[2023] How did Judd start creating LE with no developing experience? Did he just do his own self taught research or enroll in a class or what? Seems wild.

Haha I’ll have to give a more in depth talk on this at some point. But I’ll give a little background here.

I ran a web development studio for a decade with a partner. I did front end dev, sales, marketing, hiring, and most of the business side before staffing up a little where I was able to delegate some of it. I was never a great coder outside of html/css and some probably poorly executed JavaScript. But this taught me all about business,team building, and how to make digital products.

I was also obsessed with ARPGs and knew what made them good and what detracted from them, so I saw an opportunity to make one that capitalized on all the great aspects. I also wanted to make sure the studio was very openly communicative because people play these games as hobbies and it was always a feelsbad when there was a lack of communication from the devs for something I was so invested in.

From there it was an exercise of finding other people who were passionate about ARPGs and had a relevant skill set and wanted to take on the venture with me. Sweat equity and very low spend contract work got us to Kickstarter which took 18 months. I held meetings with the team in the evenings regularly on Tuesdays and Thursdays though we were game jamming nearly every evening. With Kickstarter funds I was able to hire some people full time, though I still had to work elsewhere because my expenses were a bit higher having had 3 kids at the time and I didn’t want to take the funds. Then we released early access in 2019 which allowed me to hire many more people including allowing me to jump on full time as well.

That’s a very short version. Starting something without any funding, or even with funding really, isn’t for the faint of heart… but if you love it and are passionate about it you’re much better able to push through all the hard stuff. Being able to make this game as my career is an absolute dream come true and the awesome people in the studio who took the plunge with me are the same. We know our core has their hearts in the right place because they put in a TON of effort with a low chance of ever seeing a dime, but we just love doing it.

Now one of my favorite things to do is go to r/startups, r/gamedev, r/entrepreneur and try to help people get started on their ventures when I’m not daydreaming about the next skill to implement in LE!

Thanks for the kind words. It's awesome to hear that people are enjoying it as much as they do in early access. Once we're around patch 1.3 - 1.4 I think we're going to have something that is truly truly great.

Hey Perry - Imagine D2 when they brought out LoD. D2 base was amazing and LoD is the point where it became the GoaT. I think what we have in store for the 1.x series is going to be our LoD and take our very strong base at 1.0 and elevate it substantially. My heads on what’s coming later as my role is planning a lot of it of course! After 1.0 we’ll be bringing back our roadmap/forecast so you guys have a bit more insight into what’s to come.