Aydan Edwards
Hey, I’m Aydan, a game developer with three years of professional experience in the gaming industry and even more as a hobbyist. I started my journey with Chromatic Games and have proven to be a versatile and dedicated professional. My career spans from early contributions to Dungeon Defenders and Dungeon Defenders: Redux to leading development on Dungeon Defenders II and working on an unannounced UE5 project. My expertise ranges from gameplay programming, team coordination, game design, systems design, and more. I truly have a passion for creating immersive gaming experiences, and that’s what drives me to continually push the boundaries of what's possible in game development and growing my skill set.
Game Development Projects
unannounced UE5 Project
A new project in Unreal Engine 5.
Dungeon Defenders 2
A free-to-play live service game that I'm still working on.
Dungeon Defenders
Where it all began!
Dungeon Defenders : Redux
A studio-approved solo project that I led and released before working at Chromatic Games.
General Programming projects
Playverse
The ambitious backend online subsystem that powers the live service nature of Dungeon Defenders 2.
Dungeon Defenders : Redux
I joined the company-sanctioned game modding team called the Community Development Team (CDT for short). I helped create and port maps, bosses, and equipment from a sister game called Dungeon Defenders: Eternity. This team was closed down after the company decided to stop allowing updates to the title, so I decided to take it upon myself to make a studio-approved team of my own to add a large expansion to the game that involved a new game difficulty with a new enemy, game changing character abilities, difficult maps, quality of life, and tons of other additions. This project was officially released on steam as a Steam branch for the original game. This mod was a hit success with Dungeon Defenders players and ultimately paved the way for me to get hired at Chromatic Games.
Dungeon Defenders 2
Dungeon Defenders 2 is where I started my career as a professional game developer. Dungeon Defenders 2 at first was a huge undertaking since the game was overall moved on from active development as the next title in the series was being developed. I had to reverse engineer a lot of the mechanics and systems, but by doing so it has grown my understanding of all the many aspects of game development. It has now been 3 years and I have only improved as a developer from my time on Dungeon Defenders II. Throughout the ongoing development of the game, I have had many roles from programming to production, and worked myself up to the top with consistent milestone releases that players are excited to play.
Dungeon defenders
Dungeon Defenders was a huge start to my career, especially working on the Community Development Team as it gave me the fundamental experience needed for working with a team, understanding chain of command, and cooperative development cycles. After getting a job at Chromatic, I pushed to revisit the title and worked with the team on bringing a new hero DLC to the game.
Playverse
Playverse is an ambitious online subsystem created by Trendy Entertainment and could be considered a grandfather to the Azure Playfabs / Amazon gamelift-type services many games use today. It was meant to be a complete cloud solution for other companies to get a live service game running. This system was later tested on in-house games such as Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Dungeon Defenders 2. Today I am a big part of keeping the service running by doing maintenance and compliance upgrades, with notable contributions in upgrading to MySQL 8 and up to maintain AWS standards. I was part of upgrading the dedicated servers to use Ubuntu 24.04 from 14.04 as well.
unannounced UE5 Project
This project is still very in its infancy. My overall role in the project was porting essential code and mechanics from a previous UE4 project, establishing a solid foundation for the new game. I developed spline-based AI mechanics, contributing to the project's core gameplay systems. Additionally, I handled minor modeling and animation tasks for temporary assets and helped with character animation import and retargeting to ensure smooth transitions between animations.