We Interview: Dawn of Defiance Design Director Casey Bradley

It’s always awesome to see an up and coming development team step into something new. Traega Entertainment is one of those studios, moving from one genre to an unexpected one. We reached out to the team to find out about the discussions that made this happen, along with the other conversations that led Traega into their new game, Dawn of Defiance. Design Director Casey Bradley was happy to talk with us about the game, and what he had to say was fascinating.

GamingTrend: How did you go from a first person tank roguelite in Aegis Descent to a survival-crafting game set in Greek Mythology?

Casey Bradley: Survival Crafting was always the long-term plan.  Our founder and studio owner greatly enjoys the genre and wanted to make games in this space.  Aegis Descent was a smaller project that we developed while building up our core team in preparation for Dawn of Defiance. It was a great way for us to ship a game together before starting work on this larger passion project.

GT: What are the challenges and benefits of developing this in Unreal Engine 5?

CB: UE5 provides developers with many powerful and flexible tools for creating great games.  They can speed up prototyping and implementation while also making games look better than ever! The challenge lies in understanding the full capabilities of these tools and determining the best ways to utilize them for our specific project. Many of the tools are new enough that best practices are still being formed around them. This leads to the developers needing to spend time experimenting with the tools early on and forming a game plan for leveraging the strengths of the tools to best suit our specific development needs.

GT: I’m not much for survival games personally, because there’s a lot of tedium involved. Have you found a way to break that monotony to keep the gameplay loop feeling fresh?

CB: Our goal is to avoid monotony in the first place!  Yes, you’ll be chopping trees and mining rock, but we realize that is a means to an end.  We want to ensure you are spending most of your time exploring, crafting, building and fighting.  After a couple of hours playing Dawn of Defiance you should feel like you’ve made meaningful progress in the game, not like you are just getting started.

GT: There is a whole lot of lore in Greek Mythology. Are there any sneak peeks you can give in terms of characters we might encounter during the game?

CB: The three judges of the Underworld will play a large role in our narrative. Aeacus will serve as the player’s guide during our initial Early Access experience.

GT: Given Early Access drops very soon, what do you hope players’ initial reaction will be? And are there things you’re hoping they’ll discover early on?

CB: Well, we obviously hope they’ll love the initial experience we are providing. Our goal is to let our Greek Mythology theme and art style drive initial interest in the game. Once players get into the game, we hope they resonate with many of our core systems such as our customized crafting system and streamlined building tools.

Beyond that, we hope to develop and foster an active community that is willing to share their honest feedback with us.  We look forward to working closely with the community to continue building Dawn of Defiance throughout our Early Access period.

GT: Any tips to help us get started or pointers on what to chase after first?

CB: By following the game’s initial quest, players will quickly get up to speed with a simple base and some basic equipment. From there, your goal should be to craft hide armor and simple weapons to increase your odds of surviving the surprises awaiting you on the Isle of Arrival.  This will require hunting.  We recommend focusing your efforts on hunting fawns early on.

You should also keep an eye out for Wisps!  They like to hang out around important items such as Braziers of Apollo and treasure chests.

GT: Lastly, do you have any fun stories from development you’d like to share?

CB: Early in the development of our building tools, we were prototyping out a system that would automatically build supports from a foundation piece to the ground below it.  The problem was our foundation pieces could be built in any orientation at the time, and the system wasn’t really accounting for this.  As a result, building a foundation piece upside down, or at other odd angles, would result in giant wooden spires streaking out across the land.  QA got their hands on this, and things got… a bit out of hand.

We’ve since simplified the rotational tools and removed the automatic supports, so players won’t see this in effect, fortunately!

A big thank you to Casey and the Traega Entertainment team for spending some time with us! Dawn of Defiance is available in Early Access next week on August 15th. You can wishlist it on Steam via this link.

Stay tuned to GamingTrend for more Dawn of Defiance news and info!

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