Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin News

The first thought that popped into my head upon dipping my toes into Defender’s Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is that they don’t make tower defense games like this anymore. The second thought was that my tea was suddenly stone cold and that the past four hours had mysteriously disappeared. This is pure videogame comfort food, if you’ve even the slightest bit of nostalgia for the latter era of flash game design, and the boom of the indie scene. This may be a relic lost in time, after over a decade of delays, but it still shines bright...
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Ok, quick hotfix. Thanks everyone for the bug reports! Hit a few of the more annoying issues:

• Widescreen should behave a lot better now
  
• Steam Deck controller issues should be improved
  
• Save games from the demo will hopefully work now
  
• A few text typos
  

Hello everyone! I’m as shocked as anyone else to say this, but Defender’s Quest II is now available on Steam! It has been a long journey with a development schedule in the Duke Nukem Forever timescale (though still shorter!), but we’re finally here!

This is obviously not how we planned things, and we regret that our backers had to wait half a generation to see the results of our work. But, we were committed to finishing the project despite all of the challenges, and we can now say we’ve accomplished that.

Development speed picked up over the past 18 months or so when we secured support and funding from our fantastic publisher, Armor Games. Just after that, Patrick McCarthy joined the team and really drove the game forward. While intending to focus on level design, he ended up doing a ton of programming, and when Lars had to step away from the project Patrick took over and almost completely shouldered the development. I can’t express how much we appreciate the Herculean effort he has put in over this time, going far above and beyond what he had signed up for.

The game has also changed a lot over the past decade. It’s a sequel in the Final Fantasy sense of the word - many of the mechanics and feel of the game are consistent, but the art, characters, world, and plot are quite different. We’ve made some core changes that we believe improve the gameplay and create interesting decisions. And Patrick’s puzzle-designer background means that the Advanced versions of some of the maps can get _quite_ tricky!

In any case, we are so grateful to everyone who has given us support in myriad ways over the years, and we’re excited to finally be able to share this game with you. We hope you all enjoy it!

Sincerely,
Anthony

P.S. - If you had problems with getting an early demo version of the game (literally almost 2 years old!) when you first bought it, we apologize for the confusion and it is fixed now. We had everything set up except for one little flag on the backend. It’s always something! 😅

P.P.S. - If you purchased the game from our website, you should have a Steam key available in your Humble Library (we used a Humble Bundle widget to manage sales, so it is stored in their library). We will do our best to stay on top of support requests and are trying to figure out how to send out a reminder email to everyone.

Hey everyone,

It’s been a while since I’ve updated you on development progress on Defender’s Quest 2 and I wanted to take some time today to give you an update on where we’re at.

Due to some family emergencies on the development team, we’re pushing the launch back to 2024 to give us time to take care of ourselves and our families. Your support means the world to us, and we want to make sure we’re releasing a game that lives up to our and our players’ expectations while ensuring the team is well looked after.

The game is in the final phase of development, which means we’re spending our time fixing bugs and putting the final bits of polish into the game. I can’t wait for you all to play it, but in the meantime here are some of the newest things I’ve added to the game:





We’ll be posting more updates as we lead up to launch. Thank you for being a part of this journey!

- Level Up Labs

Defender's Quest 2: Mists of Ruin is the sequel to the cult classic tower defense game, Defender's Quest: Mists of Ruin. The classic character-driven tower-defense gameplay is back, with all new characters, all new abilities, and a host of new monsters to fight.

Catch this event as developer co-lead Lars Doucet shows off the new demo, but also details the game's long history of development and what exactly has transpired since the first game come out. Feel free to ask questions during the livestream.