2025-09 Dev-log #1

First of all, we sincerely thank all players who are following Mawang: Dark Lord Defense. As we prepare for the September demo and Tokyo Game Show, we would like to take a moment to share how this project started and how it has developed so far.

First, let us introduce Zoe, who is working on the amazing pixel art.

Zoe

Hello, I’m Zoe, the main artist. It feels exciting and surreal to finally be able to share my story with you through this Dev-log.

I would like to tell you how Mawang

Dark Lord Defense came to have its current concept and art style.

The project began at an in-house game jam.

Two programmers started the project under the name Dark Lord Defense. Since there was no artist back then, everything was built using assets only. Before I joined, it was difficult for them to create original art, so they relied on available assets.

The game received positive feedback at the jam, and as the project naturally transitioned into full development, I joined the team as the artist.

This was my first pixel art project.

At the beginning, I reused existing assets to practice and adjust the bright and cute style into something that matched the darker world of Dark Lord Defense.

As development continued, I realized that the existing assets alone had clear limits in fully expressing the concept we wanted.

So I started retouching them and creating entirely new buildings and characters, gradually building up our own art style.

Since tower defense as a genre naturally has many enemies appearing on screen, flashy effects may look appealing at first, but they easily tire the player during long play sessions.

To solve this issue, I analyzed roguelike-style games. Many of them used simple monochrome or geometric effects for common enemies, and reserved flashy colors and animations for bosses or special enemies.

Based on this, we applied simple yet intuitive and high-quality effects in our game.

Boss unit skills are made the flashiest and most noticeable.

While preparing Dark Lord Defense, I often shared concept sketches with GPT to work on character designs. By feeding GPT with details about Lua, we worked together on visualization.

The results were surprisingly satisfying, and received positive feedback not only within our team but also from others in the company.

After trying out different versions of Lua across various ages, we finally arrived at the current design.

Currently, since the project is at a resource-intensive stage, instead of perfecting every detail from the start, we are focusing on producing a large quantity at a solid quality baseline. Later, we will refine and enhance the details step by step.

This approach is a strategic choice to balance development speed and overall quality.

We also plan to continuously add new decks, units, and presentation elements to raise immersion and completeness of the game.

That was the journey of the art design. Now, let us bring in our director Jiwoo for more about how the gameplay mechanics of Dark Lord Defense came to be.

Jiwoo: Hello, I’m Jiwoo, director of Mawang: Dark Lord Defense. While Zoe has covered the visual evolution, I’d like to talk with our developer Haon about how the game mechanics came together.

Our company held a game jam alongside our other project, PengPong. Every developer dedicated themselves