Travel back in time to where it all began in this brand-new Dungeon Defenders game, built entirely in Unreal Engine 4!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Update 1.1 and Where to Get the Latest News!
over 4 years ago
– Thu, Aug 06, 2020 at 04:57:28 PM
DEFENDERS,
We are currently working very hard on the many additions coming to Dungeon Defenders: Awakened since we launched on Steam! Moving forward, we are not going to continue posting updates on Kickstarter, as we are moving our communication to be more centralized and easier to distribute, the primary source being the news section on our site. This is to make sure that our communication is clear as possible without needing to update a multitude of platforms. For any questions you may have regarding Kickstarter, hit up our support by writing to [email protected].
We recently posted about our upcoming Update 1.1 patch that includes a new hero, Massacre Survival, and more! Click here to check it out! There's a lot more coming that we're excited to share and want to thank you for joining us on the journey so far. <3
For Etheria!
Chromatic Games
ACTIVATING THE GOBLIN MECH UPDATE PREVIEW
over 4 years ago
– Thu, Apr 30, 2020 at 12:25:47 AM
DEFENDERS
Today we posted our release announcement trailer for Dungeon Defenders: Awakened. If you haven’t seen it yet, click here to check it out! To celebrate the release of this trailer, and to check in with all of you, we’re going to give a preview for our next update as well as talk about new release information and where we are as a studio. Let’s get into it!
Activating the Goblin Mech Update
This update is coming so close, you can smell the exhaust coming from the Goblin Mech’s mechanical monstrosity. This is the update preview, there’s going to be more information provided on the post that goes live with our update.
Goblin Mech Plows Through
The second boss that you’ll fight is the destructive Goblin Mech! Piloting the pinnacle of goblin engineering, he bursts through the doors on Throne Room (Campaign). You’ll need to stop him from plowing through your defenses and destroying the Crystal Cores in the middle. He’s available for all difficulties.
UI Updates
One of the biggest focuses of this entire project has been to get UIs into a functionally better state compared to previous Dungeon Defenders games. As a lot of the UIs are wrapped up and getting their final touches, we’re able to finally start arting up the UIs. In this update, the first UIs to get this treatment are our Map Select UIs. There’s more to come across the entire game!
New Bonus Map — Endless Spires
Locking away from of Etheria’s most heinous criminals, the Endless Spires is going to be coming back as the bonus map for Act II. A fan favorite, Endless Spires is available to play on Campaign as well as Survival. Conquer the spires to receive an all new pet!
New Pet — The Monkey King
Climbing the Spires and fighting off the hordes of enemies that encroach upon the great prison rewards you with primate royalty, The Monkey King. Using his legendary bo staff, this pet attacks fast, gaining strength with each hit, all from the comfort of his floating cloud.
Delays
One of our goals regarding the development of this project is to be as transparent as possible about this project. We’ve had delays from initial releases and have tried to communicate why, ultimately being that we want Dungeon Defenders: Awakened to be a great game and set the standard when fully released as the first game for Chromatic Games. We sat down, made a road map that was realistic for the work we’re able to provide, and got to work. Everything was going smooth in development land, and then COVID-19 hit. This has been an unprecedented event, and as we’ve previously stated, our first priority was (and still is) making sure everyone of our employees was safe and healthy. This has affected development in multiple ways, and we’re doing our best to be responsive and ensure a quality game. Here’s how it’s affected multiple areas and where we’re at as a studio.
Nintendo Switch
Developing for a Nintendo platform is something new that we were excited to take on. The Nintendo Switch has a lot of awesome tech crammed into their console. Dungeon Defenders: Awakened can be a bit of a resource hog, so it’s important to make sure we do everything we can to make sure it runs smoothly, especially when playing 4 player split screen Wave 25 Survival. What happens on the Switch also sets the precedence for all of the other platforms we release on. There’s a ton of work that goes into making all of this happen.
Working in the studio with our Switch development kits allowed us to be quick with testing. One of the biggest hurdles with a game like ours is making sure that what other players are doing, including host and client connections, provides proper replication to everyone playing. You start local to make sure connections work, and slowly start playing over networks and doing larger network tests. Having to change to an entirely remote setup has caused a bit of trouble doing this. We are currently working through various solutions to emulate the process we planned to follow, but it comes at the cost of time. If we were in the studio, this would be moving along faster and we’d be in a much better position. Unfortunately that’s not where we’re at.
Ultimately this means that we’re going to have to delay our Nintendo Switch release to Q3 of this year. The above is not our only requirement, as there is a certification process that we must go through with Nintendo that takes some time to make sure it will work perfectly across their networks and platform. As a studio we believe you deserve the best experience. If we were to force something through, it would be incredibly rushed, not perform properly, and be a flawed product.
We’re going to keep working as hard as we can and keep you updated on our progress.
Pure Strategy and Challenge Maps
These were originally slated for our Activating the Goblin Mech update, but were pushed off to our release on May 28th. While we’re working on progression throughout the game, we wanted to make sure the additional mode and challenge maps (Act II introduces a brand new challenge map) provided a great experience. A lot of that is going related to our Massacre work, so we held on it for the moment so you don’t receive a lackluster experience that is going to be changed when everything is said and done. With these two changes to our schedule, the goal is consistently to not curb quality in order to meet deadlines.
What’s Next
The update is coming out VERY soon. There’s a lot of hard work that has gone into this update, and we’re working with all our might to provide an amazing experience at the end of next month when Dungeon Defenders: Awakened FINALLY Releases! Thank you for all your support, there've been a lot of ups and downs, but through it all we’re going to have a game to you that we’re very proud of. We’re almost there!
Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on the future of DDA make sure to follow us on all our social media platforms:
CHROMATIC GAMES DEV LOG 1
almost 5 years ago
– Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 12:29:19 AM
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:
Kickstarter and BackerKit Supporters Update Pt. 2
almost 5 years ago
– Sun, Feb 16, 2020 at 01:34:53 AM
Hey All,
We recently announced that ALL of our BackerKit and Kickstarter backers that purchased the game in some fashion will receive one set of the preorder rewards (per Kickstarter/BackerKit account) from the preorder store:
Previously we had it locked to just the $40 and up tiers on both Kickstarter and BackerKit, it is now no longer locked by tier. As long as you receive a copy of the game through Kickstarter or BackerKit, you'll get these rewards. This is to reward our early supporters for putting their trust in us from during the birth of this project. That's all for now, just a quick update! :)
For Etheria!
Chromatic Games
Kickstarter Support Bonuses Update!
almost 5 years ago
– Fri, Feb 14, 2020 at 01:52:28 AM
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 that selected the $40 or higher tiers 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. Lower tiers had already received the game at a severely reduced price, or received other bonuses alongside a reduced price, so they will not be receiving these bonuses.
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:
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!
