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Well, if you were still holding out for DQ, at long last: https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly?March27 It finally made it into a Humble Bundle.  Congrats, Lars.Moved to this page: ___________________________ The hypening begins. Update stuff below, but you're better off going to the site:The Website posted:http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2014/03/defenders-quest-2-march-update.html - Full article, links, pictures, stuff. Alrighty! Time for an update on where we are in Defender's Quest 2. Those of you who follow me on twitter know I've been active, but I sometimes forget that our followers are spread out over multiple channels - our forum, our steam page, our gog page, our newsletter/website, our blog, etc. So, I'm going to try to shift from my "ignore everything but twitter" mode that I've unconsciously slipped into. From now on I'll try to supplement my daily twitter spew with decently-sized blog posts from time to time, and then link to them in all our forums, etc. What We've Been Doing First of all, until very recently we've been finishing up the last bits of legacy support for the original Defender's Quest. Now, you might ask, "Why would you spend all that time supporting an old game when you have a shiny new sequel to work on?" Several reasons: 1 It builds up sustainable long-term revenue 2 Our strategy is to slowly build DQ2 preorders over time to avoid Kickstarter-style pressure. 3 Send a clear signal that we really do support our games long-term We have been doing some DQ2 work in the last few months, of course, but it's mostly been pre-production and part-time engine work. Lots of game mechanics and design depend on the story, and we wanted to give James (our writer) the proper amount of time to go through several drafts. Oh, and my wife and I had our first baby (as did Anthony and his wife) about 8 months ago. So that's been a little bit of a time-sink All that said, we have gotten plenty of stuff done and have some things to show. Alpha and Beta are still a ways off, and the official final release date is "When It's Done." First I'm going to talk about the DQ1 legacy support we've been working on, then I'll get to the DQ2 stuff. DQ1 Stuff Six languages!  The biggest thing we've done for DQ1 legacy support is add five foreign language packs -- German, Japanese, Czech, Korean, and Russian. We contracted Fabian Bindel and Thomas Faust for our German translation, and worked with PLAYISM, a Japanese PC games publisher, for our Japanese translation. The japanese version just recently launched on their site (english page here). The Czech, Korean and Russian translations were generously provided by awesome fan volunteers. (The Czech translation was provided by our own forum superstar 'coyot', the Korean translation was done by Team.SM, and the Russian translation by a large group of fans). It was a lot of work to get all these translations working, particularly when it came to user interface and font stuff, but we've learned a lot from the experience, and thanks to all that, DQ2's localization process will be a lot smoother. In fact, we've already written the framework and released it under MIT license on Github, behold -- FireTongue! Like the rest of DQ2, it's written in Haxe, and is already being used in other cross-platform games, like this one! It was even featured in a brief talk at this year's GDC localization summit. SteamOS, bugs, etc We fixed a lot of bugs and have been working on getting DQ1 running on SteamOS ever since we attended Steam Dev Days. Since DQ1 is still stuck with Adobe AIR, this is not an easy task. Although we have a good solution for regular Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Mint, etc), SteamOS is harder to get working. The difference is that SteamOS has a unique default setup that changes how the default user interacts with commands like sudo. It's easy enough to work around it on my SteamBox by messing with the configuration, but we need to create a simple script that will work flawlessly for any user using only default factory settings. Thanks to the heroic efforts of Alexander Sturm and the nice folks at Valve, we've finally figured it out, but it's not up and running *just* yet. As you can imagine, I can't wait to have all my tech running natively on Linux via Haxe rather than AIR, as I blogged about recently. We also need to get a Linux build ready for GOG Linux. Given that the intersection of GOG players and Linux users are solidly unified in their hatred of Adobe AIR, this is more of a delicate communication problem for us to solve rather than a technical one, but we'll get it sorted out soon enough. Thagomizing Finally, I've been steadily looking for opportunities to chase DQ1's "Stegosaurus Tail." You can read the linked article to get the full story, but the short version is that we've made more money in the second year of release than in the first. By relentlessly chasing down promotional opportunities, we can keep introducing brand new people to DQ1, keep the bank account afloat, and thanks to our silly mini-ARG update, let new players know about DQ2 and drive pre-orders. Maintaining DQ1 sales is important because we don't want to rely entirely on pre-order revenue; the entire purpose of running a low-key "anti-kickstarter" is to avoid the intense pressure and hype usually associated with traditional crowdfunding drives. FUN FACT: in the aftermath of writing the aforementioned article, I learned that the proper scientific term for the spiky bit of a stegosaurus tail is a "Thagomizer", originally coined by Gary Larson in a Far Side cartoon, and has since been officially adopted by paleontologists! So from now on, I'm using the verb "to thagomize" to refer to the act of pursuing promotional opportunities for an old video game in order to drive further sales spikes on the long tail. DQ2 Stuff Okay, so you probably want to hear about all the DQ2 stuff we've been doing! Before I go any further, allow me to properly deflate your expectations with a metaphor. The Iceberg Effect Here's a picture of an iceberg. Notice that almost all of it is under water, and only a tiny bit pokes above the surface: A lot of work goes into making a video game, but the only part you can really experience as a player is the bit that pokes above the surface of the water. You see the graphics, the audio, the controls, but you can't see the thousands of lines of code behind the surface that keep the whole structure in order. And even if you could, you couldn't see all the planning, discussion, communication, etc. When you're watching a game in development, what you're going to see is a whole lot of nothing for a long time, and then suddenly it will seem as if there's a sudden flurry of activity close to the end as stuff finally starts to poke up above the water line. Only a few of you were following us back in DQ1 pre-alpha days, and absolutely nobody was following us for the whole first year of its development. For most of you (especially post-Steam), DQ1 just arrived fully-formed without having to wait for anything. So, please understand that "visual progress" is a really terrible metric for actual progress. With all that said, here's what we've go to show for ourselves so far. Arts! Karen Petrasko has been working on some new concept art! Here's what the inside of a domed city might look like (click for hi-res mockup):  You can expect the same level of detail/visual fidelity in our battles, though I doubt very many will take place inside of a town. The above is more likely to be used in our in-engine cutscenes for when our characters are in a domed city. And here's some random bits of concept art:   Here's a sketch of what our overworld map might look like:  And here's a new character we've been working on, who just goes by the name "Smug Captain" for now:  Dean Dodrill is still on board for this project, but he's had to take some time off to properly support/thagomize his last project, Dust: An Elysian Tail, and recover from a brutal, multi-year development slog. So we don't have any animations to show just yet, but we'll let you know when we do. Musics! Meanwhile, Kevin has been working on some of our first music tracks, which you can listen to here: Defender's Quest 2 concept piece (mp3) - http://www.defendersquest.com/2/content/media/audio/defq2_concept_WIP.mp3 "Enemy City" WIP piece (mp3) - http://www.defendersquest.com/2/content/media/audio/enemy_city_WIP.mp3 Untitled WIP piece (mp3) - http://www.defendersquest.com/2/content/media/audio/untitled_WIP.mp3 What's Next? So there's still a lot of work to be done. I really need to dig into the new battle system engine, and story material is starting to mature. Then we can draw on that for a few story announcements, we can get art from that, get music from that, etc, and roll that all back into the design. When will Alpha be? I hope to have something playable before the first half of the year is over, but no promises. Other stuff we're looking into is whether it's worth it or not to plan for a console release. Now, there's no chance we'd be interested in from-scratch ports, so everything depends on us being able to get the Haxe/OpenFL stack working for those systems. In theory, it's possible, it's just a matter of building out the native targets. So far we've made some good progress using HTML5 (believe it or not) for the WiiU's Nintendo Web Framework, but what we'd really like is truly native support on everything, especially the 3DS and PS3/4. We're putting little feelers out and seeing if we can find the right people for this, because I sure as heck can't build it myself. So far we have some promising leads but we can't announce any of that just yet. Let's just say I'm not regretting switching to Haxe. And in any case, our top priority is getting the game running on Windows/Mac/Linux. If -- and I do emphasize "IF" -- we release on console, we will make sure that is most certainly not at the expense of PC development. Jesto fucked around with this message at 02:43 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 02:41
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That's a good update, ta! Speaking of the ARG he mentioned in there, what was that about?
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Mar 28, 2014 23:18
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DQ2 talk has motivated me to reinstall DQ1 since I never did finish NG+ with my only-story-characters party. And apparently the last time I played the game it didn't support cloud saves, so I'm getting to start over from the beginning - not necessarily a bad thing. I would like to ask if there are any skill point 'guides' out there, especially for the 'no-unnamed-recruits' type playthroughs. The first playthrough is going quickly so far but I remember some of the NG+ battles (and especially the super sheep one) being freaking ridiculous.
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Mar 28, 2014 23:43
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WarLocke posted:DQ2 talk has motivated me to reinstall DQ1 since I never did finish NG+ with my only-story-characters party. And apparently the last time I played the game it didn't support cloud saves, so I'm getting to start over from the beginning - not necessarily a bad thing. I've never finished all of NG+ so I'm probably any kind of authority but what seemed to work well up until the point I stopped was pumping as many points as possible into the "status effect" or equivalent part of the skill tree when appropriate. I guess the logic at work is that one strong attack is better than a bunch of weak ones. Obviously you'll want to unlock attacks the other half of the tree upgrades before putting points into them.
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Mar 29, 2014 00:15
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Sir Rabia Tirnova posted:That's a good update, ta! You find various puzzles hidden around the game in cutscenes / battles, that blip when you have the Book of Secrets equipped. If you figure out the puzzle, you can enter it at the Strange Monument (which also appears with BoS equipped) and get Gold or Unobtanium Skulls for it. Gold skulls can be used to trade for 3 unique spellbooks for Azra. Unobtanium Skulls are used to get a book which is either more or less an anchievement, or can be ported into Defender's Quest 2 for some sort of bonus via your save file. WarLocke posted:I would like to ask if there are any skill point 'guides' out there, especially for the 'no-unnamed-recruits' type playthroughs. The first playthrough is going quickly so far but I remember some of the NG+ battles (and especially the super sheep one) being freaking ridiculous. You can reset skillpoints at any time for a fee of some scrap via the party screen, so feel free to experiment.
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Mar 29, 2014 09:51
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 It looks like they bagged a big one. INTRODUCING: Nobuo Uematsu, legendary videogame composer, best known for his work in Final Fantasy. http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2014/04/nobuo-uematsu-to-work-on-defenders.html quote:Level Up Labs is pleased to announce that Defender's Quest II: Mist of Ruin, will feature a main theme composed by none other than Nobuo Uematsu, the world-famous video game composer best known for his work on the classic Final Fantasy series. Collaborating with him will be Kevin Penkin, the composer for the original Defender's Quest: Valley of the Forgotten.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:10
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I just saw those tweets too. That is so cool. Really pumped for DQ2
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Apr 2, 2014 16:11
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That's certainly a surprise, best of luck with developing DQ2.
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Apr 2, 2014 16:46
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That's really cool. Lots of big names getting on board with this project.
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Apr 2, 2014 17:36
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There's currently an AMA ongoing at the moment as well, if anyone has any questions. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/220xfl/we_are_game_developers_of_anodyne_defenders_quest/
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Apr 2, 2014 18:33
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Wow, congrats. Already love the new look, cant wait for DQ2.
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Apr 2, 2014 18:59
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You could not have picked a worse time for the AMA, considering P-Mol's currently doing one for Godus!
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Apr 2, 2014 19:17
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How in hell did you manage to get Nobuo Uematsu?
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Apr 2, 2014 20:40
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Schwarzwald posted:How in hell did you manage to get Nobuo Uematsu? Repeat ad infinitum jesus christ good work though, really looking forward to release now. e: quote:[–]kevinpenkin 8 points 4 hours ago tithin fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Apr 2, 2014 |
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Apr 2, 2014 23:34
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Hey everybody! Whew, yesterday was crazy. Got any questions for me the AMA didn't answer?
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Apr 3, 2014 19:27
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larsiusprime posted:Hey everybody! Whew, yesterday was crazy. Got any questions for me the AMA didn't answer? Yes, release date please
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Apr 4, 2014 07:33
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Has Nobuo actually played DQ1? Did he give any impressions on it, if so? Are you going to be working with him directly, or via the internet or is he just going to collaborate with Kevin and pass his work along? By 'main theme', do you mean the title screen music, or...? Is having him on the credits of your game going to make it much, much easier to port to other platforms?  Any in mind beyond 3DS?How did you meet Dean Dodrill, and how did you get him on board, given how radically different your game genres and styles are? Have preorder numbers surprised you, considering that all you have to go off of is concept art? Treasure Adventure World, a Chucklefish-backed game, has significantly less by comparison.Sir Rabia Tirnova posted:Yes, release date please That's the first step on the road to disappointment for any game early in development. Do you really want that? 
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Apr 4, 2014 09:54
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larsiusprime posted:Hey everybody! Whew, yesterday was crazy. Got any questions for me the AMA didn't answer? I hope the game is meeting your expectations so far and the switch to OpenFL has met minimal roadbumps.
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Apr 4, 2014 11:38
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Hey folks! Let's hit these one at a time. 1) Release date: When it's done. But you knew that :P 2) All about Uematsu-san -->I don't have direct contact with him, so you'd have to ask Kevin in most cases. -->By "Main Theme" we mean the signature piece of music. Other tracks might reference it, and we probably won't use it for the title screen. -->No idea what his involvement will mean for us in terms of added notoriety/etc. We'll see 3) Dean Dodrill: he's worked with friends of mine, so I just emailed him and struck up an acquaintanceship. We have similar personalities and he liked DQ1 a lot 4) Preorder numbers have surprised me a bit, it makes me excited to see what we can do when we have more to show.
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Apr 4, 2014 14:49
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I'm a little late to the party, am currently playing 3/4 of the way through game+ and I have to say this game is stupidly good. I've put off Battlefield and diablo to finish it. It's worth twice what I paid for it, and have gotten a few of my friends to buy it. however, I have a few questions: I currently have an i7/870 with a Radeon 7950 and 16g of ram, and at times the game stutters to a standstill in framerate. I've never heard anyone else complain about framerate issues, so I'm curious if anyone else is having this issue. (Still awesome, even with this and still playable just annoying). edit: an answer to a question - can play bf4 and crysis (1-3) on ultra, but this game stutters? 
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Apr 28, 2014 01:21
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Catpants McStabby posted:I'm a little late to the party, am currently playing 3/4 of the way through game+ and I have to say this game is stupidly good. I've put off Battlefield and diablo to finish it. It's worth twice what I paid for it, and have gotten a few of my friends to buy it. I played on a business-class Dell laptop with an old i7 and 8GB DDR3 with 0 issues, something is definitely weird.
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Apr 28, 2014 01:27
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Some more DQ1/2 news. http://www.fortressofdoors.com/2014/05/defenders-quest-2-engine-progress.html quote:First of all, I've been working full-time on the DQ2 engine for a good little while now, and I finally have something to show. That said, we're still going a little slow on getting DQ2 "CONTENT" up so what I have to show today is engine work. DQ1 being re-released in an engine that didn't require 800x600 sounds pretty nice, but hopefully as a post-DQ2 sort of thing so it doesn't delay development. But man, does it look great. quote:edit: an answer to a question - can play bf4 and crysis (1-3) on ultra, but this game stutters? That could be because DQ1 is in flash and flash is a poorly optimized piece of poo poo that is getting progressively worse with each update made to it.
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May 8, 2014 08:36
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Looks like there's one last(?) update for DQ, but it's only really relevant if you don't speak English. In which case, how are you here?quote:Hey everyone! It's also 50% off in the summer sale this week. http://store.steampowered.com/app/218410/
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Jun 19, 2014 18:12
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Started playing this game again, its still great.
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Jun 19, 2014 20:44
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Has anyone here played the More Items mod and can reccomend/not reccomend it? It seems like it adds a lot, but you have to start a new save file to play it. http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=231473461&searchtext= quote:Features: All the new items do look pretty nice in the screenshots, and the extra battles are intriguing.
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Jul 10, 2014 11:53
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Some interesting Defender's Quest news in the lull between DQ2 updates. http://www.fortressofdoors.com/the-quest-to-upscale-pixel-art/ Summary: Potential 'HD' remake/upgrade? of Defender's Quest 1 once the engine for 2 is finished. Game would be able to run at higher resolutions due to scaling. Graphics showing what this would look like for the sprites and overworld. If DQ2 is brought to consoles, a DQ1 port to them is an inevitability. I personally enjoy the pixel art, but the smoothness of the new ones is interesting.
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Aug 28, 2014 16:30
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I think if any art needs to be upgraded in a potential update it should be the art in between levels because its kind of the worst of it. Whether something looks like pixel art is fairly inconsequential to me during the game but the character art especially really is just bad.
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Aug 28, 2014 17:26
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I think the pixel art is the major concern because pixel art doesn't scale well at all when changing resolutions. Smoothing it out helps with that, I guess?
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Aug 28, 2014 18:53
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I think the upscaled art looks fine. I'm guessing that the people who created it are a bit more sensitive to how it looks because it's their baby. I'm sure even the most hardcore fans aren't going to be bothered if the art gets changed a little as it's ported to the new engine.
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Aug 29, 2014 09:19
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Some thoughts on the Tower Defense genre as a whole. http://www.fortressofdoors.com/optimizing-tower-defense-for-focus-and-thinking-defenders-quest/ I mostly agree with all of this, especially the anti-air issues. Also quote:If you have 24 different kinds of towers, it's almost a mathematical certainty that at least half of them are strictly or effectively dominated by the others. There's only so many combinations of statistics, archetypes, status effects, and other kinds of flavoring to properly segregate the usefulness of every class of tower. I don't really mind overlap of usefulness if every tower is unique and all towers can be placed down. Which it seems to be where DQ2 is going. No tower is competing against other towers, they all work in unison.
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Sep 23, 2014 06:13
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Currently $1 in the newest weekly Humble Bundle. https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly I can't imagine anyone who might want it that hasn't played it yet, though.
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Sep 26, 2014 02:04
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Jesto posted:Currently $1 in the newest weekly Humble Bundle. Personally, I've already hawked this game to everyone I know who might like this. Also, thanks for linking that article a few days ago, a great read.
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Sep 26, 2014 19:19
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The new animation style in action. https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/BytoxAyCUAEb-Eb.mp4 Not necessarily better or worse than the pixel animation. Just different, I guess. Interesting at least. What's interesting is she appears to be facing southwest, rather than just south or west. Eight direction animations as opposed to four with DQ1's pixel art style, I wonder?
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Sep 29, 2014 17:43
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Jesto posted:Currently $1 in the newest weekly Humble Bundle. I had wanted it for a long time but never got around to it cause of many other things on my Steam backlog, and being busy as hell in real life. A friend gave me his Steam copy from the sale, and I am happy with this game. Time for NG+ now.
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Oct 1, 2014 06:06
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Hey guys! Big news today 1) Defender's Quest 2 Art, characters, music, news, etc. 2) Announcing DQ1 HD special edition upgrade. Read all about it! DQ1 in HD????? Indeed. With spiffied up art, too:  Sprites are getting fancied up too.  And some DQ2 stuffs:   To answer your question Jesto, the SW facing is an efficiency thing. This way we can use two facings + mirroring (SW == SE, NW == NE) to cover four quadrants of space for most characters, rather than 3 facings + mirroring from the original game (N, S, and W == E) to cover the same amount of space per facing. This frees us up to put more effort into fewer unique animations rather than spreading that effort over more facings. There's plenty more details in the blog post so be sure to read it! larsiusprime fucked around with this message at 22:54 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 22:47
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I like that you're including a toggle between old and new art for the HD version. The new art (at least for the protagonist) is more polished, but I think a lot of the character was lost in the transition. The new art looks like you could find it in any number of other games while the original is really unique and evocative. The sprite art's a huge improvement, though, and I'll be picking it up regardless 'cus I really enjoyed it the first time around.
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Nov 4, 2014 23:07
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HD updates can be a bit jarring, but I think they're usually for the best. It took me a while to get used to Escape Goat's switch from pixel graphics to HD, but eventually it just kinda clicked and ended up making a lot more sense in its new form than it ever did in pixel form. I'm pretty sure the same will end up being true for Defender's Quest, although I do think the original graphics were charming already!
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Nov 5, 2014 00:30
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Wow, all of that looks amazing. The animations look very fun, and I like that one of the only criticisms people had against DQ1 ('cheap webcomic cutscene art') will finally be gone. Azra looks wonderful in her new model, more like an actual person. As for this http://www.fortressofdoors.com/dq2-update-and-announcing-dq1hd/ Everything here is awesome! The music sounds very cool, better than I've heard in any other TD game. I'm just hoping there's another song that uses the same themes as the overworld music in Defender's Quest 1, it's a very unique sounding song that helps the player wind down between battles. http://www.defendersquest.com/2/content/media/audio/overworld_battle.mp3 http://www.defendersquest.com/2/content/media/audio/the_ride_WIP.mp3 The character bios at the bottom are very nice as well. I'm going to enjoy seeing these characters interact in cutscenes, I think.
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Nov 5, 2014 03:26
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Thanks everyone! And just so it's clear, there will be individually toggle-able options to use the old art for either cutscenes, sprites, or both.
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Nov 5, 2014 14:27
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Oh, something I forgot to mention. Do my ears deceive me, or does The Ride at :13 reference To Battle from DQ1? Musical callbacks are always nice to catch. Is DQ1's soundtrack largely being used as a reference for DQ2's? I wouldn't mind at all, if so.
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Nov 5, 2014 15:58
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