DUNGEON DEFENDERS: GOING ROGUE
Dungeon Defenders: Going Rogue combines the tower defense elements of its predecessor Dungeon Defenders with faster, rougelite, action gameplay. Select your hero, survive the waves of foes, unlock new weapons and runes, and take on the bosses that await you in this reimagined classic by Chromatic Games.
Returning characters can be found in Going Rogue, but you will notice changes in their towers (that are no longer permanent!) and general abilities to fit the roguelite genre. Described as the perfect way to kill time between classes, the Dungeon Defenders universe finally has a fast-pace option.
Going Rogue is currently available in early access on all consoles (Switch, Xbox, Playstation), as well as Steam.
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Sarah: This is Sarah and I’m here with Chromatic Games which has Dungeon Defenders Awakening and Going Rogue. Who do I have with me today?
Evan: Evan. I am a 3D artist with the company and I also do marketing and convention stuff. Definitely a lot of fun.
Sarah: Awesome. So you do the graphics?
Evan: Yeah, I get to do the cosmetics and some of the DDA, and I’m working on starting to make more of the world-building stuff as well.
Sarah: That’s awesome. So can you give us a small summary of the game itself?
Evan: So the game Going Rogue is a little different than the rest of our games. Our traditional games are tower defense RPGs so they are more of a grind and more time-consuming to most people. And so we thought it might be more interesting to make something more fast-paced. So Going Rogue is kind of a solution that we found — where it’s like 30 to 40-minute sessions of the full game. You go through different levels of bosses, find new items, and you’re able to upgrade your talent tree throughout, and you can play with up to four people in co-op as well. So definitely a lot of fun to just play quickly if you have a little bit of time between classes or something like that. I'm a student right now so that’s how it works for me.
Sarah: Right, so the regular Dungeon Defenders (because I love it) — it's like the regular tower games which I know take forever. So that's really cool that you have the ability to kind of make them faster paced game with the same characters as the original one. Is it the same characters as the original one?
Evan: So the characters have some redesigns to them. Not only visually but some of them have new towers, as well as their abilities are a little bit altered to fit the faster-paced game. And not only that but the towers also only last for a certain amount of time so they're not a permanent structure that you can rely on. You have to put them down during the combat phase and they only last a couple of seconds, sometimes longer depending on your upgrades. They're really more of an ability than a tower now.
Sarah: That’s cool. What inspired your part of the creation, like is there anything that you draw from? What makes ya do your arts?
Evan: Well, I guess specifically for going rogue we definitely went through a lot of roguelike games because we wanted to get a lot of good inspiration from popular games. So Hades was one of the ones we looked at and that's how we kind of figured out our talent system. We also looked at Gunfire Reborn for some of how that works and how their gameplay kind of played out. There's plenty of others but really it was just those two for me since I played them before and they were my biggest inspirations for anything that we worked for on this.
Sarah: What has been your favorite part so far? In just your part of the process, your role.
Evan: In general?
Sarah: Yeah, like in general. What has been your favorite part about working with Dungeon Defenders?
Evan: I would say, I mean, besides conventions, because I love the conventions. I guess being able to talk to the community and start to kind of change how we're updating the game. So a lot of new systems in check where we have new leadership and such where we're talking to the community trying to see what they want, and then we're putting that in. And I personally really like talking to streamers like the one we have here as well as the other active community members that we have.
Sarah: Nice. All right, if you could give a piece of advice — because you said you were a student — if you can give a piece of advice to anybody trying to break into this or trying to do what you do, what could you do? Or if you could go back in time and like to change something and do it again, what would that be?
Evan: The biggest thing I could say is make sure that you — even though like I'm not very much not super big on going out all the time (you know, as gamers can sometimes be) — getting out there and putting yourself out there and talking to people in the industry is really important. Even at conventions like this; talking to developers and such you can really find out a lot. I got sort of lucky with certain things. So I wouldn't change anything in the past since I ended up finding them while Evan: I was walking on campus at UF. They had a booth at a part-time job fair. And they were kind of recruiting a little.
Sarah: Yeah!
Evan: But just putting yourself out there and making sure that you're not just saying that I can do this and this, but you're also talking about how you're willing to learn new things and try new things is important. Especially with indie companies since there's so much that you're trying to do as a small team.
Sarah: Right? Anything else you want to tell the people it could be about you if you want to plug yourself or if there's anything really cool you want to tell us?
Evan: I don’t think I’ll plug myself just because I want to keep it more about the company. I guess you know follow us on Twitter and Instagram: ChromaticGames. But also new updates for DD2: new character coming soon.
Sarah: *audible gasp* ooo!
Evan: DDA is going to be having a big chapter 2 update with maps and runes and other awesome new things coming. DDGR actually, as of today, during PAX, the demo build should be out on Steam for free. And EV should also be coming out today or tomorrow officially for the full purchased game that we have.
Sarah: I love it! So, you said Steam… Is there anywhere else we can find the game or find information about it?
Evan: Yeah, so DDGR is only on Steam but if you want to play any of our other games like DD2 or DDA, DDA is on all consoles — Switch, Xbox, Playstation. DD2 I know is on Xbox and PlayStation. If you want to find out more about that I would recommend going to Chromatic Games, our website. If you look us up you’ll find it. Also if you're looking for any jobs or anything like that, too — we talked about that earlier — there's plenty of careers up on the site that you could check out. So hit us up if you're interested in that too.
Sarah: All right. Awesome. So this has been Sarah with Evans, from Chromatic Games. Thank you again for interviewing with me.
Evan: Of course, no problem, I had fun.