https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0
We’re on the home stretch! Be sure and check out the cool Abyss Lord video above! It’s bug fixing mode in the studio this week as we push to the finish line. This next release is another big step towards making the game cooler and more fun. Being able to build with any hero, swap in combat, and level them all at once while melting face with the Abyss Lord is fun business. The new UI looks slick and will really allow us to move towards a cleaner cross-platform development flow over time. I’ve been sorting through a massive backlog of robust features and improvements for the game, which we’re prioritizing this week. We need to keep pushing. Our big goal, as I’ve said before, is to get that hero library built out and never stop adding to it, but at the same time there are tons of fixes, improvements, features, and more to do and we won’t forget them. EV2 is the hero up next, but who’s after her is up to you. Keep your eyes peeled for the influence vote! As a former RR 80+ Slayer in Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning (RIP) I’m going to vote for the barbarian! “Give me death!”



Working on the changes to lanes / enemies / and towers. This is an overhaul of the strategic depth of DD2, so we are making sure we get this as fun as possible. As you can see, this lane is comprised of Air Enemies. You can also see they are flying right over my traps and barricades. This is one example of the types of changes we want to make to ensure build variety. We're going to talk more about this on Friday's Devstream!

First there was the great flood that shut us down for a few days. Then I got terribly sick again. Ultimately we lost a lot of time that we could have spent solving world hunger, curing cancer, but most important of all, we could have spent that time making the Abyss Lord eeeeeeeeven cooooooooooler. Have no fear! I’ve successfully constructed a time dilating device that allows us to nearly double the amount of time in a day. I call it, the Don’t Sleeper 3000 X PWN!!!!

For the past three weeks we had early builds of the Abyss Lord playable to a close circle of hardcore DD fans. (BTW if you guys want to join this super awesome cult write a comment and reach out to @Dani. The initiation ceremony is not bad at all and we only require you to donate one or two organs.) These DD fans gave us a lot of feedback on the Abyss Lord, and we’ve been tweaking him and making him more and more awesome with each increment. Now I’m working on his Skill Spheres and Passives and playing with him trying to place the final, final touches before he goes off to college and you can all start playing with him. Treat him gently, he’s always been a special boy… girl… er… Cthulhu thing...

At this point we have just started to work on a visual test for what might be the next Dungeon Defenders II level. All I can say this is going to be another dungeon type level. Here's a sneak peek. :)



Last week, the Flood of Trendy 2016 closed the building from Tuesday all the way through Monday. A water main had ruptured in an elevator, flooding the basement overnight with 5000+ gallons of water and caused the transformer to shut down, disabling electricity throughout the building. Several Trendy guys came in Thursday to drag a generator onto the roof, snake an extension cord down into our server rooms, and power on the internal servers so we can continue development. After several hours of troubleshooting, a thunderstorm rolled into town forcing them to stop for the night. Luckily power was restored to the building on Friday, and the team rallied for the final push towards our patch release. The effort from the team has been incredible thus far, and I’m incredibly proud to be a part of it.

This week, we’re in finaling mode, one of my favorite times of the project. We get to solve problems and see the fruits of our labor, but by the end of it, I’m ready to get back to making features.

We’re down to finalization of the PS4 update, so we’re hoping to get the Harbinger + Carnival update out to you in early April. Keep an eye right here for more news.

Lots more work on the new Hero Deck UIs. The team has been busting their butts getting all this new functionality in. This has also been a deep dive of our UI System and what it can/can’t do. This allows us to make future UIs easier and quicker but requires a ton of upfront work and time. Anyone who’s worked with UE3 native UIScenes will understand.

So while the below pictures might not look like much has changed since last week, the innards are muuuuuch better.




Also, did you see that Abyss Lord video!? That thing is the bee’s knees!

We loved watching you guys what the level was last week. Lots like a good number of you guessed correctly! Now, we are starting a new level.

Making heroes and costumes and costumes for heroes and accessories and marketing illustrations and icons and all kinds of fun things.

We’re still full swing with the new UI testing, Defender Medals, the Monthly Mission for April, Abyss Lord, and a bunch of other stuff that creeped up. Business as usual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0
We’re on the home stretch! Be sure and check out the cool Abyss Lord video above! It’s bug fixing mode in the studio this week as we push to the finish line. This next release is another big step towards making the game cooler and more fun. Being able to build with any hero, swap in combat, and level them all at once while melting face with the Abyss Lord is fun business. The new UI looks slick and will really allow us to move towards a cleaner cross-platform development flow over time. I’ve been sorting through a massive backlog of robust features and improvements for the game, which we’re prioritizing this week. We need to keep pushing. Our big goal, as I’ve said before, is to get that hero library built out and never stop adding to it, but at the same time there are tons of fixes, improvements, features, and more to do and we won’t forget them. EV2 is the hero up next, but who’s after her is up to you. Keep your eyes peeled for the influence vote! As a former RR 80+ Slayer in Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning (RIP) I’m going to vote for the barbarian! “Give me death!”



Working on the changes to lanes / enemies / and towers. This is an overhaul of the strategic depth of DD2, so we are making sure we get this as fun as possible. As you can see, this lane is comprised of Air Enemies. You can also see they are flying right over my traps and barricades. This is one example of the types of changes we want to make to ensure build variety. We're going to talk more about this on Friday's Devstream!

First there was the great flood that shut us down for a few days. Then I got terribly sick again. Ultimately we lost a lot of time that we could have spent solving world hunger, curing cancer, but most important of all, we could have spent that time making the Abyss Lord eeeeeeeeven cooooooooooler. Have no fear! I’ve successfully constructed a time dilating device that allows us to nearly double the amount of time in a day. I call it, the Don’t Sleeper 3000 X PWN!!!!

For the past three weeks we had early builds of the Abyss Lord playable to a close circle of hardcore DD fans. (BTW if you guys want to join this super awesome cult write a comment and reach out to @Dani. The initiation ceremony is not bad at all and we only require you to donate one or two organs.) These DD fans gave us a lot of feedback on the Abyss Lord, and we’ve been tweaking him and making him more and more awesome with each increment. Now I’m working on his Skill Spheres and Passives and playing with him trying to place the final, final touches before he goes off to college and you can all start playing with him. Treat him gently, he’s always been a special boy… girl… er… Cthulhu thing...

At this point we have just started to work on a visual test for what might be the next Dungeon Defenders II level. All I can say this is going to be another dungeon type level. Here's a sneak peek. :)



Last week, the Flood of Trendy 2016 closed the building from Tuesday all the way through Monday. A water main had ruptured in an elevator, flooding the basement overnight with 5000+ gallons of water and caused the transformer to shut down, disabling electricity throughout the building. Several Trendy guys came in Thursday to drag a generator onto the roof, snake an extension cord down into our server rooms, and power on the internal servers so we can continue development. After several hours of troubleshooting, a thunderstorm rolled into town forcing them to stop for the night. Luckily power was restored to the building on Friday, and the team rallied for the final push towards our patch release. The effort from the team has been incredible thus far, and I’m incredibly proud to be a part of it.

This week, we’re in finaling mode, one of my favorite times of the project. We get to solve problems and see the fruits of our labor, but by the end of it, I’m ready to get back to making features.

We’re down to finalization of the PS4 update, so we’re hoping to get the Harbinger + Carnival update out to you in early April. Keep an eye right here for more news.

Lots more work on the new Hero Deck UIs. The team has been busting their butts getting all this new functionality in. This has also been a deep dive of our UI System and what it can/can’t do. This allows us to make future UIs easier and quicker but requires a ton of upfront work and time. Anyone who’s worked with UE3 native UIScenes will understand.

So while the below pictures might not look like much has changed since last week, the innards are muuuuuch better.




Also, did you see that Abyss Lord video!? That thing is the bee’s knees!

We loved watching you guys what the level was last week. Lots like a good number of you guessed correctly! Now, we are starting a new level.

Making heroes and costumes and costumes for heroes and accessories and marketing illustrations and icons and all kinds of fun things.

We’re still full swing with the new UI testing, Defender Medals, the Monthly Mission for April, Abyss Lord, and a bunch of other stuff that creeped up. Business as usual.

The Calling All Heroes update is coming in April! This update includes:

• The New Hero Deck: Major changes to the Hero Deck, including the much-requested ability to build with all of your heroes, leveling up all of your decked heroes at once, quickswapping your decked heroes at the press of a button and inspecting other players' decks!
  
• New Hero, The Abyss Lord: This is just the first of many heroes coming to the game this year!
  
• Defender Medals: A new earnable currency used to recruit new heroes!
  
• And more!

Learn more about the update on our new landing page!

Before the update comes out, meet the Abyss Lord!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0

Want to see the update in action? Tune into the Devstream on Friday at 5PM EDT! We’re going to show off the Abyss Lord and all of the new Hero Deck changes, and then we’re going to give you a sneak peek at our strategy revamp, which is scheduled to come out in a future update. Tune in live for a chance to win the Dark Arts Apprentice costume!

The Calling All Heroes update is coming in April! This update includes:

• The New Hero Deck: Major changes to the Hero Deck, including the much-requested ability to build with all of your heroes, leveling up all of your decked heroes at once, quickswapping your decked heroes at the press of a button and inspecting other players' decks!
  
• New Hero, The Abyss Lord: This is just the first of many heroes coming to the game this year!
  
• Defender Medals: A new earnable currency used to recruit new heroes!
  
• And more!

Learn more about the update on our new landing page!

Before the update comes out, meet the Abyss Lord!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0

Want to see the update in action? Tune into the Devstream on Friday at 5PM EDT! We’re going to show off the Abyss Lord and all of the new Hero Deck changes, and then we’re going to give you a sneak peek at our strategy revamp, which is scheduled to come out in a future update. Tune in live for a chance to win the Dark Arts Apprentice costume!

Bug Fix

• Fixed an issue from Patch 10.8 that caused some players' pet abilities to reroll.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where pets were going to the Scavenger and getting sold when the pet bag was full.
  
• Ping chat notifications will no longer happen while the ping is on cooldown.

Known Issues

• All equipped pets will appear to not have a pet ability after the patch.
• Unequip and re-equip your pet in order for the ability to show up again.
  
• Sometimes “Unknown Error:0” will appear when attempting to matchmake. We’re looking into it.

Calling All Heroes!

• The Calling All Heroes update is coming soon! Check out the update page for more information, and don't miss the Abyss Lord trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0

Bug Fix

• Fixed an issue from Patch 10.8 that caused some players' pet abilities to reroll.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug where pets were going to the Scavenger and getting sold when the pet bag was full.
  
• Ping chat notifications will no longer happen while the ping is on cooldown.

Known Issues

• All equipped pets will appear to not have a pet ability after the patch.
• Unequip and re-equip your pet in order for the ability to show up again.
  
• Sometimes “Unknown Error:0” will appear when attempting to matchmake. We’re looking into it.

Calling All Heroes!

• The Calling All Heroes update is coming soon! Check out the update page for more information, and don't miss the Abyss Lord trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfsuK1ISEb0

Ian Gillan’s voice comes to mind on a day like this.
“They burned down the gambling house
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Pulling kids out the ground
When it all was over
We had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out
It seemed that we would lose the race.”

Thankfully, we replace fire with water. On Tuesday morning, a water main broke in the basement of the building where we’re on the sixth floor, and all power went out, including ours. We had to send everyone home and it’s now nearing the end of day two of this unfortunate event, to steal a tag line from Daniel Handler. It’s not clear whether the water level rose high enough to hit the electric breakers or what, but we’re hoping to be able to get back in the building soon! I’m glad we’re not in the basement. In the meantime, folks are working from home on DD2 as much as possible. It’s not ideal, and we have some backup plans in case this delay keeps extending. This week is the last week of content lock, so if all goes well, we’ll be able to wrap everything up over the weekend. Let there be light, please Bon Scott.

Working on making some final tweaks to our Abyss Lord as well as preliminary work on the next FOUR (yes you heard me FOUR) heroes! The Abyss Lord is coming along well but alas none of us can enter the office! Something is wrong with the water and power and we’ve not been able to enter for the past two days… heck we might not be able to enter tomorrow too! We are waiting to hear from the water and power people. :(



Water, you delicious, destructive bastard. Thanks to you, O' Master of Thirst and Despair, we've delayed our Devstream from this Friday to next Friday, March 25th. But it's not all bad news: The delay means we can reveal a sneak peek at the Strategic Revamp coming after the next update. You win this time, Water. You win this time.

We are fast approaching the deadline for putting all changes into the game before the next patch. By the end of the week, Defender Medals will be earnable and spendable, all the hero deck UI will be in and playable, and everything about the Abyss Lord will be wrapping up. Next week, we’ll fix the bugs we introduced into the build when we bring everything together as well as fixing some bugs that are in the live game.

Or at least that was the original plan. The building we’re in sprung a massive leak and flooded the basement with 5,000 gallons of water and took out all electricity in the building. We’re exploring interesting options such as getting a generator onto the roof so we can power some of our critical machines and get back to developing DD2!

So the power went out right as we were about the set the hotfix live Tuesday morning… so that’s been making life interesting. The new hotfix is pretty light, but it contains a much-needed fix involving certain pets being destroyed as soon as they hit the Scavenger. While this one arose because of the bling wheel, any time you would’ve earned a hatched pet in the future this could have happened. Once that goes live we’re going to be looking into problems with our login chain and why some of you stop being able to play when we patch (this is bad and we’re closing on what exactly seems to be happening). If you’re running into this issue and would like to help, please send your logs to us, and that will help us get to the bottom of what’s going on.

PS4 is cruising along and is closing in on the finalization period. There are still a lot of things we need to fix, but Carnival and the Harbinger are starting to come together and are looking pretty good. As I’ve been saying, we’ve really been diving deep this milestone and trying to figure out how to improve the game overall, and I’m excited for what we have planned in the coming months (especially the research we’re doing on getting rid of full-screen takeover UIs in split-screen).

I know that crashes have been a sore point for people and so our CTO himself has been diving into the crash reports Sony provides and trying to give us some useful information. This next patch should drastically reduce the number of server crashes you see and will hopefully help out with a couple client crashes as well.

This week has been tough. Got a ton of UI work coming in hot. We knew our goals for this milestone were ambitious but by golly I’m gonna do everything I can to hit them (goodbye sleep!). Then to top it off, the power is cut off to the building while they drain the basement and fix the electrical.

Since I’ve been a little hamstringed by the power outages, I’ve been going through and replacing quite a few cardboard support beams with new and improved steel support beams. Translation: Implementing these new UIs exposed several weakness in underlying systems. Been fleshing those systems out and taking them from hackfix/prototype to fully functional properly implemented systems.

And now for the pictures! I’ve included last week’s images for some hot before-and-after action.







This week we are working on a new level. At this point we’ve already made good progress, but there is a lot of work left to be done.

I'm pretty sure Dungeon Defenders fans will love it!

Quite right! We're working on a new level! The main geometry is mostly done at this point, so it's time to start polishing it. From the pic at the top of this post, does it look familiar to you?

Missed the first part of the week due to it being my turn to be infected with the Annual Trendy Plague. Now we’re having power/water problems with the office. Once we’re back in and rolling again, it’s full steam ahead with finishing MS22 and MS21 PS4. That means full blown testing with the Abyss Lord, Defender Medals, and biggest of all, the new UIs and Hero Deck changes!

Ian Gillan’s voice comes to mind on a day like this.
“They burned down the gambling house
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Pulling kids out the ground
When it all was over
We had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out
It seemed that we would lose the race.”

Thankfully, we replace fire with water. On Tuesday morning, a water main broke in the basement of the building where we’re on the sixth floor, and all power went out, including ours. We had to send everyone home and it’s now nearing the end of day two of this unfortunate event, to steal a tag line from Daniel Handler. It’s not clear whether the water level rose high enough to hit the electric breakers or what, but we’re hoping to be able to get back in the building soon! I’m glad we’re not in the basement. In the meantime, folks are working from home on DD2 as much as possible. It’s not ideal, and we have some backup plans in case this delay keeps extending. This week is the last week of content lock, so if all goes well, we’ll be able to wrap everything up over the weekend. Let there be light, please Bon Scott.

Working on making some final tweaks to our Abyss Lord as well as preliminary work on the next FOUR (yes you heard me FOUR) heroes! The Abyss Lord is coming along well but alas none of us can enter the office! Something is wrong with the water and power and we’ve not been able to enter for the past two days… heck we might not be able to enter tomorrow too! We are waiting to hear from the water and power people. :(



Water, you delicious, destructive bastard. Thanks to you, O' Master of Thirst and Despair, we've delayed our Devstream from this Friday to next Friday, March 25th. But it's not all bad news: The delay means we can reveal a sneak peek at the Strategic Revamp coming after the next update. You win this time, Water. You win this time.

We are fast approaching the deadline for putting all changes into the game before the next patch. By the end of the week, Defender Medals will be earnable and spendable, all the hero deck UI will be in and playable, and everything about the Abyss Lord will be wrapping up. Next week, we’ll fix the bugs we introduced into the build when we bring everything together as well as fixing some bugs that are in the live game.

Or at least that was the original plan. The building we’re in sprung a massive leak and flooded the basement with 5,000 gallons of water and took out all electricity in the building. We’re exploring interesting options such as getting a generator onto the roof so we can power some of our critical machines and get back to developing DD2!

So the power went out right as we were about the set the hotfix live Tuesday morning… so that’s been making life interesting. The new hotfix is pretty light, but it contains a much-needed fix involving certain pets being destroyed as soon as they hit the Scavenger. While this one arose because of the bling wheel, any time you would’ve earned a hatched pet in the future this could have happened. Once that goes live we’re going to be looking into problems with our login chain and why some of you stop being able to play when we patch (this is bad and we’re closing on what exactly seems to be happening). If you’re running into this issue and would like to help, please send your logs to us, and that will help us get to the bottom of what’s going on.

PS4 is cruising along and is closing in on the finalization period. There are still a lot of things we need to fix, but Carnival and the Harbinger are starting to come together and are looking pretty good. As I’ve been saying, we’ve really been diving deep this milestone and trying to figure out how to improve the game overall, and I’m excited for what we have planned in the coming months (especially the research we’re doing on getting rid of full-screen takeover UIs in split-screen).

I know that crashes have been a sore point for people and so our CTO himself has been diving into the crash reports Sony provides and trying to give us some useful information. This next patch should drastically reduce the number of server crashes you see and will hopefully help out with a couple client crashes as well.

This week has been tough. Got a ton of UI work coming in hot. We knew our goals for this milestone were ambitious but by golly I’m gonna do everything I can to hit them (goodbye sleep!). Then to top it off, the power is cut off to the building while they drain the basement and fix the electrical.

Since I’ve been a little hamstringed by the power outages, I’ve been going through and replacing quite a few cardboard support beams with new and improved steel support beams. Translation: Implementing these new UIs exposed several weakness in underlying systems. Been fleshing those systems out and taking them from hackfix/prototype to fully functional properly implemented systems.

And now for the pictures! I’ve included last week’s images for some hot before-and-after action.







This week we are working on a new level. At this point we’ve already made good progress, but there is a lot of work left to be done.

I'm pretty sure Dungeon Defenders fans will love it!

Quite right! We're working on a new level! The main geometry is mostly done at this point, so it's time to start polishing it. From the pic at the top of this post, does it look familiar to you?

Missed the first part of the week due to it being my turn to be infected with the Annual Trendy Plague. Now we’re having power/water problems with the office. Once we’re back in and rolling again, it’s full steam ahead with finishing MS22 and MS21 PS4. That means full blown testing with the Abyss Lord, Defender Medals, and biggest of all, the new UIs and Hero Deck changes!

Ian Gillan’s voice comes to mind on a day like this.
“They burned down the gambling house
It died with an awful sound
Funky Claude was running in and out
Pulling kids out the ground
When it all was over
We had to find another place
But Swiss time was running out
It seemed that we would lose the race.”

Thankfully, we replace fire with water. On Tuesday morning, a water main broke in the basement of the building where we’re on the sixth floor, and all power went out, including ours. We had to send everyone home and it’s now nearing the end of day two of this unfortunate event, to steal a tag line from Daniel Handler. It’s not clear whether the water level rose high enough to hit the electric breakers or what, but we’re hoping to be able to get back in the building soon! I’m glad we’re not in the basement. In the meantime, folks are working from home on DD2 as much as possible. It’s not ideal, and we have some backup plans in case this delay keeps extending. This week is the last week of content lock, so if all goes well, we’ll be able to wrap everything up over the weekend. Let there be light, please Bon Scott.

Working on making some final tweaks to our Abyss Lord as well as preliminary work on the next FOUR (yes you heard me FOUR) heroes! The Abyss Lord is coming along well but alas none of us can enter the office! Something is wrong with the water and power and we’ve not been able to enter for the past two days… heck we might not be able to enter tomorrow too! We are waiting to hear from the water and power people. :(



Water, you delicious, destructive bastard. Thanks to you, O' Master of Thirst and Despair, we've delayed our Devstream from this Friday to next Friday, March 25th. But it's not all bad news: The delay means we can reveal a sneak peek at the Strategic Revamp coming after the next update. You win this time, Water. You win this time.

We are fast approaching the deadline for putting all changes into the game before the next patch. By the end of the week, Defender Medals will be earnable and spendable, all the hero deck UI will be in and playable, and everything about the Abyss Lord will be wrapping up. Next week, we’ll fix the bugs we introduced into the build when we bring everything together as well as fixing some bugs that are in the live game.

Or at least that was the original plan. The building we’re in sprung a massive leak and flooded the basement with 5,000 gallons of water and took out all electricity in the building. We’re exploring interesting options such as getting a generator onto the roof so we can power some of our critical machines and get back to developing DD2!

So the power went out right as we were about the set the hotfix live Tuesday morning… so that’s been making life interesting. The new hotfix is pretty light, but it contains a much-needed fix involving certain pets being destroyed as soon as they hit the Scavenger. While this one arose because of the bling wheel, any time you would’ve earned a hatched pet in the future this could have happened. Once that goes live we’re going to be looking into problems with our login chain and why some of you stop being able to play when we patch (this is bad and we’re closing on what exactly seems to be happening). If you’re running into this issue and would like to help, please send your logs to us, and that will help us get to the bottom of what’s going on.

PS4 is cruising along and is closing in on the finalization period. There are still a lot of things we need to fix, but Carnival and the Harbinger are starting to come together and are looking pretty good. As I’ve been saying, we’ve really been diving deep this milestone and trying to figure out how to improve the game overall, and I’m excited for what we have planned in the coming months (especially the research we’re doing on getting rid of full-screen takeover UIs in split-screen).

I know that crashes have been a sore point for people and so our CTO himself has been diving into the crash reports Sony provides and trying to give us some useful information. This next patch should drastically reduce the number of server crashes you see and will hopefully help out with a couple client crashes as well.

This week has been tough. Got a ton of UI work coming in hot. We knew our goals for this milestone were ambitious but by golly I’m gonna do everything I can to hit them (goodbye sleep!). Then to top it off, the power is cut off to the building while they drain the basement and fix the electrical.

Since I’ve been a little hamstringed by the power outages, I’ve been going through and replacing quite a few cardboard support beams with new and improved steel support beams. Translation: Implementing these new UIs exposed several weakness in underlying systems. Been fleshing those systems out and taking them from hackfix/prototype to fully functional properly implemented systems.

And now for the pictures! I’ve included last week’s images for some hot before-and-after action.







This week we are working on a new level. At this point we’ve already made good progress, but there is a lot of work left to be done.

I'm pretty sure Dungeon Defenders fans will love it!

Quite right! We're working on a new level! The main geometry is mostly done at this point, so it's time to start polishing it. From the pic at the top of this post, does it look familiar to you?

Missed the first part of the week due to it being my turn to be infected with the Annual Trendy Plague. Now we’re having power/water problems with the office. Once we’re back in and rolling again, it’s full steam ahead with finishing MS22 and MS21 PS4. That means full blown testing with the Abyss Lord, Defender Medals, and biggest of all, the new UIs and Hero Deck changes!

This week’s theme: more Abyss Lord, more Hero Deck, and more Strategy Revamp. Did hardcore and detailed battle testing on Abyss Lord over the last five days and got that out. He’s getting close. Can’t wait to jump on him again after the team has had a chance to nail the refinements to his visual effects, sound, and feedback. Active defending is fun. You can always tell when a Hero is starting to click because you start pulling off little tricks and combos in a risky way, so when you get away with it, it’s fun. I love the synergy between the Knight of the Abyss PBAOE and the Abyss Stones.

Collins and Brett’s strategy revamp is gaining momentum with internal playtesting. What they’re doing really brings strategy back to tower choice, placement, and hero loadout. Playing it today with Jason and Phil made DD2 feel like a new game all over again, with a neat blend between tactical puzzle solving and responding to lanes overrun with baddies. It’s much more interesting mixing thinking and plotting with mass destruction!

With each passing day we get closer and closer to the Abyss Lord’s release. My primary focus is making sure the Abyss Lord is as fun and entertaining as possible before you all get your hands on him… her… erm… Not entirely sure what the Abyss Lord is as a matter of fact. At the same time I’m working with a handful of people on our upcoming heroes beyond the Abyss Lord and helping out with all the other initiatives we’re working on from shared experience for the hero deck and hotswapping.

We had our Remote QA and Remote Playtesting Group teams play the Abyss Lord this week and we are just now looking through their feedback and making some changes based on what they and people internally are saying. I’ll be having a one-on-one call with RQA later this week to talk to them directly about the Abyss Lord.

Thank you all for your interest and participation in the Abyss Lord playtests. There were limited spots available, and it filled up way faster than we thought. For those that made it into the playtest, please fill out the survey and share your thoughts. While we may not respond to every piece of feedback, we definitely spend the time and read through them. There is another update to the playtest build later this week so keep an ear out for that one. Also wanted to give a quick shout-out to two of our fans Cord McLennan and Grier Eutychus who helped us test an updated Abyss Lord build.

As some of you may have heard on the stream, we decided to go with the shared hero experience across the Hero Deck and combat hotswapping rather than moving forward with implementing account leveling. Thanks to Javier’s hard work on the account leveling prototype, we were able to test out the changes early. Although we shelved the prototype, we really loved being able to try out some of the things we’ve been wanting to do for a while.

The shared experience across the Hero Deck and combat hotswapping are currently being implemented, and we will be playtesting these changes internally this week. To give a sneak peak at the test we’re running this week on the hero deck, the XP earned is awarded to the other heroes in your deck as well as your active hero. That means, if you got 100 experience at the end of a wave for your active hero, the other 3 heroes in your deck will also get 100xp each. As for combat hotswapping, we’re testing out things such as ability cooldowns ticking down when the heroes are swapped out, having a global cooldown for hotswapping, and mana not regening while the heroes aren’t active. I make no promises that we’ll keep these changes, but I wanted to share a bit more details of the really cool happenings here in the studio.

In live land, we think we found one reason why people randomly stop being able to play the game after certain patches, so we’re looking into reproducing and resolving that. This week’s hotfix should also help out with ping spam and reduce the amount of bot farming going on in Onslaught matches.

In PS4 world, we’re cranking on UIs for the Carnival and trying to get everything fixed up. It’s slow but steady going because we’re trying to sort out some of the quirks in the game as we go along.

Watching and listening to all the feedback about the strategy revamp. We are just as excited as you guys to get some more strategic options in the game. With the removal of resistances, we can move forward with some more interesting tower / enemy relationships. Hoping to get a sneak peak next week into some of the more specifics.

Now that the Hero Deck UI flow has been hammered out, I’ve been heads down cranking these UIs out. So far, things are moving along nicely. Got a couple of screenshots to share with you. Most of the big pieces are finished, and now it’s slotting everything into place and iterating on look and feel.













Been working on finishing up test plans for the current milestoness for PC and PS4 as well as preparation for the upcoming weekly patch. I can’t hold all these builds.

On the testing side, we’re starting to get some fixes in for the Abyss Lord so hopefully that’ll open up more to test with him and get him a bit more functional. We’re in full swing with the shared XP feature and eagerly awaiting the implementation of the new UIs.

We are already done with our first Dungeon type level! For those who didn't notice looking at previous pics of the level (or missed the image at the top of the blog), it's a remake of DD1 Foundries and Forges level but with a DD2 look!

Now we are doing some visual tests before we start working on the next level.



Working on a new visual test level. For this test I'm building some modular assets: arches, walls, columns and stairs to test some ideas. An old decrepit castle is awaiting you!

I’ve spent the past week in the testing trenches with some of the finest and generous testers the community has to offer, and I want to thank them for all the help and support they have given so far and the support they will give until we finish playtesting.

Apologies to any later signups. We’ve hit our target numbers and our hands are full. We’ve created a preference list for late signups that didn’t make the cut-off point, and if we expand to include more testers we will hit up those of you that have pitched an email offering to help.

I’ve always been proud of the community we’re lucky to have, and yet again I am impressed by your dedication and support. The Abyss Lord is gonna rock.