has been nothing less than incredible! And what better to celebrate this achievement with our community than with Early Access launching in a few hours? Oh! I know what’s better! How about a teaser? Click here to see what’s coming later to DD:A!

We’ve already heard tons of feedback from our beta in November and have been working towards addressing the biggest concerns from our fans. If you missed this blog, give it a read for more information on our post beta survey. Much of that feedback will be represented in today’s build, and much will be rolled out in the coming months. 

Until then, we ask you to bear with us while we iron out some kinks. More specifically, but not exclusively, we’re currently working to improve upon these areas over the coming weeks and months, leading all the way up to our 1.0 launch:

• Performance optimizations

• 4P split screen support

• More polished gamepad controls 

• Continuous UI aesthetic transformation & polish

• Hero progression updates

• Polishing up some epic boss battles

• Rolling out the higher difficulties

• Implementing our story elements via beautiful new in game cinematics

• Finishing up the Kickstarter and Pre-order rewards for 1.0

• Anti Hacking measures

• The list goes on...

Anyhoo, the time is NOW for hype! We need your help to spread the word today! Grab your friends, and join us online at 1PM ET for the Early Access launch of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened!

Sincerely,

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS,

We’re all so excited for the Steam Early Access release of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened on Feb 21st! We wanted to share some of the awesome work the team’s been working so hard on to get ready for the Early Access at the end of this week. This Dev Log will have some sneak peaks from different departments here at Chromatic: Art, Design, and Engineering! Also, if you haven’t and wanted any of the goodies that come with the preorder editions of DD:A, make sure to get them ASAP since they’ll be gone at 11:59PM EST 2/20! 

Some of The Team

Mary — Community Manager

Hi there! I’m Mary, the new Community Manager and I’ve been working for Chromatic for a little over a month now. I worked at Artix Entertainment previously for almost five years before coming over here. It’s been super fun and I had a blast at PAX South talking to everyone there about DD:A. I’ve been really enjoying reading all of your feedback and suggestions regarding DD:A, and making sure that your voices are heard by the team. I’ve also been working on ways to revamp some of our social media platforms like Discord and hopefully you’ll see those changes soon. I’ve also been getting together some little gif teasers together and getting feedback from the Discord community. Here’s some examples:

I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts on the Steam Early Access of DD:A! It’s only 2 days away!

Brent Caulfield — Jr Designer

Hello, my name is Brent Caulfield and I am a Jr. Designer at Chromatic Games. I first started game development about 6 years ago when a friend and I started making a FPS game with wizards and magic instead of guns and ammo. That eventually evolved into a commercial project called Grimoire: Manastorm which was released on Steam in late 2017. After that I started a design internship at Chromatic and then accepted a full time design position shortly afterwards!

There have been a lot of interesting tasks, but my favorite would have to be the final implementation of gameplay elements for all the maps. Placing the final parts to make the gameplay work and then being the first person to playtest it was really exciting. Seeing the waves of enemies all come out on the maps full of beautiful art was a great experience and one I’ll remember for a very long time. There were so many talented peoples’ work that went into making it all happen and to be one of the first people to see it all come together into a full gameplay experience was very special and was definitely my favorite thing I’ve worked on!

Reverse engineering and breaking down DD1 code to find out exactly how and why different systems work was definitely the hardest stuff I’ve had to work on. In order to create an authentic DD1 style experience the Engineering and Design teams spent a lot of time going back into the DD1 code to see how it all functions. One of our major goals with the project is to bring back that awesome gameplay experience that so many people love and while we have extremely experienced people on the team that know how it all works there were still some surprises along the way that we never would have figured out without digging into the source code. This was very challenging at times, but extremely rewarding at the same time.

After the initial hazing (Javahawk told me it was possible to beat DD1 Insane Deeper Well on a fresh character) things have been great! Gainesville is my hometown and game development is my dream job so I feel extremely fortunate that I was able to find a place at such a welcoming studio that is working on a game I genuinely enjoy playing! There are so many amazing people on the team and it's a great feeling to wake up every day and be excited to go into work. I am really excited about everything we are working on and think the community is going to love all the awesome content we’ll be putting out in the future!

Jade — Jr 3D Artist

I go by Jadeite in the art world and I have a slight obsession with video games and all things nerdy! So much so that I decided to make some kind of a career out of it through the art side of things. I've been practicing 3D art since my junior year of high school, and it's my favorite medium to date. My life basically revolves around games, whether I'm at work making them, or at home playing them! I'm also a big fan of tabletop games like King of New York, Boss Monster, D&D, and Necromonda just to name a few.

I've had a lot of fun working on the many assets I've been tasked with, but if I had to pin down my favorite it would probably be the pets! I'd say I had the most fun when making these little guys, they're just so cute! I wouldn't really say I'm a character artist, but working on them gave me a chance to essentially be one for a small time and I learned a lot from it. Besides that I also really did like making weapons and shields, super fun especially when I got to make my own spin on old weapons or even just remake them from the ground up. 

I haven't had to make anything that frustrated me to the point of thinking it wasn't fun in the slightest. But for the hardest thing I’ve worked on I guess I would have the pick the new version of Ancient Aegis. From the start I just had no idea where to go with the new concept, and then actually carrying that out in 3D form was a bit of a challenge. I've also had a few issues come up with this particular model, having to add more or fix things in regards to texture, smoothing issues, etc. It was still a very interesting take on a "sword" and I learned quite a bit from it.

My time here has been nothing but enjoyable! I was more than thankful when I first got my internship position here just a few months after graduating, and it's been a blast ever since. One thing my university always said was that you never fully learn this art form until you land your first job, and man were they right! I've been practicing this art form for about 5 years now and I definitely struggled my first week here. I kid you not, I took an entire week making a bench haha. But I've learned a great deal of information, new techniques, and even made some friends along the way! I'd say this is an experience I'll never forget :D

(Also here's some more of my work)

Derek Stroud — Sr Programmer

One of my favorite things that I’ve worked on was setting up our abilities using Epic’s own AbilitySystem, which is a very neat and robust system to work with. Abilities are such a key component to the game as they include everything from placing towers to the Genie pet giving you mana. Setting up our core flow for this and making some of the base abilities was very satisfying and fun as it is one of the very direct means of adding fun interactions to the game. In previous development on the original Dungeon Defenders and Dungeon Defenders II, this was a lot more difficult. Swapping to Unreal Engine 4 is like a dream come true when it comes to setting up abilities and being able to do a lot more in a shorter amount of time.

With any project, there’s always going to be that mountain to climb, and it’s usually the hardest thing you work on. For Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, we needed to mimic the original Dungeon Defenders stats on every piece of gear and balance for gear, enemies, difficulties, you name it! Due to Dungeon Defenders evolving beyond its original scope (especially post release) there were a lot of tacked on additions to various formulas that became very hard to translate into an easy to work with system for DDA designers. Tracking down all the various additions and small stat tweaks that could happen in DD1 and making sure we incorporated them into DDA but also trying to keep the new systems intuitive and manageable was quite an undertaking... not quite sure we hit intuitive but I think we got manageable down. 

My favorite thing that has been added to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened that wasn’t in Dungeon Defenders (2012) is double jump! Anything that makes navigation feel better, also every game should have it cause it is the best. As someone who worked on both games, you should take this as a fact — double jump is best jump.

What’s Next?

Everyone has been working so hard on polishing things up for the Steam Early Access release of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened on February 21st and working on getting it ready for the full launch in Q2! A few of us are also getting ready to head out to PAX East at the end of the month, will we see any of you there? If you go, make sure to stop by and visit us, we love to hang out with some of our brave Defenders whenever we get the chance!

Social Defenders

To keep up with us and get the latest news on both Dungeon Defenders and us folks here at Chromatic Games, make sure to follow us on our social media:

• Discord

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Instagram

• Twitch

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

This is just a brief check-in to talk about preorders for Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. We’ve received a lot of support from a ton of you, and want to make sure we reward that where we possibly can. There’s two big things to go over, being preorder upgrade options for Kickstarter and BackerKit supporters, and preorder window coming to a close. Let’s get to it!

Preorder Upgrades

We’ve been working tirelessly with our shop partner to enable upgrades over the past few weeks. Without getting into the details, we unfortunately have not been able to get upgrades going, and don’t want to let people know very last minute that they can upgrade, if at all.

Instead, we’re going to do the following. ANYONE that preordered through BackerKit or backed us on Kickstarter will receive the $60 Prestigious Edition bonuses shown on the preorder store, that are preorder exclusive. This includes:

• Forum Titles

• In-game Titles

• Digital Soundtrack, Strategy Guide, and Artbook

• Awakened Phoenix Pet 

• Crystalline Skins 

• Rift Skins

At Chromatic, we want to do everything we can to reward all of our players who support us, as fairly as we can. We announced the ability to upgrade, and since we are not able to deliver, we are taking the high road and providing the bonuses to those who would have been able to upgrade for FREE. We chose these tiers because it’s equivalent to how much the retail price is for the game. This serves as a big THANK YOU to all of our supporters who joined us early on this adventure, and to help show that we’re focused on making a great game.

Preorder Availability

With Early Access coming on February 21st, we’re going to be closing our Preorder Store the same day. This is to ensure that all our sales for the PC version of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened goes through Steam. With the Preorder Store closing, the Preorder Bonuses will no longer be available for ALL platforms. If you want to grab the Preorder bonuses, you only have until February 21st.

Kickstarter and BackerKit Changes

Starting on February 21st, we will no longer be able to change the platforms that people have selected, as we need to make sure that orders are locked and ready to fire for when we release on each individual platform, ensuring that people receive their correct copies.

What’s Next?

We’ve got a Dev Stream that we’re going to have tomorrow, February 14th at 3:00 PM ET, where we answer questions that we’ve seen posted everywhere, answer questions that all of you have for us, and show some gameplay as well! Please join us, and potentially win a free Prestigious Edition of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.

That’s all for now, just a quick check-in. We’re hard at work to make sure that Early Access feels as great as possible, and cannot wait for you guys to tear it apart!

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team thanks you for your support. We’re working to make Chromatic Games a studio that is able to create games current and future Defenders are sure to enjoy, because our games are made for YOU!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS,

Now that we’re a week out from our PAX return, we’re ready to share a lot of information about Dungeon Defenders: Awakened and what you can expect. There’s a lot to talk about, and based off the title of STEAM EARLY ACCESS, you probably already have a ton of questions. Let’s get into it!

Steam Early Access
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is going to be available for Steam Early Access on February 21, 2020 (just in case you thought it was February 2021). This is something we’re incredibly excited for and hope that you are too! There’s a lot of reasoning that went into this, so we’re going to break it down because we want to be as transparent as possible to you, our GLORIOUS Defenders.

We previously mentioned that we would be avoiding Early Access, but we feel this is the best route to deliver on our promise that we’re working very hard, while being able to also deliver something tangible to you by the extended deadline we provided. Our continued goal is to be as transparent as possible and have our fans tied to our development for years to come.

Feedback
We received A LOT of feedback. We put out a survey to our testers at the end of last year/early this year, and the turnout was insane. The thousands of results outlined what all of you thought about our game. In fact, for how rough the Beta was, we were ecstatic by the results:


 

In total, it’s less than 10% of the most diehard hardcore Dungeon Defenders fans were not happy with the Beta. In terms of testing a game… that’s a home run! We knew that we were doing a lot of things good, but based on the feedback provided, we know we can do better than good and produce great work.

The feedback outlined a lot of what people enjoyed about the game so far, and also some of the holes we had to fill. We went through and outlined everything we could make better based off the feedback from the survey, forums, and feedback provided through zendesk. It was a lot, and we’re not devs who shy away from a lot of hard work. Some of the feedback we’ve received made it into the PAX build and had an incredibly positive reception, showing that our approach to focusing on pushing from good to great is the best approach for not only us as a studio, but to all of our incredibly loyal community.

Studio Work
We’ve been working at a pretty high capacity to make sure things get out on time. We could have made a February launch for both PC and Nintendo Switch, but based on the feedback we received, it would have felt like 80~90% of the game you expected. This created a lot of internal conflict, because the people who work here at Chromatic are incredibly talented individuals who have done such a great job in such a short amount of time (we’re coming up on only 1 year of development), and we hold ourselves to a higher standard because 100% of what’s in the game is a reflection of our work.

When we received the feedback, we knew that if we weren’t feeling the game was at 100%, then we couldn’t be dishonest and release it saying it was 100% ready. We want gameplay to feel polished and smooth, we want everything to look amazing and crisp, we want the systems to be seamless for people to use, and we want it to be a Dungeon Defenders game that our players are proud to support for years to come. Our goal is to be as transparent as possible, which leads us into what our Early Access schedule looks like.

Why Early Access?
Going into Early Access on Steam allows us to get where the game is at into the hands of our players on PC. By doing so, we’re able to iterate quickly, getting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened into that 100% state as soon as possible. We are still going to be honoring our Nintendo Switch exclusive deal with Nintendo, with our PlayStation 4 and Xbox One releases coming in Q3 2020.

That said, this Early Access is not going to be like other games, or like Dungeon Defenders II. The Early Access period is going to be incredibly short, because we’re really spending this time to polish up the game and meet your expectations. Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is going to be fully released during Q2 on PC and Nintendo Switch. We want Early Access to be as short as possible so that we can get Dungeon Defenders: Awakened out to all of you as the best version of the game.

A lot of the polish we’re doing is to systems and gameplay, those are a bit harder to show off or discuss, but they encompass enemies spawning, how much loot drops, what kind of loot drops, enemy difficulty, enemy AI, and more across the entirety of the game. 

One of the things we can show is the visual changes to some portions of our feedback. One thing that was shown off at PAX (and is still being iterated on) was the changes to the HUD:


The feedback from the survey was overwhelmingly positive:



That’s 4.5% that were dissatisfied, which when it comes to feedback, it's a slam dunk equivalent to (Space Jam spoiler alert) Michael Jordan slam dunking with his long arm at the end of Space Jam on the Monstars to score the two points needed to save the world: 

As a result, we’re going to continue to use this time to polish up UIs in a similar fashion to how the HUD was polished. We’re excited to get these updates out to you in Early Access, and will be continuing iteration through Early Access based on feedback. As we speak, the UI has received even more polish than what’s shown here.

Another change that we made was to the Huntress and Monk. We had seen through written feedback that people were not happy with their visuals, so we made some changes and presented them in the survey. People were happy with the direction we were going, but weren’t sold all the way. Something we weren’t able to get in the PAX build was our next iteration on the Huntress and Monk:

 

You can see the progression we made over time, the first being the version we released into Beta, the second being a first pass presented in the survey, and the last being an updated version based on the feedback we got.

These images felt to us a lot closer to Dungeon Defenders, while bringing them graphically up to 2020. We’re going to continue to get feedback on these as well, but we’re really happy with where they are at currently.

Roadmap
Releasing into Early Access isn’t only going to be setting the game live in its early state and then providing the finished product months later. Instead, we’re going to be updating it over time, adding in features as they become polished and in a state we’re happy with. Thus, THE ROADMAP IS BORN! 



As a studio, this is what we are sticking to as a studio. Should anything change, we are going to make sure that we keep all of you updated as soon as possible. We want this road map to serve as a look into where our focus is and as a promise for what we’ll deliver.

Beta Closing
We’ve already implemented a ton of Beta feedback and are currently working through more. As a result, we’re going to be bringing the Beta to an end on Sunday, February 2nd at 11:59PM. We were very happy with the amount of people that we got in and the amount of feedback provided. If you had fun in the Beta, it’s only the surface of what’s in store for you on Early Access and our full release! Early Access is less than a month away.

What’s Next?
We’re going to keep working. As shown in the Roadmap, we’ve got some ground to cover still. We want to keep updates coming and to further enhance our transparency and direct communication with our community. After Early Access launches, we plan on having updates showcasing the work that has been done, introducing you to members of the team, and giving you a look at the work it took to make Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.

Chromatic Weekend Wind Down, Dev Streams, and more are going to be coming as we continue development. We’re very excited for everything coming out and are excited that all of you are along for the ride!

Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team thanks you for your support. We’re working to make Chromatic Games a studio that is able to create games current and future that our Defenders are sure to enjoy, because our games are made for YOU!

For Etheria!
Chromatic Games

Hi there everyone! 

My name is Mary (or known as [CG] Mary) and I’ve recently joined Chromatic Games as the Community Manager. I’m so excited to meet all of you, answer your questions, listen to your feedback, and be the bridge between you and Chromatic! I spent almost five years working player support and assisting with community management at Artix Entertainment on AdventureQuest, DragonFable, MechQuest, EpicDuel, AdventureQuest Worlds, and AdventureQuest 3D. I also have been volunteering for the RTX (RoosterTeeth) convention in Austin, TX for six years! I love being able to help out as much as I can and make sure people are being heard.

(My demodog Rusty and I)

I’ve enjoyed tower defense games since I found Bloons TD in 2007. Ranged/mage characters have always been my favorite, so I really enjoy playing The Apprentice (plus Flameburst is one of the greatest offenses.) The Huntress is my second go to, but I also love using the electric auras with The Monk. Outside of the Dungeon Defenders franchise, my favorite games to play are Fable II, Wolf Among Us, and Fallout: New Vegas. I’m currently playing Pokemon Shield and The Outer Worlds in my free time.

I look forward to talking to all of you! You’ll be seeing me on streams defending Etheria from the hordes, responding to your questions and feedback on our social media platforms (tag me on twitter @CG_Mary_), as well as acting as a bridge between the Chromatic Games team and you, our brave Defenders. If you have any questions you can find me on Discord and Twitter and I will do my best to answer as soon as I can! 

For Etheria!

PS If you understood the Fallout meme in the title we're gonna be best friends

DEFENDERS,

Beta has been out for a few weeks now, and what a ride it has been! As a studio, it is incredibly exhilarating to have a ton of the hard work that we’ve been hammering away at as a studio out into the wild. Between watching streams and youtube videos; discussions on the forums, Twitter, Facebook, Steam, and Discord; the plethora of feedback that’s been provided; and just playing the games ourselves with friends and family, it’s been an incredibly awesome experience. So let’s start with Beta in general!

Beta, What is it Good For — Absolutely A Lot
Our Beta launch was something that we were incredibly happy with. When putting something as complex as a game out into the wild has developers putting on a helmet, and strapping down everything, for the potential chaos that can come with a Beta that just aren’t able to be tested in an internal environment. We launched with relatively low issues: gameplay was working at a very high degree with little bug issues; crashes were low and easy to identify; lanes performed with little issues, and our testers computers didn’t burst into flames (that was a super huge one). We were able to address crashes and tweak some things to improve the Beta experience pretty quickly, releasing four patches in a very short amount of time — SIX DAYS!

Betas over time have taken a turn in the industry to have a large range in what that actually entail. Our version of Beta was the original approach, that is getting a functional build that is very representative of the final experience regarding the core gameplay loot: build, defend, fight, and get sweet loot. A lot of things performed correctly, and the gameplay, for a Beta, could not have been better for us! That said, we have received a lot of the feedback, and are still parsing through a lot of it. Things like UI art, character visuals/faces, Survival scaling, hero and tower balance, and more are on our radar. There’s a lot of feedback that we’re getting that was anticipated, so we’ve had plans to address these things for the most part. We received a ton of feedback regarding UI visuals, and we are going to be making sure to give it that Dungeon Defenders feel. What was in the Beta was focused on functionality, to ensure we didn’t waste any work making art that could lead to wasted work. Needless to say, there’s a lot of improvements that we’re going to be making, and your feedback has been incredibly helpful to validate our plans moving forward!

Pre-order and Backing
We’ve had multiple ways that Defenders have been able to get Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. Starting with Kickstarter, which then transferred to BackerKit, and finally ending on our current store. There were bumps along the way, many we are still sorting through (note: if you preordered through Kickstarter and BackerKit, with any issues, please reach out to preorder@chromatic.games, DO NOT if you purchased through our current store, that should be done through support@xsolla.com). These three phases were part of our total plan, but the bumps were a very large learning process and we are working diligently to make sure we provide everything we can to our supporters.

One of the things that we’re going to be doing is sending out beta keys to our BackerKit supporters who purchased the $25 copy of the game. The store outlined what was included, but there was some confusing messaging going out about the BackerKit store. Our higher paying backers have had access to the Beta for a while, giving them exclusive access, and now we want to open it up to show our appreciation for your support, and also to make up for any confusing messaging that may have been sent.

We’re also offering more rewards through our newest storefront. We don’t want to exclude people who backed early from these rewards, so we’re going to be doing our best to be as inclusive as possible:

• First, anyone who purchased through BackerKit will be moved over to our current storefront in the coming weeks. We'll let you know when this change is made. This means that you’ll get what’s at the $40 tier, but also have the option to upgrade to a higher tier if you want to, instead of having to purchase an entirely new copy.
   
• Second, anyone who backed on Kickstarter at or above the purchase tiers on the new storefront will receive the rewards included in the new packs. For example, did you purchase the $75 tier on Kickstarter? You’ll receive everything included in the Prestigious pack, the costumes, titles, everything!

Our goal is to make sure that when you’re purchasing Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, you feel good about the purchase, and that you’re getting awesome rewards with an awesome game. You guys help make the game, and we want to make sure you know you’re valued.

Beta Late Than Neva
We’re sorry for that pun. It’s terrible, but it had to be said. With preordering and getting beta keys, the vast majority got out, but there were some keys that weren’t properly transferred over, surveys were submitted late, etc., that lead to people not receiving their keys on time. One thing we’re going to do is extend the Beta into January. Here’s why:

• You have provided a ton of feedback and we want to increase the window so that every nook and cranny is covered. We want Dungeon Defenders: Awakened to be the best game it can be, and a lot of the feedback you’ve provided has been instrumental in making sure that’s the destination we reach.
   
• We’re opening the beta to the $25 purchases, and some people didn’t receive their keys on time, or are still in process (please reach out to preorder@chromatic.games if you haven’t already), we want to make sure that players have enough time to experience the beta and provide their feedback.

These two reasons alone make it very important for us to keep with our goals of being inclusive to all Defenders, and making the best game possible. We want and encourage you to continue to provide feedback. Maybe later this month, there maybe an update, maybe that expands on some stuff, and maybe fixes some issues you've reported, maybe probably maybe. As for January, we’re currently discussing adding more for players to experience, with there being a reflection of change via the feedback all of you have provided.

MORE FEEDBACK
Another thing that should be in your inboxes in the coming week is a survey to those who have taken part of the Beta. While digging through all the feedback you’ve provided, we also want to get general sentiments and feedback about as many facets of the game as possible. To that end, to make sure we’re doing the best we can, we’re going to send out a curated survey for our Beta players. By completing the entire survey, we’ll be drawing 10 WINNERS to receive our Prestigious pack, giving you another copy to use for another platform, give to a friend to join you on your adventures in Etheria, or whatever you want!

New Stuff
Dungeon Defenders: Awakened isn’t just some simple port or remake. We’re adding a lot of content, and have some big plans for future content. People have seen some of the new rewards from the Beta, but we wanted to give you a quick sneak peek at some of the awesome weapons and pets that are coming your way:

New Weapons — Tech Rewards

With new rewards coming in, we want them to feel awesome. We also want them to feel awesome for ALL heroes. This is the Squire’s sword that you’ll be able to hunt down, alongside getting weapons for the Huntress, Apprentice, and Monk that are part of the future tech-based set.

New Pets

We have familiar pets coming back that many Defenders love, but we also have new pets to be earned. Currently called the Etherial Ancient, they are just one of the new pets that’ll help boost your character and pack a punch when fighting enemies.
 

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
We've added an FAQ section to help address questions for current and returning Defenders. We'll be updating this overtime as more questions come in!
 

What’s Next?
We’re going to keep polishing systems and working. There’s a ton of feedback we’re actively working through, and are going to keep up to really make the game for our GLORIOUS Defenders. Keep throwing feedback our way, and know that even if you don’t get a response, it has been seen and that we’ll do our best to address it.

When it comes to communication, as we’ve acknowledged, have not been the best. We’re working on a few initiatives internally to help bridge the gap between our community and development. We’ve also been working through bringing on a full-time Community Manager, working with some fantastic candidates. Current plans have our new Community Manager joining Chromatic Games in January, and we can’t wait for you to meet her!

Chromatic Games is going to continue to work on doing things to the best of our ability. There have been bumps along the way, and while they can be frustrating, we want to thank you for sticking through it with us, as we grow into this new studio and are able to make awesome games for YOU! <3

Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

Twitter
Facebook
Discord
Twitch

The entire team thanks you for trying to destroy the Beta. We’re grateful for all the tremendous feedback we’ve received so far (and more to come), and want to thank you for joining us on this journey!

For Etheria!
Chromatic Games
 

DEFENDERS,

It’s time. It’s FINALLY time. Oh good golly gosh, it’s finally time… BETA IS HERE! Today we launched the Beta, getting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened into the hands of Etheria’s brave Defenders. There’s so much to cover, that we’re not going to cover it all. We want you to discover all the beta has to offer on your own. Let’s get into it!
 

Beta Release
The current Beta is available to our Kickstarter Backers first. This is a promise that we made during our Kickstarter, and are going to make sure to uphold. Kickstarter Backers currently have advanced Beta access. On Friday, November 22nd, we are going to open up the Beta to everyone who has purchased the $40+ preorder packages.

Beta is currently scheduled to run for roughly three weeks! Starting on November 22nd and ending on 13th, this gives us a great window to gather feedback and be able to make necessary changes before launching in February.

Progress and data from the Beta does NOT carry over to the release of the game. Beta is used as a testing ground to make sure that the game is in the best possible state. Keeping data from Beta (ha, it rhymes) can cause major issues when updating to the release version.

If you did not receive a Beta key, and are a Kickstarter Backer, make sure you have filled out the surveys that were sent to your registered Kickstarter E-mails from "Backerkit". If that survey is not filled out, then the Beta key is not sent.

All pre-order and Kickstarter Backer keys have been sent out. If you are missing keys, please write to preorder@chromatic.games, using the e-mail you used for Kickstarter and/or BackerKit.

Remaining pre-orders will be handled through our new store located here. If you run into any issues getting a key ordering from this store, contact support the new support here (suppot@xsolla.com) or using the link on the receipt of your purchase.

Streaming and Content Creation
During the Beta, you are free to stream, make videos, or whatever content you want. We want Defenders to enjoy and share as much as they want when it comes to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened!
 

What’s Missing?
There’s a lot to cover what’s in a game. Patch notes usually say what’s new, but with so much of the game being new, we’re going to let you explore the game. Instead, we're going to outline what may not be in the Beta that we are currently polishing and iterating on to get in for release (we may be missing some things from this list as well):

Tactical Map
This is currently in a functional state. We’re going to be updating the map images, and make sure it’s a lot prettier come release.

Challenge Maps
We’re currently wanting to make sure that balance feels good across the map in general. Challenge Maps are coming your way on release!

Maps
There are a total of 15 maps in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. Not included in the Beta is Act II, Act III, and the Bonus Maps. Act I is the big focus for our beta test, helping us set the foundation so the rest of the maps bring the right amount of challenge.

Difficulty
Nightmare and Massacre are not going to be included in the Beta. We don’t want people beating all the hardest content during testing. Gotta have something scary hard for you to master on release!

Enemies
With Nightmare not in the beta, Sharken, Djinn, Spiders, and Goblin Copter will not be spawning in a lane near you.

Weapons
All of our weapons are not in the game. We have a pool of roughly 5 different weapons per hero to simulate the amount of weapons you would see during your playthrough of Act I on release. Weapon random colorization is also not reflected in the beta build, but will be implemented for release.

HUD
We’re going to be adding various improvements to the HUD. Currently we have it setup for beta to be functional. There’s a ton of work that we’ve done not in the Beta, but expect improvements on launch.

Armor
Currently we have placeholder armor models in. The final models are currently getting a last pass and will be sparkling and shining on release.

Set Bonuses
Set bonuses are working but may not currently be showing up correctly.

Split Screen
We’re testing base functionality currently, so split screen is not available during the Beta.

Spawn Immunity
Enemies are immune up until a certain point in spawn doors. Indicators are not included in Beta, but will be here on release.

Social
We’re wanting to make sure that getting your friends into a match is as easy as possible, give hosts control over their sessions, and showing who’s in your party. These are currently not in the beta, and can be expected on release.

Hardcore
Currently not in Beta, coming on release. 

Twitch Integration
Currently being developed, it will not be in the Beta.

Game Modes
In the Beta we have Campaign and Survival. Other game modes are coming on release.

Pets
There are a total of four pets that are available during the Beta. On release, there will be much more!

Elemental Weapons
Some weapon elemental affinity visuals may be disabled, as we’re making sure performance comes first. Your weapons will be shooting flames and electricity during release.

Kickstarter Rewards
Kickstarter rewards, such as exclusive skins and portraits, are not available during the beta.

Currency
Mana from the original Dungeon Defenders is being split into three different categories. Currently in the game is ability and defense mana. Ability mana regenertaes over time, and Defense mana is gained from defeating enemies and completing waves. Currency in the form of gold is what will persist outside of maps, being used for trading between players and upgrading items.

Trading
Trading is currently not enabled during the Beta.

Upgrading
With currency not in the Beta version, you are unable to upgrade items.

Boss Fights
Boss fights are coming with release. These are big epic moments that we want to make sure are special for release.

Cross Saves
The beta is only available on PC, so Cross Save functionality is not part of the beta.

Tavern
Currently you are unable to build defenses in the Tavern. As such, there are not any training dummies for you to beat up.

Defender Forge
We’re testing for functionality currently with our Inventory and Hero Deck systems. The Defender Forge makes its glorious arrival on launch.

New User Experience
This is something we’ve spent quite a bit of time on, and are going to refine. It is important for new Defenders to understand how to protect the world of Etheria, but it will be available on release.

Tower Inspection
A step up from what was offered in Dungeon Defenders II, tower inspection shows you the most pertinent information for your currently placed tower. This is currently disabled, and will be available at release.

Tower View
Another feature brought over from Dungeon Defenders II, where you are able to hold a button/key and see what the range of your defenses are. This is currently disabled, and will be available at release.

Gamepad Support
This is disabled for the Beta currently. We’re actively polishing the gamepad experience and did not want to provide it in an unpolished state.

Hero Customization
During the beta, the heroes will not be able to be customized in regards to color changing and costumes.

Auto Equip
This is a feature we are providing for Defenders who don’t understand the item system right away. This will come during release.

Level Requirements
During beta, there are no level requirements for gear. What you get is what you can use. Since we’re not having trading, we wanted to make sure getting gear was as fun as possible for testing.

Mana Chests
Mana chests are gone-gone-gone. Keep an eye out for end-of-wave loot chests.

Options Menu
The options menu is currently in a beta state and does not reflect every option that will be available upon full release.

Cinematics
The in-game cinematics are not part of the Beta.

Known Issues

A lot. It's beta, so there's a ton we're still working on. Music not playing correctly, audio playing from different parts of the map instead of where you are, UIs not working properly. There's a ton, but we're knocking them out super quick. Be sure to leave feedback in the DD:A Beta Discussion Forum.

Next Steps

We’re going to be monitoring gameplay and feedback that all of you provide. While polishing and finishing remaining systems for our February launch, we’re also going to be scouring feedback to make sure that we get the game into the best state possible. Nothing in the Beta is guaranteed to be final, and is going to be scrutinized heavily.

From now until release, we’re going to keep churning away to make sure DD:A is the best it can be!

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team cannot wait to see you tear apart the Beta. We’re excited for release in February and thank you for joining us on this journey!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

October flew by, and November is here, which means we’ve got a slew of new things to show off and talk about! The Dungeon Defenders: Awakened PC beta is coming this month, with news on when it’s being released very soon. We’re currently working with our excellent PR partners on getting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened in front of as many Defenders as possible, so bare with us as we prepare to make this beta an explosive success!

While we’ve been working incredibly hard, today we want to show off the Huntress’s traps, some of the new gorgeous UIs, never before seen maps, and an update as to how as a studio we’ve been working on the game. Without further ado, let’s get into it!

Huntress Traps

We wanted to make sure that the Huntress’s traps conveyed that they were put together by an elf, using materials that are available to a being from the woodlands. There’s a lot of VFX and power that we’re going to be adding to these traps, but for now we’re going to show you what you’ll see as your creating a literal minefield for the hordes that are coming!

Poison Gas Trap

Proximity Mine Trap

Inferno Trap

Darkness Trap

Etherial Spike Trap

User Interface Facelift

One thing that we promised with Dungeon Defenders: Awakened was providing a cleaner User Interface, something that is definitely wanting when playing the original Dungeon Defenders. Our approach is to make things read well so that you’re able to discern the information you want, get your gear and character setup the way you want fast and efficiently, so you’re back in the fray and doing what you do best — defending Etheria!

The inventory in Dungeon Defenders has always been a big part of the gameplay, and we’ve made it look aesthetically pleasing, while also providing a ton of functionality. We’ll start off with showing the item box:

One thing you’ll notice is that there are Nintendo Switch inputs at the bottom. One of the biggest goals we had with the UIs for Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, was to make sure that it played well with a gamepad first. If it plays well with gamepad, then we can easily make it play well with mouse and keyboard.

You’ll also notice that there is a filter tab in the top right. This filter is going to allow players to filter gear with multiple options! Filtering is something that players have wanted for a while, and we’re bringing it in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. Here’s a tentative list of what you can expect to be able to filter by:
 

• Quality (Common, uncommon, rare, epic, etc.)

• Equipment (Weapons, Helmets, Chests, Gloves, Boots, Pets, Brooches, Masks, Bracers, and Shields)

• Armor Type (Leather, Mail, Chain, etc.)

• and More!

Another important aspect of the game is being able to inspect a piece of equipment that you’ve received, compare it with a piece that you’ve got equipped, and decide if it’s an upgrade or not. Those were our goals with gear tooltips and comparison:

When making these tooltips, we made sure that we included the “worst case” scenario for when you receive an item. By that, we focused on what the absolute biggest an item tooltip would be, and this is the result. There’s a ton of information that we need to convey, and so we made sure to push things to their absolute limits in order to provide a clean and easy to read UI. It’s worth mentioning that the white circles and squares are where our icons are going to be going to represent each stat (they’re currently made, just need some slight adjustments).

We also are adjusting the names of stats so that they are able to be understood. These images are work-in-progress still, but these names are something we’ll be looking for feedback throughout our beta process. 

All of it together, here’s what you can expect to see when playing solo:

There’s still some iteration we’re going to be making (and currently are), but we’re very proud of where the UI currently is and can’t wait for you to be able to use it to its full potential!

There are a couple things that aren’t being shown here, but we want to give context to:

• Abilities:  This will be where a hero’s abilities and towers are explained.

• Runes:  This is the level up stat allocation area. Your stat updates are reflected in the character stats pane.

• Character stats: This is currently getting polished , but will appear where the current item tooltip is in the above screenshot.

A lot of these pieces are coming together for beta. They have functionally been in our test builds as engineer art.

New Map? New Map!

Half of the maps in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened campaign have never been played before, and they help bring an all new epic feel! Two of our new maps are desert based maps, the ruins of a civilization that has long been gone. One of those maps, is tentatively called “Tornado Valley”, opening up to a giant ruined city:

The next map is a follow up to Tornado Valley, that we’re tentatively calling “Tornado Lowlands”. That’s most definitely a developer name, as there’s nothing low about this map. Be careful not to fall:
 

Studio Work

As a studio, we are churning through a ton of work. Recently our communication has not been as frequent as we’ve wanted and we’re progressing towards making it better. We’re currently expanding our workforce to help with this, but also are going to be working with our partners, including a PR firm, that will be getting updates and information out across our social channels, and into the hands of various game news outlet to really help Dungeon Defenders: Awakened blow up!

There are multiple goals that we have with Beta. First is to deliver on a promise to our backers, we want to be good on our word and you deserve to see what your support has created. Second, you’ll be providing really value feedback, both in terms of gameplay, but also from the metrics that we’ll be reading on the back end. Last, it’s a great milestone for us to achieve that really helps bring the game together and empower us as a studio to keep working hard.

After the beta, we are going to continue work on the game, up to the release in February. This means polishing systems, balancing gameplay, fixing bugs, and a lot more. The amount and quality of work that we’ve done in such a short time (a little over 8 months) is something that we’re incredibly proud of, and we use that pride to push us in these remaining months. What you’ll see in the beta does not mean it is final, and there’s going to be a ton of time put into making DD:A the best it can be!

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team is having a blast working on DD:A, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on it. Stay tuned for more info!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

We’re almost at the end of September, which means there’s a little over a month away from the Dungeon Defenders: Awakened PC Beta! The team has been putting in tons of time to really make sure the beta is a great experience, while also polishing up a lot of areas that won’t be seen until release. Starting next month, we’ll begin ramping up displaying a lot of the hard work that’s been going on in the world of Etheria.

As we’re working on that, we didn’t want to leave you without anything for September, so while this will be one of our shorter updates, we do have some awesome things to show off. We have a big post processing and shader effect that is still being tweaked, and the following pieces are still works in progress, but without further ado, let’s get into it!

Squire Towers

We previously showed the concept for these bad boys, now it’s time to see them in-game!

Spike Blockade

Bouncer Blockade

Harpoon Tower

Bowling Ball Tower

Slice n' Dice Blockade

These towers not only look fantastic but are incredibly fun to defend with. There’s another set of towers that we’re putting the finishing touches on in regards to animation, so we’ll show off the concepts for now. Get ready, the Apprentice Towers are coming at ya!

Apprentice Towers

Arcane Barrier

Magic Missile Tower

Flameburst Tower

Lightning Tower

Deadly Striker Tower

Our goal was to make sure that the towers are very discernable from one another, something that was harder to do previously. We cannot wait for you to see their 3D beauty, we’re just giving it some finishing touches before doing so.

These are things you’ve seen before. How about we look at something that’s NEVER been seen before? Maybe a map?  Maybe a new map in Act 1? Actually yeah, that sounds pretty good. Let’s do that!

NEW MAP: Lava Mines

This map is one of the new campaign maps coming in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened! It’s a ton of fun to play, it’s absolutely gorgeous, and most of all — LAVA!

What’s Next?

We’re still working our hardest to ensure the Beta coming in November is going to be the best first step at letting you, our valiant Defenders, take on Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. There’s a ton of info we’re excited to gain, where we can make the game better, and most of all — LET YOU PLAY! There’s a ton still left to do, but it’ll all be worth it.

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team is having a blast working on DD:A, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on it. Stay tuned for more info!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games
 

DEFENDERS!

Today we released the PRIME INCURSIONS update on all platforms! We wanted to provide a challenge to our tested Defenders that was separate from Onslaught, and Prime Incursions are just that. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s get into it!

PRIME INCURSIONS

What are they?

They are the highest and newest tier of incursions, selectable from the Incursions tab on the War Table. There are six different groups of incursions to play through that are releasing over time. You are able to play them as they are unleashed, the only thing that can hold you back is your own skill!

What are the rewards?

Prime Incursions have three different rewards associated with them.

Chaos VIII Ampoules
Each Prime Incursion has the chance to drop a Chaos VIII Ampoule. As you continuously progress, the Incursions get more and more difficult. As such, we wanted to increase the drop rate of Chaos VIII Ampoules to match that increase in difficulty. These Incursions can get pretty tough, which led us to making the hardest of these challenges have the highest drop chance for Chaos VIII Ampoules.

Chaos VIII Weapons
We’ve added a whole new slew of weapons with new weapon models that are only available through Prime Incursions. There’s over 25 new weapons to collect, sure to scratch that collector’s itch!

That’s not all there is to these weapons. Each weapon is upgraded to Chaos VIII, at the full 5/5 upgrade quality! That means they are perfectly upgraded, letting you focus on using Chaos VIII Amps to upgrade your relics and armor instead. Alongside these upgrades, we’ve curated these weapons to be what you really want. They have some of the most alluring shot and swing types many of you enjoy. ALONGSIDE THAT, included are curated mods specific to these weapons that really ensure these drops feel good and pack a punch!

Hyper Shards
Hyper Shards are something every player wants to boost up their arsenal. Previously, they were only acquired through Mastery completion, requiring a specific amount of Mastery Stars. Now, in Prime Incursions, you earn a Hyper Shard for every group you complete. There are six groups total, so if you complete all six of the groupings, you earn the seventh Hyper Shard as a capstone reward! This means you can now have up to TWO of each Hyper Shard in your ranks, pushing back the Old Ones forces more hyper-er than before.
When Do They Release?

Today we released the first two groups of Prime Incursions, Prime I and Prime II. Each of these groups contains 3 incursions, for a total of 6 to conquer. Every week, on Wednesday @ 9AM ET, we are releasing a new incursion. This is going until early November, giving you content to come back each week to enjoy. Here’s the schedule

Prime I & II:  TODAY!
Prime III Malthius:  September 4th
Prime III Power Surge:  September 11th
Prime IV Dark Awakening:  September 18th
Prime IV Return to Maldonis:  September 25th
Prime IV Bastille Master:  October 2nd
Prime V Altar of the Athame:  October 9th
Prime V Revenge of the Yetis:  October 16th
Prime V Spectral Assault:  October 23rd
Prime VI Dawn of the Blood Moon:  October 30th
Prime VI BETSY:  November 5th

New Costume
The Ascended Initiate is now available for purchase in-game at 800 Gems!

Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The team had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

Today is a big day for Dungeon Defenders: Awakened and Chromatic Games! Earlier today we were featured as part of the Nintendo Indie Showcase, which if you haven’t seen, click HERE to check it out. This is HUGE for our game and studio, helping us bring the world of Etheria to many future Defenders.

This showing also revealed something very big: A RELEASE DATE! Dungeon Defenders: Awakened releases February 2020, and there’s a lot of reasons for this, so let’s get into them by answering some questions we’re sure you have!

Release

Why is it not releasing in October 2019?

Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is meant to be a showing to our loyal fans of what we’re capable of as Chromatic Games. This isn’t a simple remaster/remake, but bringing back the soul of the original Dungeon Defenders into modern day. Building the game from the ground up is no simple feat, and we’re pulling out all the stops to really blow your socks away. Half of the maps in DD:A are new; Assets in the game are new; all of the UIs are new; and a slew of new features to make for an enjoyable experience. Releasing in October would lead to two things: an unpolished and unrefined gaming experience, or tons of crunch that can burn out developers. As a studio, we absolutely REFUSE to release DD:A as half-baked, and as a business we don’t want people working unbearable hours (we love all our employees, they already kick a ton of butt). This meant pushing our release date to accomplish our goals, and give you the game you deserve!

“A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.” - Shigeru Miyamoto

Why February 2020?

In short, It’s the best time for us to release the game. In long, there’s a multitude of reasons. We’re able to keep cranking out content without overworking and breaking developer souls; we can release a beta that allows us time to make iterations as they’re needed; we don’t have to compete with AAA releases that would drown our marketing efforts; it’s after the holidays, giving Defenders a chance to get back to post-holiday life-ing and get hyped for DD:A release; and we could keep going. Overall, it’s best for us as a studio and better for those of you wanting a great DD:A experience. For those of you wanting a bad DD:A experience, we apologize, but we are unable to provide that.

Beta? BETA?? BEEEEEEEEEEEEETTTAAAA??!??!?!?

We’re currently going over the best time for beta and letting you sink your teeth into this meaty game. DD:A PC Beta will be available Early November 2019. This Beta allows us to monitor all the systems we’ve been working tirelessly on, and getting any fixes out before the release. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated during these testing periods, together it we get to make an AWESOME game.

Nintendo Switch Console Timed-Exclusive?

This means that we’ll be releasing on Nintendo Switch and PC right out of the gate in February 2020 at the same time. What does this mean for our PS4 and Xbox One backers? We’re going to be spending extra time polishing up the builds for your platform. The release for these platforms is not very far off from the initial release, with a concrete release date coming in the near future. Or maybe we’ll NEVER release on those platforms, MUAHAHAHA (just kidding, we love all our consoles Defenders and could never hurt you like that).

New Content?

Well I guess… So far we’ve been showing off some of the hotness coming in the forms of complete maps, concept art, and goblin animations. Everything here is still considered a work-in-progress, but everything is until the game’s released! First we want to show off our new Dungeon Defenders: Awakened logo and cover art (it’s freaking amazing).

Let’s take a look at the new Squire in 3D, with his animations in-game!

Attack 1

Attack 2


Attack 3


Blood Boil


Circular Slice


Healing


Death


Also how about our first boss map, Alchemical Labs!

The core will be in the middle, we just wanted to show off the art!

There’s that core, get back to the middle of the room!

How about a look at your favorite homestead, a place to kick up your feet and admire your loot, THE TAVERN!

That’s Sir Bubbles himself there on the wall.

Here’s old George, on patrol. Kind of.

And last but not least, while we’re finishing up the work on his encounter, how about a look at the NEW Demon Lord?

What’s Next?

We’re going to keep working incredibly hard to get DD:A into your hands, duh! This is a giant passion project for all of us, and every day is a blast, even when we’re squashing bugs (ty QA, we love you). Regular updates are going to continue, and we’ve even brought on board some awesome help to get this info out to you! Speaking of…

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team is having a blast working on DD:A, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on it. Stay tuned for more info!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

July is almost over, and we’re ready to share all the work we’ve been slaying since we last spoke! There’s a ton of information to go over since our last update for the work that we’ve been churning away for Dungeon Defenders: Awakened and Dungeon Defenders II. Note - the Dungeon Defenders II info is all the way at the bottom if you want to jump to it first. Anyway - let’s get right into it!

June Recap

Last month we had a lot of really great things to share, concept art, goblin animations, beautiful maps, and a look into where each of our Chromatic departments were on the DD:A. We’ll be following the same format, but to pour through the June Update (in case you haven’t, which you most definitely should!), click here for more info.

As for June, it was really important for us to get a build put together with our awesome partners at Nintendo. We put in the time and got a really awesome build running on the Nintendo Switch! It brought some very pleasant surprises for us: the performance was good without applying optimizations, the controls felt great on gamepad, and most importantly — it was really freaking fun! For a lot of us here, it was a real moment where a lot of our work came together, something that has only bolstered our spirits.

Onto July!

There’s a ton that has gone on for July, and we still have a few days to knock out some really awesome work! We’re working with a lot of partners, doing a ton of feature work, fleshing out some story telling, and making (as always) really beautiful art. Should we break those things down into their own section for easy readability? We think so, LET THE GREAT SECTIONING BEGIN!

A Ship Full of Partners… Partnership?

We’re making sure that all of our partners are taken care of so that gamers far and wide have the opportunity to know the greatness that is DD:A, recruiting them to become glorious Defenders! We’ve been securing ways to show off to the world how awesome DD:A is, you might even see a trailer revealed towards the end of August…

Engineering Magic

There’s been rumors around the studio that our engineers have been tampering with black magic. It’s really the only explanation as to how they are getting such amazing work out. There’s been a weekly sacrifice of barbecue, though that might just be lunch. “Stop talking about barbecue, you’re making me hungry, and talk about that work” you’re probably thinking. All right, let’s do that!

Enemy AI

Something design and engineering have given a lot of careful attention is giving the best experience fighting off waves and waves of the Old Ones’ army. AI (artificial intelligence) is crucial to really selling the fantasy of combating thousands and thousands of the enemies coming your way. Unreal Engine 4 (UE4) has made this so easy to setup and create the experience we want. Another one of our big focuses is making sure we don’t make them TOO smart. We’ve watched enough Terminator, we know the dangers.

Button Mashing

We want to make sure that tirelessly pounding buttons on your respective controllers feels good and natural, so you’re not worrying about controls while defending Etheria. Based off internal feedback we received from our last update, controls are only feeling better and better. Getting around the maps, building defenses, and using abilities to fight enemies will help make DD:A be the perfect way to experience DD:A with some awesome couch co-op!

Splitting Pixels

For all platforms, we’re wanting to have a great split screen experience. When it comes to building out DD:A performance-wise, we focus on split screen Nintendo as the bottom line to hit, and then scale it up from there. This means being very smart about how things are displayed when playing with 1, 2, 3, or 4 players! Four player split screen on Switch already feels nice, giving us very promising results without even applying our optimizations to the maps and how players see enemies from afar. Seriously, it’s going to be awesome playing this arm and arm with your “defrienders” on the couch! That pun was a bit much, we apologize, but it had to be made.

Art of Warfare

There’s a lot of content that we’re currently constructing with digital pens flourishing, mouses clicking, and frames being keyed for animation. While we got our trailers working, we didn’t want to give away too much of what’s coming up, but we know you need something… Hmmm.. Hrmmm… *shuffling folders and files* A-HA! Squire towers are the answer! This is just a taste of what you can expect from towers in DD:A.

The Bowling Ball Tower

This tower is a staple in Dungeon Defenders, and we’ve been having a lot of fun with it in DD:A, with cannonball bouncing everywhere (it was pretty OP before our first pass). This tower looks amazing in our internal builds, but here’s a sneak peek

The Ballista

Complete with concept artist notes, this bad boy can slay over 33 GPS (goblins per second). We showed a bit of our tech off in our Kickstarter trailer regarding this turret, where it carries and pins some of the enemies it hits to wall. It’s ruthless!

The Spiked Blockade

This is one beefy blockade! Metal, wood, spikes, gems, it’ll be surprising for enemies to take this thing down as they’ll be in awe at looking at the masterful craftsmanship this tower exuberates!

The Slice N’ Dice Tower

Don’t let it’s idle state fool you, not being careful around this tower leave more than just paper cuts, you might need to be glued back together! It gets hit, it spins. It gets hit more, it spins faster. You get it.

The Bouncer Blockade

It just looks like something you don’t want to touch. If it had a spirit animal, it’d be a porcupine. You get too close to it, it shoots out it’s spikes at about 1750.6 EYPS (Etherian Yalms Per Second), knocking back some of the strongest foes you’ll fight. We thought about calling it the “ouch spikey stabby tower”, but it just didn’t flow very well.

In-game they look and feel amazing to use. There are more that we’re going to keep throwing your way, so get hyped!

Designing Defenders

Designing games is super easy, especially something as simple as Dungeon Defenders, a Cooperative Action Roleplaying Tower Defense (not a mouthful at all). Oh wait, it’s exactly the opposite (take that, idea guys)! Our designers might be using some of that black magic the engineers are conjuring, because they are making great strides through what would seem impossible. Let’s start talking about the walk design’s been walkin’!

Inspector of Defenses

One thing that was a big improvement was tower inspection in Dungeon Defenders II. It provided a lot of valuable insights and experience (alongside a ton of feedback) to really make defense inspection in DD:A the next step in a super useful feature. On a per tower basis, you will be provided the most important information first. You’ll see the stats that matter for your towers, as well as what the towers area of influence is, making it easier to create perfect builds to efficiently cover and fend off the hordes that await you.

QOL (Quoogle Oogle Loogle?)

There’s a ton of Quality of Life coming with DD:A, and we’ve got an update on the work we’ve done so far. As for quoogle oogle loogle, we’re not sure how that affects the game, probably not at all… Probably?

Lane Wisps

This is something that really helped new Defenders in Dungeon Defenders II. It really helps give an understanding of where threats are on a map, something very important on a first, second, and third visit to any given map. Lane wisps, for the uninitiated, show the paths that enemies are going to be taking as they spawn and march towards your core (why are they doing that in DD:A anyways?). However, we’re very aware of the thoughts on this feature (*cough* feedback *cough*), so we’re currently looking at ways to make this dependent on the difficulty. 

Replay From Wave

An amazing feature to get through some of the most challenging content in Dungeon Defenders II, Replay From Wave allows you to learn from your mistakes, and not lose all the sweet progression made while taking on some of the toughest enemies. This feature gives you another chance at losing a wave, like winding time back a wave, and understanding where things may have gone wrong, helping learn as you progress. As for where it’s usable, we’re still mulling over, but it is part of an awesome feature you’ll see in DD:A.

Ping System

Sometimes typing in chat, in the heat of battle, is not the best way to communicate. Our focus is to have an easy to use ping system that let’s your fellow Defenders know where enemies need to be slayed, towers need to be built, or areas with too much danger. Your teammates can’t hear your screams for help, so this helps soothe those vocal cords.

Gear of War

Gear is probably the lowest priority in DD:A. Of course it’s not! With all of the different stats in Dungeon Defenders, it can be hard to gain a good understanding of what each stat does, what’s best for you, and what challenge your ready to take on. It’s very important for us to make sure that gear is easy to understand, feels good to get, and allows you to know what challenges your equipped for. Our designers are up for the challenge, and they’ve got the tools to take it on!

Inventory (How Are My Bags Full?!)

Making gear better to understand is one piece of a big puzzle. Inventory is another very large piece of that puzzle. Dungeon Defenders had an inventory system that could definitely use some improvements. DD2 made some improvements to that system, but there were some things that were lacking. Inventory in DD:A is setup to cover those gaps and more. We’ve poured through feedback to make sure it was easy to manage the items in your inventory, locking items, selling items, sorting items based on their type and stats that are important to you. Some things, less is more, but in regards to inventory tools, more is more!

Dungeon Defenders II Update!

We’re currently working on a DD2 update that is coming in August. We’ve had multiple weeks of playtesting with our RQA and RPG groups (shout out to all the hard work you fine people have put in) to help sculpt this content into a great experience. We’re preparing a challenge for tested Defenders, setup to be a blast and give awesome rewards. There’s still some things these testers haven’t seen yet, so there’s going to be nice surprises for everyone! Also our small studio is working on TWO games at once… it’s pretty insane how pizza fuels such amazing work.

Recently we sent out rewards for DD2 that our Kickstarter backers should have received (Corrupted Gunwitch, Golden Costumes, and Crystalline Costumes). If you haven’t received them, please reach out to preorder@chromatic.games (make sure you know what you’re supposed to get at the tier you backed).

What’s Next?

We’re thinking that another update should come in August. What do you think? Well TOO BAD, we’re going to do one regardless of what you think! It’s been an absolute blast to work on DD:A and DD2, and we can’t wait to show all of you more. A very hearty thank you for your support, there’s only more and more coming your way!

For August, internally we’ve got a build milestone that sets us up for success. Maybe more polished gameplay can be shown afterwards… maybe! Taking the systems we’ve setup so far, and giving them a nice layer of polish so that we can continue to create an awesome experience for new and veteran Defenders.

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games
 

DEFENDERS

It’s finally time for a Dungeon Defenders: Awakened Developer Check-In! We have a ton of information to share today that covers our post-Kickstarter work, studio changes/improvements, and Dungeon Defenders: Awakened as a whole. Let’s go ahead and start getting into it!

Enter Chromatic

First things first, we want to apologize for a couple of bumps that we ran into. The first thing is something we’ve covered quite a bit, that something being Kickstarter shipping for our approved regions. We’re not going to dig into it more (the conversation can be seen here), but understand that it is not something we will have happen again with any future projects in regards to fulfillment. It was our first foray into this area, and we learned quite a lot.

Second is that we have been silent for a little over a month. We want to have more regular check-ins with where our progress is, show off some of the new art (something we just started this week on social media), and more info to share on our plans. As for the why, it’s all based on growing the team out, foundational setup, and working with outside partners.

Dev Level Up!

As a studio, we’ve been incredibly busy with getting our team bolstered by additional teammates to really make Dungeon Defenders: Awakened an amazing game, and also set us up for success on any additional projects. A good portion of the team was involved in tons of interviews and tests to make sure that we only brought on high quality LEGENDARY additions to our ranks. We’re still growing the team out more, but we’re a developer power house with the people we’ve brought on!

Hardware Upgrade!

We’re wanting to make sure that we’re employee-owned while also making sure we have all the tools necessary to create awesome games. We’ve been working with partners like nVidia to bring some awesome graphical opportunities, Azure PlayFab to bring out awesome features (like Cross Saves!), Nintendo to provide an optimal experience on Switch, and so many more! We’re wanting to blow it out of the water with Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, so that we can then knock it out of this world with future titles. And so far — it looks really, really good!

Art — What Is It Good For?

Absolutely everything. What would an update be without some awesome art to show off! Heroes, enemies, and Maps, are some of the many amazing creations that we’ll be including in this and future updates.

Character Updates!

As we showed on social media this week, we have revealed the concepts for our four main heroes, which you can see the Apprentice, Monk, Squire, and Huntress below:

We’re going to be revealing enemy concepts as we’re working on finishing the Heroes animations, but we wanted to show off the new Goblin model for the first time here, which has been fully animated! This is the awesome quality that our animation team has put out, with so much more coming:

Excited to destroy some cores!


What they lack in finesse, they make up for in ferocity


It’s electrifying!

Oh no, he was poisoned!

Even goblins know, if you’re on fire: STOP, DROP, and ROLL!

Death came to take him, all things go, all things go

There’s a lot of models we’re currently working on/with, but for a SNEAK PEEK, we wanted to show a model we’re currently animating. Striking fear in many, check out the WIP (that’s just a quick way to say Work-In-Progress, which with this explanation, maybe it would have just been easier to say that in the first place, but we’re committed already, and don’t have a backspace) Dark Elf Warrior:

All of these new hero and enemy models are going to also be receiving some epic animations and VFX to really bring Dungeon Defenders to modern standards. We can’t wait to share more, so we won’t — Next up, MAPS!

Maps, Maps, Maps!

Many of you have seen the Deeper Well map showcased in our Kickstarter and during our dev stream. Well get ready for MORE Deeper Well. Or maybe we’ll show some different maps? Actually, that sounds like a much better idea. We’re not going to be showing the entire maps just quite yet, but here’s the kind of diversity and quality you can expect:

Oh the places you’ll go! Dungeon Defenders: Awakened is going to have a lot of familiar locations, including a lot of fan favorites, but also new places in Etheria that you’ve never seen before!

Design — The Blueprints of DD:A

Creating Dungeon Defenders: Awakened has been a very enjoyable experience, but not an easy one! Really digging into the original Dungeon Defenders and emulating what made it fun is a noble quest, but not a very easy one. Our designers have been working hard to breakdown Dungeon Defenders into formulas and building blocks, so that we can build a skyscraper of awesomeness!

The overall goal is to recreate that Dungeon Defenders feeling, while giving it the same treatment we’re giving art — bring it to modern standards. Let’s get into some of the things we’re doing.

Hero Swapping

This has been a hot topic between many Defenders, and we’re ready to share what we’re doing. Hero swapping was something introduced in Dungeon Defenders II that affected the gameplay greatly. It helped streamline gameplay, and while we love it, we also understand it’s not necessarily the best thing to be able to do all the time if we’re wanting to go back to our roots.

In Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, you WILL be able to swap between four of your pre-assigned heroes on the fly ONLY during the Build Phase. You’ll still be able to access your other heroes in traditional methods (only during Build Phase as well). We wanted to bring back some of the strategy when it came to swapping heroes, especially with the challenge that later difficulties bring with timers. These timers will be adjusted to ensure that difficulty is still there and that strategy is rewarded!

Camera Improvements

We’re going to be bringing plenty of camera options in Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. One of those features is something that Defenders of old and new will enjoy: Perspective Swapping. In Dungeon Defenders, the camera was placed top down when placing towers, which gave a good perspective of how close you could get your towers placed. In Dungeon Defenders II, this view was traded for an over the shoulder view to see where the actual effect of longer range towers would be.

In Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, when you are placing a tower, you will be able to toggle between BOTH of these modes. You’ll be able to select a default mode within the options, but with this addition you now have an even better understanding of placement and efficacy than ever before!

New Abilities

We’re not looking to overhaul our heroes entirely, but we did want to give attention to some weaker abilities, or some that just are overall not enjoyed. We’re adding some cool functionality to some of these abilities, but we’re also adding a new ability: Elvish Agility.

Elvish Agility is a new ability for the Huntress that increases movement speed, jump height, reload speed, and rate of fire. The Huntress is an agile ranged fighter and we wanted an ability that reflected that. We polled hundreds of our users, and the least liked ability (it wasn’t even close) was Invisibility, something very few used, and that there were very few situations to justify using it. Our goal was then to bring an ability that felt great to use for Defenders who wanted to use her. The internal tests with this ability have been a ton of fun and really give that feeling of hunting down your enemies with agility and efficiency!

HUD

One of the weakest points in the Dungeon Defenders franchise has always been UIs. In UE4, we are given a lot of options to setup a UI the way we want, which is why when we grew the team out, we made sure to bring on a UI/UX expert to make an awesome experience. We’re making a sleek, modern HUD, arted up with that Dungeon Defenders charm. We’re making sure that the HUD looks amazing from every way you’d play — from on-the-go with the Nintendo Switch, at your desk on a PC, or on the couch playing split-screen with up to four players.

Everything currently icon and text-wise is placeholder until we take our art pass over it, but so far it’s been performing really well, and has been a ton of fun to use on internal play. Without showing TOO much WIP, here’s a picture of our build so far:

Oh also, it’s our first picture of the game running on Switch! This isn’t the final HUD at all, and we don’t think the stats in the middle of the screen are going to be covering gameplay. Probably not. Probably. (spoiler alert: it won’t, we’re just being a little cheeky :> )

Engineering

There has been a HUGE amount of work of getting just the base functions of Dungeon Defenders into Unreal Engine 4. The Engineering Team has been making some amazing strides helping to capture the feel of the original so that the rest of the team can build upon their incredibly sturdy and efficient codebase foundation. They’re the binary heart of bringing some amazing features to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened!

They’re currently working on making multiplayer and split screen work as best as possible, making sure we squeeze out as much performance as possible. They’ve made great strides, to where our performance on the Switch, with multiplayer, has been surprisingly very good right off the bat. It’s because they’re wizards.

Another feature they’re working on currently is Cross Save functionality. Making it so that you can use saves between platforms is no simple feat, but our engineers are legendary, so they’ll make it happen! Lastly, they had a secret message they wanted to pass on:

01010000 01110010 01101111 01100111 01110010 01100001 01101101 01101101 01101001 01101110 01100111

What’s Next?

Our goal is to do monthly check-ins to show off our work and progress, similar to what we’ve done here. There’s a ton still left to do, but we’re getting through things at breakneck speeds! We’re also currently working on additional end-game content for Dungeon Defenders II. As a studio, it’s our goal to make incredibly fun games that you want to play. Thank you for your support so far, we have a lot more to come!

In regards to Kickstarter Digital Rewards, we’re continuing to get the Dungeon Defenders 2012 Complete Collection codes out to backers who purchased the appropriate tiers that included them. Our next step is to get the Dungeon Defenders II costumes (Gold, Crystalline, and Corrupted Gunwitch) out in our next patch. This patch is currently planned to come out next week with those costumes included. After the patch is out on all platforms, we will begin getting codes sent out!

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team

DEFENDERS!

With our Kickstarter now over, we wanted to make sure that we provided a way for people who were unable to back, or unaware of the Kickstarter, to get in on early savings and some sweet swag!

Click here to check out the Pre-order Store, and get in while the gettin's good. One of the most awesome advantages is the LIMITED Awakened bundle that includes:

• Beta Access
• Dungeon Defenders 2012 Collection
• Dungeon Defenders: Awakened
• Digital Soundtrack
• Digital Strategy Guide
• Digital Artbook

You can also get some cool swag, like a Dungeon Defenders: Awakened T-Shirt or Dungeon Defenders: Awakened Joy-con Vinyl Covers! All purchases go towards supporting the development of Dungeon Defenders: Awakened, helping us ensure we put out the best product possible. <3 

SOCIAL DEFENDERS
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Discord
• Twitch

For Etheria!

Chromatic Games

DEFENDERS!

The Defender-Centric Update is now live on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One! This update contains a whole lot of love to a lot of foundational systems within Dungeon Defenders II. These changes are based off of feedback many of you have provided, and as Chromatic, we wanted to really give our GLORIOUS Defenders something that demonstrated how much we value our community. Without further ado, let's get into it!

SHARD SHOP

Shards are such an integral part to Dungeon Defenders II when it comes to empowering your heroes with great strength to take out the waves of enemies constantly thrown at you. Currently there is a lot of RNG regarding which shards you get, and to help cut down the randomness, farming lower tiered content is the easiest way to go.

We don’t want that. We want you playing content you find engaging, while being able to acquire the Shards you want. With this update, you can! We're adding in the Shard Shop, a service that the Gran Ma'ster now offers. Visiting her allows you to purchase Shards directly from her, from Campaign to Chaos VII. There is also search functionality so you can search for the Shard you want and cut down the hunt!

CHAOS VIII SHARDS

Chaos VIII Shards are a new tier of shard, that some of you may have snagged before. We went through and found a way to make these shards feel like a good reward for climbing higher Onslaught, and have them compete with similar Shards. You can get them after a certain point in Onslaught, similar to when you start receiving Chaos VIII Ampoules.

MATERIAL CONVERSION

We want players enjoying Ancient Power as much as they can, and our big goal was making sure that Defenders could play content they found engaging, while working towards a specific goal. Enter Material Conversion. Material Conversion allows you to take a Pristine quality material and convert it to the same type of material of a lower quality. This makes it so that if you are climbing Onslaught, or playing higher Chaos, you're always gaining usable materials to acquire Ancient Power.

That's not all though! As you play Chaos VII and above, you can take your Chaos VII Ampoules and convert them into CHAOS VIII AMPOULES! We want players upgrading and getting Chaos VIII gear, so this is a step towards making that process feel good and not entirely beholden to RNG. We’ll be using this as a basis for any additional changes/additions made to Ancient Power.

NEW WEAPONS

One thing that we love is the ability to customize the heroes in Dungeon Defenders II. Weapons are part of the epic-ness (or silliness) that can really show off your own personal taste. This update provides over 30 NEW Weapons that are currently unobtainable. These weapons are gained by climbing through different tiers of Onslaught. The higher you go, the more epic the weapons become! These weapons scale upon opening the gifts to your progression (to a cap, like Chaos VII items). There's a ton to hunt down, and if you happen to get the same weapon repeatedly, no worries — you can trade it to your friends!

NEW ELEMENTAL DAMAGE — POISON!
Poison Mods in the form of Chips are coming with this update. This Mod can be find in Lost Temple for now. Poison can be applied to weapons to give them an additional damage over time effect. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! If earth damage is dealt to a poisoned enemy, they now become PETRIFIED, freezing them in place, turning them to stone, and causing their fellow enemies to attack them!

NEW USER EXPERIENCE
We understand that a lot of Defenders that come to Dungeon Defenders II want to start the game off with their friends. This update includes the ability to complete the New User Experience (the first three tutorial levels) with friends. The flow has also been adjusted so that new Defenders get to town faster and instead of having to complete the tutorial maps first.

BALANCE CHANGES

Heroes

Adept

• Towers
  • Hailstorm Tower
    • Increased damage scaling to 4.7 from 4.5 (5% BUFF)
• Abilities
  • Arc Lightning
    • Increased scaling to 42 from 40 (5% BUFF)

Gunwitch

• Abilities
  • Two at Twice the Price
    • Increased scaling to 5.5 from 5 (10% BUFF)
  • Broomvault
    • Increased scaling to 37 from 35 (6% BUFF)
  • Broom Swarm
    • Increased scaling to 12 from 10 (15% BUFF)

Huntress

• Towers
  • Poison Dart Tower
    • Now deals Poison damage by default. This provides the same rules as other elemental damage towers, where Mods cannot apply a second form of elemental damage, but Shards can.

Initiate

• Abilities
  • Draining Strike
    • Increased scaling to 27 from 25 (8% BUFF)

Lavamancer

• Towers
  • Maw of the Earth Drake
    • Defense Unit cost reduced to 40 from 50 (20% BUFF)
    • Defense Health Scaling reduced from 225 to 175
  • Fissure of Embermount
    • Increased scaling to 2.2 from 2.0 (10% BUFF)
  • Oil Geyser
    • Health scaling increased to 0.2 from 0.1 (50% BUFF)
  • Volcano
    • Increased damage scaling to 9.51 from 9.31 (3% BUFF)
    • Increased range scaling to 1.5555 from 1.3334 (15% BUFF)
• Abilities
  • Eruption
    • Increased Tower Defense Power scaling to 1.3 from 1.2 (8% BUFF)

Mystic

• Towers
  • Sand Viper
    • Increased damage scaling to 6.975 from 6.875 (2% BUFF)
  • Snaking Sands
    • Increased range scaling to 0.1534 from 0.1334 (15% BUFF)

Shards

Abyss Lord

• Power of the Knight (Gloves)
  • Increased damage boost scaling to 5 from 3 per level (66% BUFF)

Dryad

• World Tree McBufferson (Relic)
  • Increased shield bonus to 15 from 10 per level (50% BUFF)

Gunwitch

• Broomnado Power (Boots)
  • Increased damage scaling to 3.5 from 3.0 (17% BUFF)
• Scatter Power (Chest)
  • Increased damage scaling from 3.5 to 3.0 (17% BUFF)
• Snipe Critical Strike (Weapon)
  • Increased Critical Chance to 3 from 2 per level (50% BUFF)

Lavamancer

• Crumbling Stone (Relic)
  • Increased damage multiplier to 1.5 from 1.0 per level (50% BUFF)
• Shattering Stones (Boots)
  • Increased detonation damage to 45 from 40 per level (13% BUFF)
• Volcanic Might (Relic)
  • Increased stun chance to 2% from 1.5% per level (33% BUFF)
• Volcano Mega Rock (Relic)
  • Increase Defense Power scaling to 200 from 150 per level (33% BUFF)

Mystic

• Lashing Power (Chest)
  • Increased damage to 3.5 from 3.0 per level (17% BUFF)
• Split Vipers (Relic)
  • No longer removes ramp up damage (BUFF)
• Debilitating Madness (Gloves)
  • Increased damage amplification to 3.5 from 3.0 (17% BUFF)

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue with Pristine Motes not dropping correctly from Victory Chests (now drops a stack of five).
• Fixed an issue with Shattequake triggering Mod effects based off the heroes equipped weapon.
• Fixed an issue with poison sometimes not applying towards the Controller Burn mutator.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed users to generate infinite mana with the Dryad.
• Adjusted error messaging when players were pushed to the main menu from the tutorial maps.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed users to generate unlimited defense mana.
• Fixed an issue that allowed defense effects to stay after being sold.
• Adjusted the messaging from the second tutorial map.
• Adjusted messaging that indicated a map had not been unlocked yet.
• Fixed an issue that allowed players to get infinite help.

KNOWN ISSUES

• Shattering Stones, Explosive Poison, Snake Bomb, and Explosive Finale shards are not working correctly.
• Crafting Materials are currently not tradeable.
• Poison damage is not procc'ing correctly on Target Dummies.
• The Wayfarer is still in his winter clothes, we’ll get him a new pair of clothes in our next patch/hotfix.
• Poison Dart Tower does not have an attunement icon.

SOCIAL DEFENDERS
To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Discord
• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team

DEFENDERS!

Our next update, the Defender-Centric Update, is upon us! This update contains a whole lot of love to a lot of foundational systems within Dungeon Defenders II. These changes are based off of feedback many of you have provided, and as Chromatic, we wanted to really give our GLORIOUS Defenders something that demonstrated how much we value our community. Without further ado, let's get into it!

SHARD SHOP

Shards are such an integral part to Dungeon Defenders II when it comes to empowering your heroes with great strength to take out the waves of enemies constantly thrown at you. Currently there is a lot of RNG regarding which shards you get, and to help cut down the randomness, farming lower tiered content is the easiest way to go.

We don’t want that. We want you playing content you find engaging, while being able to acquire the Shards you want. With this update, you can! We're adding in the Shard Shop, a service that the Gran Ma'ster now offers. Visiting her allows you to purchase Shards directly from her, from Campaign to Chaos VII. There is also search functionality so you can search for the Shard you want and cut down the hunt!

CHAOS VIII SHARDS

Chaos VIII Shards are a new tier of shard, that some of you may have snagged before. We went through and found a way to make these shards feel like a good reward for climbing higher Onslaught, and have them compete with similar Shards. You can get them after a certain point in Onslaught, similar to when you start receiving Chaos VIII Ampoules.

MATERIAL CONVERSION

We want players enjoying Ancient Power as much as they can, and our big goal was making sure that Defenders could play content they found engaging, while working towards a specific goal. Enter Material Conversion. Material Conversion allows you to take a Pristine quality material and convert it to the same type of material of a lower quality. This makes it so that if you are climbing Onslaught, or playing higher Chaos, you're always gaining usable materials to acquire Ancient Power.

That's not all though! As you play Chaos VII and above, you can take your Chaos VII Ampoules and convert them into CHAOS VIII AMPOULES! We want players upgrading and getting Chaos VIII gear, so this is a step towards making that process feel good and not entirely beholden to RNG.

NEW WEAPONS

One thing that we love is the ability to customize the heroes in Dungeon Defenders II. Weapons are part of the epic-ness (or silliness) that can really show off your own personal taste. This update provides over 30 NEW Weapons that are currently unobtainable. These weapons are gained by climbing through different tiers of Onslaught. The higher you go, the more epic the weapons become! There's a ton to hunt down, and if you happen to get the same weapon repeatedly, no worries — you can trade it to your friends!

NEW ELEMENTAL DAMAGE — POISON!

Poison Mods in the form of Chips are coming with this update. Poison can be applied to weapons to give them an additional damage over time effect. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! If earth damage is dealt to a poisoned enemy, they now become PETRIFIED, freezing them in place, turning them to stone, and causing their fellow enemies to attack them

SOCIAL DEFENDERS

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team

DEFENDERS!

Today we announced yesterday that tomorrow we want to pivot our goals with any future games within our studio. There’s a lot to talk about, so for now we’ll just go over the big bullet points, because who even reads these things? The text is all bold because everything is important. Our artists are too busy, so we're going to draw these things for you in MS Paint to the best of our ability, which are the peak of art. Let’s smash that like and subscribe button:

• After our Kickstarter succeeds, we will be launching a second Kickstarter for a new Dungeon Defenders dating simulator. It is currently known as Project: Smooches, it is 9 years into development, and all the characters are mo-capped (motion captured) by Steve Buscemi in a fat suit (a true professional).
  

• New company mascots, the Chromie Bois. We got all three of the good ones:
  

• Our current Kickstarter has received so much support so quickly in such a short amount of time. We want to reward our players with an accelerated experience. Instead of our next project being Dungeon Defenders III, we’re going to blow away YOUR expectations by making the next installment in the Dungeon Defenders series being Dungeon Defenders VII. Here is an illustration of our new and main hero of DD7, Nimbus Conflict:
  
  You already love him!

• We realize that being Chromatic Games, some people have a hard time reading our text and logo. We’ll be creating a more colorblind friendly sister studio, Monochromatic Games, with the logo being specifically black and white.

• To provide the best Dungeon Defenders experience, we are now working on the Chromatic Launcher. This will have all your favorite Dungeon Defenders games in one place. No more pesky Steam, Epic, Uplay, Origin, MyGames, or any other launchers, you just have to use ours. Surely you don’t play other games, ours are the only ones to play.This is only available on your phone. Do you guys not have phones? We’ve got you covered.

• cPhone One. How’s it said? Don’t worry about it. Buy the phone and use the launcher.

• Everyone in the studio is going to legally change their last name based on the survey results taken at the beginning of this post.

• Gator sword.

• We’re looking to hire about 30 voice actors with no experience that can help us recreate every episode of Seinfeld in a special Dungeon Defenders VII map called “Jerry’s Apartment”. Here's the concept probably:
  

• Oh cool, a gun with legs. Too bad we have a fire-breathing muscle gun. (final concept art):
  

• Smell-o-vision update coming to all products once Oculus releases their new N-VR (nasal virtual reality).

• The Apex Legends pinging system, that’s pretty cool.

• No silly April Fool’s day posts.

There’s a lot that we’re hard at work on and are really trying to churn out to provide the best experience possible. We want you to join us on our journey and hopefully make the best Project: Smooches errrr Dungeon Defenders game possible. Follow us on our social platforms, you know the ones.

To make all of this potentially but probably not possible, but to make Dungeon Defenders: Awakened the best experience possible, check out our Kickstarter by clicking this whole paragraph. There’s less than two days left. Also there’s a secret link somewhere in this text.

Smooches,

Chromatic and Monochromatic Games

Defenders!

I can’t believe we’ve reached $350,000 and that we’re still climbing!  We’re super grateful for all the support we’ve received so far, and we can’t wait to keep building this game.  

This is the last chance for everyone to back the Kickstarter so I just wanted to remind people what the perks are so you can spread the word! 

Being a Kickstarter backer comes with a lot of exclusive perks, but all our Backers get access to additional add-on products after the campaign ends on BackerKit.  That means that if you’re a Backer, you can purchase additional T-Shirts, postcards, copies of the game, and more for the lowest price.

Now I want to talk about the game!

As you may have noticed, we’ve hit several of our FLEX goals and I hope we hit more!  So I wanted to briefly talk about the ones we have hit, and even some that we haven’t yet.

Localization Support

This one is pretty simple, we want to offer the game in more languages, so we’re going to offer it in more languages!  Huzzah!

New Challenge Maps

Challenges are coming back!  In DD1 we called them Challenges, in DD2 they were Incursions, but in DDA they’ll be pure awesome.  We’ll be bringing back some of the classic Challenge Maps, but this stretch goal is even more!  With some of the new content that’s going to be in DDA, these will be accompanying custom Challenge Map versions with their own sets of rewards.  We plan to have sick loot that comes from conquering these, so get your Stashes ready!

For this next one, I’m going to let our Lead Designer, Mark Telfer talk a bit about “Massacre” Difficulty.

Massacre Difficulty

Hey Defenders!

We just blew past another flex goal, and that means even more opportunities for us to create new and exciting content.  Being the masochists that you are, you’ve decided to bring Massacre Difficulty into this world.  Allow me to titillate your masochism with the doom you’ve brought upon yourselves.  Massacre will be an intense challenge that will test the formidability of even the most seasoned defenders.  This isn’t just going to be the same enemy schedules with some stat buffs slapped on.  The enemies you’re going to face present brand new challenges that require some serious strategy and legendary skill.  You thought Nightmare was hard?  Pfft… Good luck!

GLHF,
Mark Telfer
Lead Designer

New Enemy and Map

This is an additional enemy and map threat that will be presented after the end of the campaign and at the end of the current progression.  This will be one of the new hardest maps to beat, and a challenging enemy threat to accompany it.

Customizable Tavern

I want to clear things up that we still plan to have similar levels of tavern customization to DD1 in DDA.  This stretch goal was to have even more control over where your trophies go, adding decorations, and really having additional customization options within your personal tavern.  This stretch goal was for the extra of the EXTRA!  Let’s HIT IT!

Bonus Boss Fights

We have a lot of awesome boss fights that we want to add into DD:A and you’ll be getting some of them with the base product, we just wanted to add more!  This goal was for that!  We still might add more as we continue to develop DLC’s or patches and content, but this was to get more at launch.

I hope that helps give a little more context about the FLEX goals we’re trying to hit, and some more details about the game we’re trying to build.

Let’s close out this Kickstarter with a BANG and get every awesome bit of content and features into Dungeon Defenders: Awakened!

Thanks again for your support, from all of us at Chromatic Games.

Colin “Elandrian” Fisher
Creative Director
 

Greetings Defenders,

We’re getting closer and closer to the next Dungeon Defenders II update! Our focus is on taking big strides to make this update as player-centric as possible, with even more player-centric changes coming out in future updates. Currently we’re working on Dungeon Defenders II and Dungeon Defenders: Awakened (check out the Kickstarter here), so we’ve been super busy and working at 385% (real metric). We have a lot to go, and this intro is long enough, so let’s get into it!

Shard Vendor

We’ve seen so much feedback on Shards for so long, and we’re able to now do something that makes it easier to receive them and farm for them however you want. Our primary goal was trying to get the vendor into an easily navigable menu while easily seeing as many shards as possible. Here’s what you can expect to see:

We went through a lot of ways to figure out how to make them easy to get. We looked into shard dust, but then you’re still limited to farming a specific chaos tier to actually be able to earn a specific shard. We looked into ways of converting shard dust into different versions, but the ability to make that easy to do was very messy and hard to use (very frustrating), created a ton of technical difficulties for us, and ended up requiring more inventory management. Eventually we ended up landing on making them purchasable with Defender Medals. We currently have an RPG test going (contact dani.moore@chromatic.games if you want to join the test, are 18 or older, and can sign an NDA) testing this specific feature, but we do not have a specific price set yet. Going with Defender Medals allowed us a way to provide players a concrete way to earn them in multiple ways. If you want to farm a specific tier, you can still do that to maybe increase your chances a little more; but if you want to keep progressing while playing engaging content or just do dailies, you are now able to do those things while working towards a specific reward.

Oh, and one last thing. This badboy has search functionality in it as well. It’s pretty dope.

Chaos VIII Shards

We’re bringing back Chaos VIII Shards. These are a slew of shards that will be obtainable through higher floors of Onslaught (similar to Chaos VIII Ampuoles). Because we want these shards to feel special and rewarding, they will not be purchasable with the launch of the Shard Vendor, but will be making a debut at a later date. We have some veteran Defenders who have held onto these for a long time, and the majority of these Shards are going to be re-enabled. There are two Shards that we are removing as they cause either tech issues (making mobs get stuck, lowering performance, etc). They are Harbinger’s Exile and Elemental Chaos. We’ll have a comprehensive list of these Shards with the update notes.

New Mod — Poison Mod!

We’re keeping good to our word and adding in Poison damage! There are certain towers that have Poison damage, and there is a Poison Damage Chip as well that can be applied to weapons. There may be a new weapon or two that comes with it by default…

Also what would elemental damage be without any kind of combo? We’re currently adding our first Poison interaction. This one is pretty awesome. Combining poisoned enemies with earth damage now petrifies them. It’s like turning your enemies into a work of art.

New Weapons

We’re adding a slew of new weapons that you can earn while playing through Onslaught. At various tiers within Onslaught, you have a chance to receive an additional treasure that contains a random new weapon from that tier. Some of these weapons a few Defenders have seen before, but we’ve got a ton of new weapons that players have never seen, here’s one:

There’s a lot more info on these drops and when you get them (you do get guaranteed drops), but we’ll have more information on these new weapons in our update notes.

Campaign Gating

Currently we’re working on changing up some of our campaign progression. This is to focus on letting Defenders play together as soon as possible. Our focus is to make this process feel as good as it can be. With what we’re able to do here, this could affect different areas in the game for future updates.

More!

There’s more coming as well, but this is a sneak peek, so we can’t talk about everything. We’ve been hard at work, so give us a little longer and we’ll get a quality update for you, our GLORIOUS Defenders!

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team

From: Colin “Elandrian” Fisher, Creative Director

What’s up, Defenders!  Welcome to our first post as Chromatic Games!  If you’re new to the community, an extra helping of “welcome” is in store for you.  If you’re a veteran Defender, then welcome back. Let’s get right to it!

It’s been a wild ride these past couple months, but the cat’s out of the bag now!  There’s been a lot of news about our rebranding, new Kickstarter campaign, and what all of it means for you as a player.  I want to just take a brief moment to provide a little extra context about what’s going on. We’re #indieAF now, so it’s time to get the info straight from the horse’s mouth!  (Or maybe it’s beans time? Company beans? Who knows. Let’s do this.)

So What Happened To Trendy Entertainment?
For the more official take, you can check out the press release here.

For the realest take, keep reading!

In December of this past year, Augi Lye, one of the original founders of Trendy, came back as CEO to help return Trendy to its indie roots.  

The development team and I worked with him to figure out how we can have a good plan to move forward and start creating Dungeon Defenders games in the way they were meant to be made: for our players.  One of the things we wanted to make clear was that Trendy was no longer really Trendy.  There’s brand-new leadership, a new creative direction, and new energy at the studio that was just waiting to be released.  So we decided that we’re not really Trendy anymore.

Chromatic Games is our final form.  We’re over power level 9000 now, and we’re ready to rock.

We’re not answering to external people anymore.  We’re in control of our own destiny. We were able to keep the majority of the development team around, but we had some people move on to newer pastures. We’re so grateful for their years of service.  We love and respect all of our previous Trendy family, but now the Chromatic team is focused on the future — and that future is to keep improving DD2 and crafting Dungeon Defenders: Awakened.

What Does This Mean For Dungeon Defenders II?
Dungeon Defenders II will keep going!  Development is going to slow down, but we still plan on maintaining limited updates and content.  What do I mean by limited updates? We’re going to be focused on smaller quality of life updates, bug fixes, improvements and some occasional new cosmetics.  When I say smaller QoL, I mean in the development time aspect — we still plan on our quality of life features to be super impactful for players.  

We’re going to be releasing an update soon on all platforms that will have a vendor where you can get the Shards you’ve been looking for or looking to gild — a highly requested player feature!

There’s some extra morsels of dopeness in that update as well.  Most of the changes are gameplay related. We’re trying to make the fixes and improvements that everyone has been asking for.

Supporting Dungeon Defenders II will still continue to support the team at Chromatic and support our ability to continue to patch and grow DD2.  Our team is dedicated to figuring out how we can keep evolving the game in the right direction.

We’re going to keep making Dungeon Defenders II better and better, just as we’ve been committed to doing in the past.

So Why Dungeon Defenders: Awakened?
I’m just going to begin by addressing the elephant in the room:

“Elan, Dungeon Defenders: Eternity already happened.  Isn’t this just the same thing?!?”

The short answer is no. The long answer is HELL no.  DD:E was a different product entirely. We have no plans to repeat history when it comes to that.

We came up with Dungeon Defenders: Awakened as our first smaller-scope project as a new team. If we want to remain employee-owned/controlled (which is the dream!), we needed to prove that we’re the capable stewards and re-earn that trust before diving right into Dungeon Defenders III (which we have SO many slick plans for).

Dungeon Defenders: Awakened started as a plan to do a modern remake of the original Dungeon Defenders for the Nintendo Switch, but then it evolved from there.  We didn’t want the game to feel like some sort of weird attempt at Dungeon Defenders: Eternity again. We wanted to make a new game, a new experience, a new story.

As we began looking into what we could build with Unreal Engine 4, we found that we’ll need to rebuild a lot of the systems and code that supported the Dungeon Defenders games.  Fortunately, our engineers are rockstars. We’re taking a lot of the hard lessons we learned about building games over the years from DD1 and DD2 and now have the freedom to make these systems in newer, more optimized and scalable ways for DD:A.

We don’t just want the game to look better in UE4 — we want it to run and feel better.

We want controlling your character to feel “crispy.”  For some context on what that means, you should check out Ben Brode’s PAX Keynote from last year.  We love to draw inspiration from other games and developers, and that is one of my personal favorite talks that describes some of these key aspects of making games have that polished and responsive feel.

Then when it comes to content, we’re exploring ways of using and importing some of our existing content in new ways that we can use as a springboard to accelerate development.  

This is one of the things we show off in the Kickstarter.  Deeper Well is definitely still the same map effectively, but it has a completely new look and will play a little differently.  It will still be a familiar and recognizable location, but there are new things going on in these familiar spots and new gameplay that comes with it.

This is what will allow us to make our aggressive October timeline.  By using the content and assets that we’ve been developing over the years, the content team can go CRAZY and make the game look and run amazingly well while our design team focuses on bringing the gameplay into 2019.

Our goal is to bring Dungeon Defenders: Awakened to as many platforms and players as possible.  We want to make a game that everyone can enjoy, and enjoy together. It just takes additional support to get there, and that’s why we have our Kickstarter campaign.

Why Go To Kickstarter?
We JUST became fully independent again.  We want to build the game in a way that we can fully be in control of.  Obviously going to a publisher is an option that we can explore to get additional funding, but there’s always a bit of “loss” associated with that.  We’re really trying to move forward and make new games. We don’t want to have a publisher — we want to make Dungeon Defenders games that are fun, weird, engaging, meme-tacular, challenging, charming and magical.

By going to Kickstarter, we can maintain FULL control over development and the future of the Dungeon Defenders franchise.  Your support here is VITAL.

The “dream” is to add as much content to this game as possible and to make a game that you can enjoy as a solo player or as a co-op player, strategizing against new challenges, maps, defenses, and gameplay.  We love it when people make interesting builds that even baffle our internal designers. We love when people find cool ways to make defenses and heroes more powerful than we ever could have imagined. We want to give you more of that.

So we need your help.

In Conclusion
We’re here to make a game that communicates our passion for Dungeon Defenders. We want to fulfill the expectations of our followers both new and old.  At this moment, we’ve had about a month of focused pre-production development time so far, and look how much progress we’ve has been made already!

We can’t wait to give people more news and updates about Dungeon Defenders: Awakened as we make more progress. We’re focusing on having a player-first mentality be our driving force at Chromatic.  

We’re here for you, if you’ll be here for us.

Support our Kickstarter, spread the word, help us make the dopest Dungeon Defenders game of all time.

As always, feel free to hit me up on Twitter:  @LordElandrian

Welcome to our community.  Stay a while.

Greetings Defenders,

Welcome to the new forums! There's quite a bit of changes that had to happen in order to facilitate this move so please read everything to hopefully answer any questions you may have.

• Logging In
  • Email/Password Login: Your password did not carry over from the old forums and must be reset by going here: https://forums.dungeondefenders.com/lostpassword/ . Make sure to check your email junk/spam folders in case the reset email goes there.
  • Steam Login: You must login with email first and re-link your Steam account to your forum account.
• Post Counts
  • Since the new forum had to re-index everything during the migration, post count numbers will be to what posts you do have and not include any deleted posts, non-copied over old forum posts, or forum restore numbers.
• Messages
  • Messages between members on the old forums were not moved to the new one. Sorry 😞
• Threads with pages that show "There are no posts to show"
  • Older threads that had deleted/bad spam bot posts in them were cleaned up which may cause the error message above. Once new posts are added or you go to an earlier page instead of last post should work fine. New forum posts started on the new forums will not have this issue.
• Reporting forum issues
  • You can report new forum issues here: Forum Bug Reports.
• Titles/Ranks
  • We're working on bringing back some custom groups and post count promotion fully. Right now after you make a post you should see yourself get the correct rank updated on your account.

Thank you!

Greetings Defenders,

We’ve been hard at work since our latest update and we’re ready to share some of what you can expect to see in our next update! We wanted to take a step back and focus on some more player-centric changes, and we’ve got a pretty hefty list of things we’re accomplishing. There’s still a lot of work for us to do, and while we’re not ready to show anything off yet, it’s the perfect time to talk about some of the things you can expect to see coming to Dungeon Defenders II!

Shard Acquisition

Shards are such an integral part to Dungeon Defenders II when it comes to empowering your towers with great strength to take out the waves of enemies constantly thrown at you. Currently there is a lot of RNG regarding which shards you get, and to help cut down the randomness, farming lower tiered content is the easiest way to go.

We don’t want that. We want you playing content you find engaging, while being able to acquire the Shards you want. The exact details cannot be spilled out here, but we’re working on concrete ways to get the specific Shards you want.

Chaos VIII Shards

They’ve been gone for a while, and the game has changed quite a bit since they were removed. We have taken a pass at them so that they fit into the current game and are something you want to get. You’ll be able to get them after a certain point in Onslaught, similar to when you start receiving Chaos VIII Ampoules.

New Weapons

There’s a lot of epic weapons that we’re going to be making available, some that have been available previously, and some you've never seen before. Players love to make their characters look unique, and while costumes, flairs, and accessories help accomplish this, weapons also play a big part in making your heroes look awesome!

Elemental Addition

We know a lot of you really enjoyed harnessing the powers of the elements, and we promised to add to this system. In the next update, Poison Mods will be added. While we’re not talking interactions yet, we wanted to let you know that we’re expanding on the list of powers you can combo to break apart your enemies!

Other Greatness

There’s still a decent amount to talk about, and we promise to get word out on things as soon as we can. This next month is going to be a crazy ride for all of our Defenders and we cannot wait to share with you what our 2019 is going to look like! We'll be doing at least one other update over the next month, and then go through our usual release of dev streams and previews. We’re wanting to really take our time with everything we're conjuring up and give attention to a lot of things that we believe you’ll enjoy.

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team

Greetings Defenders and Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone has been enjoying our most recent update, Drakenfrost! It was definitely a new experiment into how we deliver content, and I can’t wait to see all the feedback about it. How did you feel about our recent release of the Drakenlord? Let us know your thoughts in this thread!

I didn’t come here entirely for feedback… I may have an ulterior motive… to deliver some tremendous news!

I have recently been promoted to Creative Director on the Dungeon Defenders team!

I’ll be leading the direction of Dungeon Defenders into the future with the help of our amazing team!

We’re going to make the changes that you, our Defenders, want to see. We’ll also be able to make even more exciting new content and features for Dungeon Defenders II than we ever have before.

But what does this mean for the players?

Well let’s recap a little bit. I started as a community member, Caster’s Guild streamer, and Dungeon Defenders player. My tenure at Trendy started off with an internship that grew into an Associate Producer position, where I was eventually able to mold and shape some of our most recent updates - for example Protean Shift, Isle of Dread, and the Drakenfrost update.  

Josh comes into all of this with deep knowledge of the original Dungeon Defenders title, the aspects of it that players enjoyed, and is a master of the technical arts.  

Our primary goal and focus is to build upon recent successes through continuing to evolve DD2 into the game we all know it can and should be.

So what are some of the things we’re thinking about?

We’re looking at our pain points:

We’ve been improving Ancient Power since its release and we know that everyone is still not as stoked about it as we were hoping.  In 2019 we will continue to iterate and expand upon this feature until it hits the mark we’re all hoping for.

We also know there are some Inventory pain points that players have with stacking Shards, amount of free space, and clunky navigation. We’ve already made significant improvements to finding Mods and sorting your inventory, but we’re always looking at doing more to make it easier and easier.

In the near future:

We’re looking at expanding our elemental combo system. The goals for this are to add intuitive and interesting combinations between damage types, setting you up for some mad alchemy with new and beefier elemental interactions (what if poison exploded when hit with fire damage?).  Elemental interactions entered Dungeon Defenders II before our Free-to-Play launch and while our old plans to expand upon them have grown dusty on the shelf, I have never forgotten how excited they made me about the potential for DD2. We want to rekindle that excitement and realize this feature’s potential.

We’re also looking at acquisition methods for all of your loot and rewards in the game. We know people are looking for specific Shards, 10/10 Qualibean™ MODS, crafting materials, re-roll items...basically all the things. Our new Lead Designer (Mark Telfer) has made appeasing you his primary goal in life and loot acquisition is where he’s decided to start. Much like with recent changes to MOD roll and drop rates, your feedback will be essential to this process — so keep reaching out and letting us know your thoughts.

In the slightly farther future:

We’re looking at creating a better “purpose for play.” Some people call this a “chase” in a game. We know some people enjoy getting to high floors of Onslaught, and some enjoy getting fully kitted out with Chaos VIII gear, Gilded Shards, all Ancient Powers, etc. but we also know that we can do even better than that.

We want our players to have a more meaningful reason for getting all the new loot and levels in our progression systems. One avenue we’ve been playing with is an “ultimate boss” style encounter. The Lost Eternia Shard DLC packs proved the concept for the franchise, and we are currently exploring ways we can hit that emotional high-point in the contemporary DD2 format.  Modern MMO’s and RPG’s have taken big strides when it comes to designing boss fights and we’re looking to mirror their modern, elegant style.

There’s also an ongoing conversation about adding additional ways to acquire heroes and premium currency via gameplay. We really want to make sure that all our players are feeling adequately rewarded for playing our game. We’re going take a look at what our Gem purchases and pricings are like, and evaluate ways that we can make these more “player-first.”

We’re here to make a dope experience for you, and we’re going to double-down on that as our direction moving forward.  (My first act as Creative Director was to declare “we’re going to make dope s***” as the new modus operandi.)

Real Talk:

We have a small, but dedicated team working on delivering Dungeon Defenders to everyone in the best way that we know how. We’re people (just like you!) making a free to play game, so there will always be monetization and occasionally we’ll make some mistakes with features.  Additionally, change does not always occur at the speed at which you wish it would. We have processes for improving, but they remain what they are — a process. That being said, our ultimate goal is always to make a game that you guys want to play, and to continue to experiment with finding new and interesting content and release methods.

Do not forget that each and every one of you are an essential part of DD2 now and the shape of what it becomes in the future. Continue to give us all your feedback, opinions, and ideas using the appropriate methods.

We’ll do our best to fix bugs, add content, and provide new features to the game as we keep developing in 2019.

Join me, and the entire team, in making Dungeon Defenders II, and all our future Dungeon Defenders games, into the best games they can possibly be.

Sincerely,

Colin “Elandrian” Fisher and the entire Dungeon Defenders II Team.

The Heroes of Etheria have arrived at Drakenfrost Keep and explored its grounds. Throughout their exploration they unlocked a hidden chamber shrouded in runes around a mage who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep an ancient evil at bay. The seal has been broken, and the Drakenlord lives again! Held at bay for many years, kept alive only by fables, this menacing evil seeks to take back his keep, raise a dragon army, and set out to conquer the lands of Etheria. It is up to you, Defender, to send this juggernaut back to the underworld.

Greeting Defenders,

We unleashed a beast in Patch 4.3, which is now out on ALL platforms! The Drakenlord has come to terrorize the citizens of Etheria, we took a pass at some additional Mod Reroll quality of life, bug fixes, and more. Let’s get into it!

The Drakenlord

Soaring through the skies of Etheria, the Drakenlord is trying to take back his domain, Drakenfrost Keep. He’s a new boss type that will require you to create unique strategies to take him down, unlike any other boss you’ve fought so far! With his arrival, he may appear in other maps as well. He is now ready to fight you in Expeditions!

Drakenfrost Keep is also now a map that appears in Onslaught. Starting at Floor 39, Drakenfrost Keep appears every 10 floors as a capstone floor (similar to The Lost Temple). This means at Floors 34, 44, 54, 64, etc., you have to defend the Lost Temple, and on Floors 39, 49, 59, 69, etc., you conquer Drakenfrost Keep.

The Drakenlord provides new rewards every week! There are a slew of new weapons AND Mods for you to obtain by slaying him and protecting Etheria.

A costume for the Squire is now available on the Emporium, where you can BECOME the Drakenlord. We’re excited to see how you handle what he has in store for you, and the great rewards that await you.

Mod Reroll

We’ve been all about adding Mod quality of life changes, and here’s another one. Previously we doubled 10/10 drop chances, then last week we ensured that you run into a 10/10 after actively playing for ~10 hours, AND we added a new Mod Reroll material (that can be stored in the Material Vault).

A lot of people have enjoyed these adds, but we thought we’d take it a step further. Mod Rerolls allow you to target specific Mods into becoming 10/10. Some players target farm lower tiers to try and get better luck on a 10/10 dropping for a specific lower Mod (*cough* Tenacity *cough*). We want you all playing content you find engaging, so now Mod Rerolls after a while will guarantee a 10/10 roll. The amount of time is greatly impacted by the ability to buy this material from other players. This change means you can keep climbing or playing content you want, and are guaranteed to eventually get a 10/10 of the Mod you want.

Diminishing Returns

There were a few issues with Diminishing Returns upon release. Most of these problems were related to towers/abilities that could apply a stun more than once a second (i.e. Weapon Manufacturer and Protons). These towers were causing a large spike in diminishing returns that was not intended. On top of that, because of the fast attack rate the drop off of diminishing returns was halted.

Three major issues caused this, Stuns reapplying themselves and adjusting their initial duration each time. This caused initial stuns to a lot last less than intended, which was fixed in today’s update. Second, all Crowd Controls (CC) were adding to the same tenacity pool instead of separated by type (for instance, stuns and slows). This was causing a much higher overall tenacity than expected, which was also fixed in today’s update. The final issue, which we are still working on, is related to how the tenacity fall off is calculated. This is causing some enemies that start at a higher base tenacity when playing with four players to have enemies be nearly immune to CC after their first stun. This is not intended and we are actively looking into a fix to allow players to use theirs stuns as intended.

Communities

This is a feature that we are testing on PC/Steam. There’s a lot of information that we’re going to be gathering with this specific feature, so we want to communicate that there may be times where it’s not working correctly, and it may require game restarts to get it functioning correctly, but will not affect your gameplay specifically.

Communities provide a way for you to gather with up to 30 like-minded Defenders and talk across games and lobbies, invite to party, and more! You can be in up to 5 communities at any time, and are able to create communities whenever you want. Here are some of the functionalities that Communities offer:

• Give them a unique name (don’t worry, the name filter is working)

• Give them a three or four letter acronym of your choice.

• By using “/c1”, “/c2”, “/c3”, “/c4”, and “/c5” you can quickly chat in each of your communities. (You can also use /<insert acronym here> to chat with them as well).

• Invite players to join your parties in the Town or Private Tavern.

• Use different ranks (Owner, Officer, and then regular members).

• Invite and recommend users to join a Community.

There’s a lot more functionality and we’re looking at ways to add more and improve the current setups. We’re looking forward to your constructive feedback and will be doing everything we can to make these Communities great.

Hero Changes

Abyss Lord

• Towers

  • Skeletal Orc

    • The DU cost is now 30, was previously 35.

Dryad

• Towers

  • World Tree

    • The DU cost is now 20, was previously 25.

Lavamancer

• Towers

  • Fissure of Embermount

    • The overlap is now 35% of the max range, was previously 50% (for reference, flame aura overlap is 50%).

Squire

• Towers

  • Training Dummy

    • The DU cost is now 20, was previously 25.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where a small group of player’s pets had invalid stats tied to them.

• Fixed an issue where Boom chips were functioning incorrectly.

• Fixed an issue for PS4 users getting kicked to the main menu, and having to restart the game to continue.

• Fixed an issue with inspecting items on the ground while playing splitscreen for PS4 and Xbox.

• Fixed an issue when inspecting defenses, it showed the stats of other defenses.

• Adjusted billboard focus size to make them easier to read.

• Destructive Pylon and Destruction interaction match the Destructive Pylon tooltip and no longer stack.

• Fixed an issue when going through incursions and getting put against Malthius.

• Updated drenching strikes to be affected by electrocute for the correct duration

• Fixed an issue with pathing in lanes that had translucent objects.

• Fixed an issue where water chip was sometimes not drenching enemies.

• Adjusted Vampiric Empowerment to show the correct stat boost on the individual tower inspect screen in the inventory.

• Fixed an issue where restarting Drakenfrost Keep produced one less core alive.

• The Haunting Shard now shoots ghosts on secondary attacks.

• Fixed an issue with Ogres teleporting on the far east lane of The Lost Temple.

• Fixed an issue with non-leader members of a party get a bad error message when matchmaking.

• Changed the schedules on Drakenfrost Keep on Chaos VI and VII in Expeditions.

• Boom mods should now work on everything they’re equipped to.

• Fixed a framerate drop on Xbox when interacting with enemy schedule billboard.

• Fixed an issue on PS4 where the menu level music played during the video intro.

• Fixed an issue on comparing/inspecting items in the inventory if they are not equippable for the current selected hero.

• Removed an Auto Sort checkbox on the Tinkering UI.

• Tweaked the VFX for the Accumulator Servo to show the AoE effect.

• Fixed an issue on Sacrificial Warden adventure when using a controller/gamepad.

• Fixed an issue for a very small subset of users that caused an issue when coming back from a long break that had them temporarily stuck on Greystone Plaza.

• Adjusted how Diminishing Return buffs were calculated with different types of debuffs.

• Adjusted the difficulty of Forest Crossroads, Liferoot Forest, and Betsy during the campaign to be easier.

• Added elemental effects to weapons dropped during the New User Experience.

• Adjusted the pickup radius for Primary Reroll and Mod Reroll materials.

• Fixed an issue on gamepads/controllers with focus while rerolling Mods/Primary stats.

Known Issues

• Some sources of fire damage from Shards/Mods are not lighting torches correctly on Drakenfrost Keep.

• If you are not able to use Communities, restart the game to get back into them.

• Consecutive Win Bonus and Replay From Wave can fail, currently getting a fix ready.

• Replaying from Wave on Drakenfrost Keep and winning can result in not receiving the special Frost weapons.

Social Defenders

To get reliable updates on what’s to come, be sure to check out our social platforms for the latest juiciest beans to be spilled:

• Twitter

• Facebook

• Discord

• Twitch

The entire team has had a blast making this content, we cannot wait for all of you to get your hands on our next update. Stay tuned for more info soon!

For Etheria!

The Dungeon Defenders II Team