Devlog #2 — Demo Release!

It has been a while since our last post, but we haven't been sitting idle. Today, the Dreadful Defenders' demo gets released on Steam after receiving some major updates! Here is what's new...

Tutorial

Since Dreadful Defenders brings a lot of novelty to the Roguelite and Tower Defense genres, making a tutorial that teaches everything needed without being too dense was both crucial and terribly challenging. Now, after 2 complete reworks and more adjustments than we can count, we think that the tutorial is finally in an appropriate shape.

Procedural Generation

The map is now procedurally generated. We still have plenty of adjustments to make on it, as right now some maps make the game much easier to play than others because of how special tiles and obstacles are placed.

Balance Changes

There have been plenty of small adjustments, but here are the three major ones:

Game Difficulty

So far, the game was mostly played during festivals, so we made it easy to allow players to quickly get into the game and explore its mechanics without dying too quickly.

For the Steam demo, the focus completely shift. There are more enemies and their hit points increase faster. The game is still beatable, but expect to lose a few times before you master the mechanics and achieve your first victory.

Benedictions Buff

We reduced the amount of stats Defenders gain by default when leveling up and doubled the strength of Benedictions keeping Defenders roughly as powerful as before while making the player's choices of Benedictions matter twice as much

Visual updates

UI

The pause, options and game over menus weren't visible most of the time and had been neglected so far, so we gave them a complete overhaul.

We also did a lot of small changes, but for that, two pictures will be worth a thousand words so here's a before/after:

Defenders Level Up

The visual of Defenders now evolves with every level they gain. The most flagrant changes are when a Defender gets their first and last upgrades, letting you spot at a glance Defenders of levels 1 and 6.

Next Steps

Here are the next big features that will be added to the demo, in no particular order:

Difficulty Levels

We don't mean something like easy/normal/hard. We intend to add many difficulty levels that gradually make the game harder by changing numbers or adding rules, and each difficulty would be unlocked be beating the game in the previous one.

Gods

Dreadful Defender is about reviving an old God, but this God has no impact in game. Yet. We want to let you choose which God to serve at the beginning of every run, with each God granting special bonuses in game.

Metaprogression & Content

We have plenty of amazing ideas of Defenders, Benedictions and Relics to add to the game. But to avoid dumping advanced mechanics on new players, we need to add a metaprogression system.

We don't like grindy metaprogression, so Dreadful Defenders' won't be. Its main purpose will be to give you access to new content regularly, keeping the game fresh and letting new players familiarize themselves with the game's base mechanics before introducing complex content.