Wanted to give a quick rundown on what's been going on.
2013 - Scrapyard
This was my last year at USC for game dev. I lead a 4 player fighting game called Scrapyard, where players fought as animals in customizable mech suits. Turned out really fun but we all got jobs after school so the project was... scrapped. Fun fact! One of the other games in dev that year was Outer Wilds, they kept working on it a while and it turned out to be a huge indie success.
This was also the year I got an internship at Blizzard working on bringing Diablo III to consoles.
2015 - Diablo III & Overwatch
After school I started working fulltime on Diablo. Then a little game called Overwatch needed support to ship on time. It was insanely fun working with that crew for 4/5 months, and I learned a lot about amazing leadership from Jeff Kaplan. The game was fun as hell, I never could have guessed how big it would get. I ended up going back to the Diablo team as they felt like family and was excited for what we were cooking up next.
2023 - Diablo IV
Fast forward a lot, and we finally shipped Diablo IV! This was the first Blizzard game I was a part of from start to finish, which meant a lot. When we shipped I was the Lead Gameplay Engineer for Classes & Systems. Basically, I got to write a ton of the code for player controls, abilities, passives, buffs, skill trees, itemization, etc etc. When our team grew a lot, I shifted more into a management role, teaching people how to make fun combat, work as a team, all that good stuff.
2024 - Battle Lads
With Diablo shipped, I decided to leave and try making an indie game before I had a family or anyone to yell at me for making dumb decisions. That game turned into Battle Lads! The idea was to take a strategic war game like Total War, but let you actually fight the battles like Diablo or Hades. You can recruit a big army to fight alongside you, or go it alone. The campaigns are meant to be quick and roguelike so we can find lots of ways to throw fun random events and different builds at you, while still being something 2 people can make.
@MindChamber joined me about 10 months ago to work on all the 2d/3d art and level design. MindChamber's been my ride-or-die since Tyler Glaiel introduced us 20 years ago. Back in the day we worked on Red Baron, M-Bot the Game, Da Pink Knight, Heavy Terror Machine, and a few other projects we didn't finish up. It's been insanely fun getting to work together again!
We just put a trailer out for the game, as well as a demo on Steam. Hoping we can get a proper web build made so we can host the demo here too, been running into technical problems. Right now we're working on controller support and adding more content. If anyone wants to try it out, wishlist it or give us some feedback, that would all be very appreciated.
Thanks all,
Evan (FrostedMuffins)
