Trendy Entertainment: Summer Internship
This summer I had the opportunity to join Trendy Entertainment as a Game Design Intern. Throughout this 3 month project, I worked to on several different aspects of the game including helping the game launch and improving content for two patches after the release. This work ranged from simple tasks such as testing, critiquing, and improving campaign missions in order to generate better player retention, to assisting in system reworks, and most importantly brainstorming, implementing, testing,and releasing the brand new hero the Adept.
Internship: First Phase
The first few weeks of the internship were not as I was expecting. Coming into the studio, I did not realize that Trendy was just a few short weeks away from the final release of Dungeon Defenders II, a project that had been in development for nearly four years. After understanding the situation, I quickly took up whatever task I was given to do my part and help make the launch just that bit smoother. This meant hours of playtesting campaign missions, running them again and again, testing brand new scenarios and new mechanics. One such mechanic was the introduction of "mutators," unique campaign only twists designed to keep players on their toes. These mutators ranged from sky portals that would drop enemies onto one of the predetermined lanes to others requiring players to kill a boss monster to stop an endless onslaught of enemies, to waves consisting of only a single type of enemy. During this time my primary task was testing and critique, but I also managed to catch several dozen bugs that could have lead to problems down the line. This work with the campaign missions and catching several bugs helped to give Dungeon Defenders II the launch it deserved.
Internship: Second Phase
After the release of Dungeon Defenders II, I was moved from testing and bug-fixing to other tasks. Arguably the most important task I took on during this time was the organizing of all of the shards. In Dungeon Defenders II, shards are a mechanic that allow players to augment a hero's abilities or stats. This could mean anything from gaining a shield when an ability is used, increasing the damage of an ability or tower, to adding elemental or controlling effects. One of the major problems with the shard system however was the redundancy among the shard icons. This lead to confusion over which shards were which and their effects. On the developer side of things, it was also difficult to find a single shard as the in editor naming convention was not consistent and the folder structure was infuriating. In order to improve this system I first cataloged and organized all the shards into categories. Then collaborating with the creative director and others, we developed new, distinct shard icons for each category. With these implemented, I then took the Shard Lexicon, a document that was exclusively for keeping track of all the shards during the the new icon implementation, and turned it into the one-stop-shop for all shard information. Here developers could find a particular shard, which shard pack it dropped from, its effect, its icon, and even the shard's unique ID which they could use to spawn it in game. With these changes alone, we saw players were more easily able to find the shard they wanted and the Trendy team were more easily able to find what they needed in a quick, efficient manner.
Internship: Final Phase
After the implementation of the new shard icons, the team began work on the latest hero the Adept. While not the lead designer for her I still had plenty of impact on her design, her implementation, and her shards and talents. When first sitting down to discuss the Adept and her future role in Dungeon Defenders II, the various stakeholders and department heads gave us the challenge of meeting the following design challenges: deal with Dark Assassins, disrupt anti-air monopoly, expand upon marking targets.
With the challenges in place, we on the Adept Strike Team set to work. The first was to give the Adept an ability to help deal with a late game enemy known as the Dark Assassin. These enemies first appear in Chaos 5 and serve to disrupt players by appearing next to a player, dealing high damage, and stopping players from using abilities while the assassin attacks them. While the Dark Assassins only disable a player for a few moments, at that level of difficulty one Dark Assassin could mean the difference between success and failure. Working with the other designers, we eventually settled on the Arcane Bubble, a large dome like ability which stunned any enemies caught inside during its duration. This ability performs well against the Dark Assassins as players can place it down just as the assassin approaches and can stand in the bubble waiting to stun the assassin then remove them.
My primary task for the Adept was the second challenge, finding a way to break the Skyguard's monopoly. Due to how the Skyguard works, its ability to continually stun flyers, its constant rate of fire, high damage, and 360 firing zone, the Skyguard was often the only anti-air tower that many players would use. While I developed several ideas, including a mortar based tower that many of the design team liked and wanted to pursue (a concept image you can see to the right), we ultimately settled for a burst-fire tower called the Hailstorm Tower which made targets it hit take 15% more damage from all sources. This was a fairly easy tower to implement and allowed us to reuse many pieces from other towers in order to keep production quick and cheap. Ultimately, the tower has proven to be a big success.
The third and final challenge that we tackled was the idea of expanding upon marking targets, a unique mechanic for the Adept and her partner class the Apprentice. With the Apprentice, players mark targets with their primary attacks then use Arcane Volley to fire bolts of energy into the air to finish them off. The trick with marking targets is we did not want it to be another step the player had to go through in order to be effective. We wanted to allow players to be able to plan out their move, mark the right targets, then unleash hell at just the right time. With the Adept we explored a lot of ideas such as a chain lightning effect where marked targets would unleash an explosion of electricity and even going into a gravity ability that lifted marked targets into the air before slamming them down. Ultimately we went with the current iteration of Arc Lightning which is a big success with users as they can plan out their moves and position themselves for massive payoffs.
The last major aspect I worked on for the Adept was her Shards and her Talents. The shards, as previously described, are various effects that help to augment certain abilities to either add new effects or bolster current ones. Some of these were fairly simple such as Thunderbolts and Lightning, which just increased the damage of Arc Lightning by 40% once fully upgraded. Others were more complex such as Explosive Finale which causes the Arcane Bubble to explode once its lifespan is over. No matter the case, the team pulled together and we created some powerful and interesting shards for the Adept. The Talents for the Adept are a special resource players put ascension points into in order to increase their damage, health, critical chance, etc, in order to deal with the more powerful late-game enemies.
With the shipping of the Adept, the remainder of my time at Trendy was spent getting ready to leave and working on Firing Solution for Series EV2. Overall my time at Trendy taught me a lot and gave me a small idea of what it must be like to work in an actual studio. And while my time at Trendy was short, it renewed in me the drive to break into the industry, to keep striving to improve, and to keep making games.