We chat to Trendy Entertainment devs Phillip Asher and Brad Logston about their action tower defence sequel

I recently tracked down Trendy Entertainment’s designer Phillip Asher and producer Brad Logston, hoping to quiz them on action tower defence sequel Dungeon Defenders 2. After a quick run-out with the game, during which I very nearly caused both of their deaths due to some spectacular incompetence, I seized my chance.

GameWatcher: First off, the world you created back in Dungeon Defenders seems a lot more fleshed out in the sequel. Is that something you felt was important to do?

Brad Logston: DD1 was really kind of light on lore and story, it was like “okay cool, we have the Ancient Ones that got out of the crystal, and now they’re causing chaos”, but in DD2 we really wanted to amplify that sense of the world being a real place, so we’ve got some awesome environments and we’ve got a much bigger scope. The Ancient Ones are invading, and armies are thundering across the Kingdom trying to hold them off, we want to establish that impending cloud of war so you get this awesome sensation of this conflict happening around you.

Now our objectives are all tied to the story, so you’ll have to defend the gates of the city rather than just protect a crystal, and we have sub-objectives in each level. In the first game if you failed a sub-objective the mission would end, but here it might open up a new lane for the AI instead. If you keep them closed it’s a bonus, but if you lose one you can fall back and keep going. The world is all connected too, so if you’re in the town market level, you can look up and see the castle gates you had to fall back from in the last map. Then there’s lots of lore and story stuff hinted at in each environment, and we have a Codex system now where you can collect bits of lore, and if you get a full set you’ll get a little bonus. There’s also little mini-arcs in each zone, so there’s lots of little details, foreshadowing, stuff like that.

GameWatcher: Will we see any new classes in Dungeon Defenders 2?

Phillip Asher: No, there’s the classic four classes in there now (Apprentice, Squire, Hunter and Monk). A long time ago we were going to be making a MOBA instead of DD2, and there were a bunch of classes in that, but then we kind of threw that away and rebooted, decided to work on a real spiritual sequel to the first game. We wanted to focus on quality over quantity.

So what we have is the Forge, which is a station where you can set up your characters and equip them with items. In DD2 you can bring three characters into a battle, you can have as many as you want, but you can only take three into a match and they will be the ones you want to play.

GameWatcher: How have you changed character levelling and so on? In the first game it was largely just done by upgrading certain stats.

So if you go to the Forge menu, you’ll see a new menu with items and talents. Items are now kind of stats for your character, so they’ll change the basic strength of each hero. Then you’ll also see Specs, which are basically like talents that you unlock when you level up. These pretty drastically change how your character plays, so you could theoretically bring three totally different Hunters to the same game. If I choose to level up ‘Drench’ for my hunter, that adds a debuff to all enemy attacks. Or I could focus on doing more damage with my bow, or all kinds of other stuff.

Brad Logston: So when we were playing there I noticed you were using a lot of cannonball towers, so I levelled up my Apprentice’s frost towers to encase enemies in ice, and your cannonballs were shattering them.

GameWatcher: So you can set up lots of those combinations between characters?

Brad Logston: Yeah, the combo system is a new thing we added in DD2 that we felt would really amplify that co-op experience. The first game was a lot of fun when you were playing with friends, but your towers and so on tended to be standalone things. There wasn’t much you could do to make them work with each other. In this you can match up your specs with other players, get some cool combos going and see what happens.

GameWatcher: How about the game’s enemies, what kind of new monsters are there?

Phillip Asher: There’s eighteen enemies in the game right now, and they all kind of challenge your defences in a variety of ways. There’s whole new types of enemies that weren’t in the first game, like we have the War Boar; we needed to have both magic resistant and physically resistant enemies to make sure there’s some variation there, so there’s a bunch of different types there. Then there’s specific enemies designed to challenge you in new ways, like the Wither-Beast which runs up to your defences and burrows underneath. That debuffs them, so you need to kill him quick when you see him. Then there’s the Dark Mage, who heals enemies in the lane, and we also have special enemies. They’re kind of like elite enemies in Diablo, they’re named and they have a bunch of unique tricks and special powers. We also have a few mini-bosses too, which are much harder to defeat. A lot of stuff.

GameWatcher: How do your special abilities and structures change at higher levels?

Phillip Asher: All your traps and towers will do a lot more damage, but they’ll also look a lot cooler when you place them.

Brad Logston: In the first game whenever you upgraded something it basically got a chevron next to it and became a bit stronger, but it didn’t really visually change that much. For this we wanted to blow out just how rewarding it is when you get to those different upgrades, so we dramatically modified the VFX, changed the shape of the towers, so a flameburst tower at level five now looks really crazy. Super intimidating, swirling fire, huge fireball, it looks really powerful.

GameWatcher: How about the structure of the game outside combat? You’ve added a new hub area for that sde of the game, right?

Phillip Asher: Yeah, we call it the Tavern. This is where you go after a battle with other players, it’s kind of a hub area where you can create new heroes, swap heroes out of your deck and change your items and so on. You’ll see the Squire’s dad over at the war table where you plan your missions and head to different areas, the way match-making works in this game is that there’s a set of level ranges in which you unlock new maps and new difficulties for the maps, so it’s not linear like the first game. Then we have the tavern innkeeper, who you can actually report bugs to if you find them, a weaponsmith, artificer, and a training area where you can try out different builds.

GameWatcher: I noticed from the off that the graphics and animations are really sharp, is that something you’ve been focusing on a lot?

Brad Logston: Oh, definitely. I always feel that Dungeon Defenders always had a cool, unique art style, but with DD2 we thought “okay, now we have to push things to look even better. How do we push our VFX to look completely cartoon-like?” Some of the things we’re doing with hand-painted textures on our VFX, it really brings out that life and character.

GameWatcher: How about the free-to-play options? What’s your approach to that business model? Because it’s not always a popular one…

Brad Logston: Well we want the basic game to be totally valid to play without you paying anything. That’s really important to us. Down the line, in terms of character customisation, we want you to be able to have custom towers, custom outfits and animations for your characters – we’ve got like a ninja costume for the Monk, Red Riding Hood for the Hunter. The phrase we use is “ethical monetisation”, so no pay-to-win, no in-game advantage for spending money, it’s all just things like cosmetics and inventory space, stuff like that. One cool thing is that our extra items all have gameplay challenges associated with them, so if you get a really cool costume and you keep using it, then over time it will eventually evolve and change, which is sort of a neat little reward for buying it.

GameWatcher: You’ve also got a team of players you call your Defence Council who’ve been testing out your game for a while now, how has that changed your development process?

Brad Logston: It’s been a really fun experience for us. We started development back in June or July of last year, and in November we brought in the first round of Councillors. We communicate with them very heavily, and then based on their feedback we petty dramatically change the game. The armour system that you saw today, for example, that was patched in last Friday, and the reason why is that we talked to the council and they preferred having the classic armour, helmet, rings, boots and so on rather than relics, which were going to take the place of those items. Dramatic changes of direction based on their feedback.

Another example, we’ve been putting a lot of effort into the combat system to avoid what we call “lawn-mowing”, which is hitting enemies without getting any real feedback from the action. For DD2 your character moves when you swing, ranged combat is much more satisfying with headshots and so on. We’d been concentrating on that a lot last year, and we didn’t really realise that tower defence was taking a backseat. Then the council got involved and told us “we like what you’re doing, but it’s not tower defence anymore. We want that back.” So, fair enough, that’s probably right. So we went back and worked on the towers, rebalanced the game to add more strategy and challenge, and then we go back to them and get a great response. We feel now we’ve got a really exciting, awesome experience that has just been helped so much by constant iteration and feedback from our fans.

GameWatcher: I wondered about that actually. I mean, you’re in a different position from a lot of developers that take a game into Early Access, because you’ve actually got a lot of content already established. How will you utilise the process?

Well, one of the things we’ve done as an evolution of the Defence Council is a new feature called ‘Influence’. Every day when players log in to the game or our website, they gain a point or vote that they can put forward to tell us what to do. So we’ll put out polls asking “hey, should we focus in this direction or on this, what’s your opinion on this?” And you know, it’s not based on play time, so it’s not like someone who’s played a thousand hours can come in and steam-roll the vote, it’s based on participation with what we’re doing. If you’re a casual player logging in every day you’re still accruing this currency, this voice. When we put votes out you can make your voice heard. For us we feel like it’s a really cool way to leverage Early Access to give players a voice, and really improve the game we’re creating.

It was a decision we took consciously about five months back to hold DD2 into Early Access, because we feel like the value add is… we have a good game here, people will enjoy it and there’s a reason to spend money on it and invest, because you’re not just getting a complete and reasonably well-balanced game, but you can also shape how we move forward and eventually into free-to-play.

Many thanks to both Phillip and Brad for chatting to me.