Hey everyone! It's been a while.

We've been posting monthly progress reports for the past few years over at www.fortressofdoors.com, but now we're finally bringing Defender's Quest 2 back out of the shadows and on to Steam. The new store page is now available here:

Defender's Quest 2 Steam store page

The latest game in the Defender's Quest series takes place in a brand new setting with all new characters and monsters. We've got a whole new art style, fresh new mechanics, and a much larger main story map.

For more details you can check out our new website here:
https://www.defendersquest2.com


Fortress of Doors announcement:
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/re-announcing-defenders-quest-2/


Presskit from our publisher, Armor Games Studio:
Defender's Quest 2 presskit[armorgamesstudios.com]


Thanks ever so much for your patience. If you have any questions, hit up our FAQ page:
Defender's Quest 2 FAQ[www.defendersquest2.com]


And if that doesn't answer things, you can ping us at leveluplabs@gmail.com, as always.

A few final issues resolved in another hotfix. Thanks for your patience.

STATUS:
Windows: YES
Linux: YES
Mac: YES

Changelog for 2.2.6 6/1/2018:
- Fixed crash in battles when you defeat an enemy with original sprites mode enabled
- Fixed bug where recruitable characters could have no colors set
- Fixed bug where renaming characters in party screen could cause their name to be "Null"
- Fixed annoying bug where the finger cursor always flashes on screen for a fraction of a second in keyboard/mouse mode

And another one.

STATUS:
- Windows: YES
- Mac: YES
- Linux: YES

Changelog for 2.2.5 5/31/2018:
- Fixed crash in recruit screen if you try to hire someone you can't afford
- Fixed overlapping "buy" and "can't afford" buttons in shops

Status:
- Windows: YES
- Mac: YES
- Linux: YES

Changelog for 2.2.4 5/30/2018:
- Fixed missing cutscene art in legacy art mode
- Fixed healer bug where boost-1 level healers wouldn't heal a defender placed after then damaged by thorns
- Fixed upgraded special armor items that were missing their special abilities

Please let me know if there are any remaining issues.

We recently released Defender's Quest DX on PS4, XB1, and PSVita, and that required some major performance optimizations. We are now rolling those back into the PC version of the game. Let us know if there's any bugs and regressions.

This is the last major patch for DQ1, but I will be happy to make any necessary hotfixes for lingering bugs.

STATUS:
-Windows: YES
-Mac: YES
-Linux: YES

CHANGELOG:
2.2.3 5/28/2018:
- Add "skip cutscene" option to misc. menu
- Fix missing dialogue popup that makes the final battle unecessarily hard if you don't see it
- Fix bug with status effects (removing one effect visually removes all)
- Fix range previews to be less wasteful/laggy
- Fix hotkey labels missing from spells in Mcguffin menu (regression)
- Fix crash when using original art mode during certain battle previews
- Fix cursor bug in keyboard/mouse mode
- Fix "knocked back enemy flies all over the screen randomly" bug
- Better sound management
- Fix various visual glitches due to improper rounding
- Fix "Need PSI" icons
- Performance optimizations, including but not limited to:
- Fix sorting algorithm in battle
- Optimize QuadTrees
- Inline lots of functions
- Font optimizations
- Optimize damage & regeneration signals to not be as wasteful
- Don't show battle numbers if speed >= 8x
- Fix various memory leaks
- Fix big memory leak in cutscenes
- Optimize cutscenes
- Clean up audio memory at end of cutscenes
- Use integer comparisons rather than strings as often as possible

Hey everyone,

I just pushed out a quick hotfix for the Windows version of the game. Apparently there was a regression which made it so that people who had unicode characters in their windows username directory (ie, lots of people from Russia, China, Japan, Korea, etc) were not able to save the game.

You COULD recover from this if you went to the in game menu, selected miscellaneous, and then manually changed your save file location, but this is not ideal.

So, today we've pushed out a fix that seems to work. There is one remaining known bug related to this issue: if you use the options menu to change your save file location, the directory picker will not recognize any path you select with unicode characters in it. "C:\this\is\a\path" is fine but "C:\カタカナ" is not.

HOWEVER! The game will still recognize a custom path with unicode characters if you manually edit the paths.xml file. You can do this by clicking on the floppy disk folder button in the save slot screen, and opening paths.xml in a text editor of your choice, you would want to set it to something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<data>
<save value="C:\MyCustomPath\DefendersQuest"/>
<mods value="C:\MyCustomPath\DefendersQuest\Mods"/>
</data>

Sorry for any inconvenience. Please report any further issues you have and we will try to fix them.

NOTE: This only ever affected WINDOWS users, as far as we can tell.

Hey everyone,

I'm back from paternity leave, and as my first official task, I've fixed the Mac build (at least, it works for me now, previously I had the same issue others were reporting). Turns out this was a simple fix, so sorry for the delay.

EDIT 2:12 PM:
Turns out there was another bug lingering across mac/win/linux. If you were using gamepad controls, and hit the button for "equip" on the town shopping screen the first time you arrived there (ie, when you don't have any equipment yet), it would cause a crash.

This has been fixed just now in the 01/30/2018 timestamped subversion of build 2.2.2. There's no other substantial changes.

So apparently the hotfix needed a hotfix. Sorry for the delay.

STATUS:
-Windows: YES
-Mac: YES
-Linux: YES

Changelog:
- Fix glitch with boost indicators in battle
- Fix overlapping tutorial navigation chrome
- Fix startup crash in level editor
- Fix mod interface showing steam options when steam is not active
- Fix text overfills in mod interface
- Fix text size issues in journal
- Fix missing paragraph of German text in "third dream" journal entry
- Fix incorrect german speaker line in opening cutscene
- Fix loading times on party screen a bit
- Fix overworld text scroll float
- Fix missing text in party rewards
- Fix "merge" method for xml files in mods
- Fix memory leak
- Fix wave text in enemy wave bar in 4:3 aspect ratio
- Fix overflow text in enemy menu
- Fix spell text showing wrong stats in YouGot screen in NewGame+
- Fix scrap overflow
- Fix cutscene text overflow
- Fix achievements
- Fix battle crash

Let me know if there's any further bugs!

Hey everyone!

Here's a year end patch for the game.

Status:
Windows: YES
Mac: YES
Linux: YES

There's a lot of fixes in this one, which means there's also an opportunity for regressions. I like to think I've checked thoroughly, but please let me know if I broke anything that wasn't already broken and I'll do my best to address it.

The big two things I've tried to address this time around are general performance in battles, and navigation using the gamepad.

Changelog for Version 2.2.0 12/19 build:

Lots of battle optimizations:
- don't call unnecessary updates on enemies
- don't call unnecessary updates on effects
- cache results of effect palette swaps rather than doing it EVERY SINGLE TIME
- Fix occassional NaN values for a projectile's angle, which would trigger a while loop of SIX MILLION ITERATIONS (every update!!!!)
- Throttle how many times an enemy's HP bar can be redrawn per unit of time (so it's not wastefully spammed when playing at e.g. x16 speed)
- Cache results of scaled tiled bitmaps to reduce drawing time
- Increase capacity of QuadTree nodes
- Added surgical speed throttling -- if there's too many enemies on screen, x16 and x8 speed modes are disabled until you kill enough off. You'll only ever really encounter this limit on the endless bonus battles, and it should effectively *increases* framerate by not overtaxing the game.
- Replaced "hot" text fields in battle with bitmap text fields, which update faster and cause less lag
- Avoid playing multiple identical sound effects in rapid succession
- Preload enemies to avoid stutter on the first spawn of each wave

Other stuff:
- Fix controls menu bug where you can create invalid control configs in gamepad mode
- Fix black screen on exiting menu in battle if sprite mode has ever changed
- Fix auto-closing gamepad controls change popup
- Fix on-screen button prompts not updating on controls change in save slot screen
- Remove various problematic window resolutions from the video options
- Fix controls menu gamepad navigation
- Fix steam achievements not always reflecting what you have on Steam vs. what you have in game
- Make journal text default to latin font if it tries to do Korean/Japanese but finds an untranslated string
- Fix this crash - start a game in hero mode, try to recruit a character, and cancel out of the warning popup
- Add various crash guards
- Fix cursor crash in movies menu
- Add antialiasing to projectiles
- Lots of locale tweaks to fix bugs
- Show the text "loading" between screen transitions so it's not just black
- Fix German/Spanish text overruns in cutcenes
- Add back/forth cutscene actions for gamepad
- Fix cursor navigation of enemy tooltips on battle preview
- Switch journal to bitmap text so it loads faster
- Fix soft lock in party skill screen
- Fixed full-screen flash effects persisting after a screen transition
- Fix missing skill lock text in party menu
- Fix missing tutorial texts when navigating with the gamepad
- Fix broken symbols text in cutscenes
- Fix crash in party skills menu
- Fix cycle defenders & spell selection bugs
- Fix accessibility menu glitch (save slot specific options accessible outside of a loaded save)
- Enemies now selectable in gamepad mode
- Battle preview now shows a line crossing out already earned rewards
- Fix crash in controls menu
- Fix bug that shows incorrect character portrait when selecting an "ally" (computer-controlled guest character)
- Fix item sorting in party screen
- Make both flashing and screenshake in cutscenes respect the accesibility settings
- Fix wave block tooltip on wave block destruction
- Fix tooltip lingering when enemy is killed
- Fix boost disabled button placement in mcguffin menu in final battle
- Fix buggy gamepad menu interactions with spell menu
- If a name is entered in japanese/korean and the language is later switched to English or another locale, so that a text field with non-asian characters
ever attempts to display asian text, display the asian text using romanization (Hepburn or RROK) rather than display nothing at all (this does not change the underlying data).
- Optimize party screen so it's faster to navigate with the gamepad
- Fix some issues with gamepad navigation on the battle screen
- Switched to bitmap fonts for many screens - should be more responsive, particularly when using gamepad navigation
- Fix artifacts in berserker animation
- Fix enemy death animations
- Make color selections for healer, knight, mage, slightly less terrible
- Add dragon roar sound effect
- Add sound effect to indicate first and last enemy wave
- German, French, and Spanish translations now officialy out of beta, should be 100% complete.
- Fixes to the journal -- shouldn't have ugly overlaps and layout problems in
any of the locales now.
- New sound effects
- Fixed a few weapon icons that had some bleed-over
- Simplified Spell "Need PSI" and "Wait" overlays to be less buggy in other locales
- Fix monastery tutorial (keyboard vs. gamepad mode)
- Fix some of Ketta's battle portraits
- Fix battle dialog window position in some cases
- Remove OUYA/Logitech button icons so I have less things to maintain
- Fix knight's generic HD sprite icon
- Combined splash screen with loading screen
- Add James Gray, Lucas Pope, Syrenne McNulty, and Nilsen Filc to credits
- Remove old website links from credits
- Made gamepad button prompts have a subtle animated effect (for non-steam-controller mode)
- The new little twinkly star on the title screen is not a special secret, it's to
fulfill a boring requirement on consoles that no screen is ever entirely static