Charles Dunn

— PROJECT NAME

Dota Underlords


— ROLE

Lead Content Designer


— Publisher

Valve

I led the design for the New Blood on the Streets update to Dota Underlords, a major gameplay patch that introduced many new units, abilities, and items. This update also included balance and tuning adjustments to nearly every game element.


My designs were aimed at creating content that would get players excited to try out new combinations and strategies. My approach to balancing was to ensure that every unit and item in the game had an appropriate niche, and to ensure that nothing was so overbearing as to crowd out other niches.


Dota Underlords on Steam

UNITS and ABILITIES

Each unit aims to replicate the identity of its counterpart in DOTA 2, but adapted and optimized for an autobattler.


New Blood on the Streets contained 8 new heroes, 8 reworked heroes, as well as balance changes and tuning to all 62 heroes in game.

Meepo is a sort of “glass cannon” type unit. He can quickly create many copies of himself, but if any one of them dies, all Meepos are lost.

Rubick’s Passive, Spell Steal, turns your enemies greatest strength against them, allowing you to copy their spell effects. There is a lot of counterplay potential however, as the Spell Steal range is rather short.

In addition to creating interesting new effects, I also balanced the stats for all units in the game.

ALLIANCES and SYNERGIES

Units are part of Alliances, which trigger additional bonuses based on how many units of that Alliance you are using.


New Blood on the Streets included 6 new Alliances.

The new Shaman Alliance gives players a powerful allied unit to help in combat. But simply adding another unit to your board was not very exciting on its own. If players did not have choice or control over the summoned unit, it would feel very dull.

The solution was to add unique effects to the summoned unit, depending on which Shamans were used to Summon it. This one is from Beastmaster, which gives an attack speed bonus to the summoned unit, that gets stronger as your Beastmaster is upgraded.

This one is from Lone Druid, and gives both the summon and the Lone Druid some healing through lifesteal. This ability is fairly weak for a low level Lone Druid, but the effect scales quite well when Lone Druid is leveled up.

Enchantress' Shaman bonus grants a defensive effect to the summoned creature, slowing the attack speed of enemies who attack it.

An example of some of the units and Alliances from New Blood on the Streets in action

ITEMS

Items are equipped to individual units, a limit of one per unit. New Blood on the Streets update included 7 brand new items, 13 item balance changes, and 8 items rotated out.


Items like Necronomicon perform very differently on different units.

This item has a lot of value on fast casting units like Bristleback (left), while a unit with long cooldowns like Medusa (right) will create a lot less Brill Bruisers.



My discussion video covering all the designs for this patch