Between the Lanes: Nest of Thorns
Welcome back to Between the Lanes, a blog feature where members of our development team walk through some of the challenges, bugfixes, and occasional happy accidents we encounter while working on a game as unique as Dota.
During an event as massive as Crownfall, we got to try a lot of experiments — overworld maps, branching storylines, hero-themed tokens, minigames, comics, pixel art, and other ideas we’d been eager to explore for years.
What gave us the confidence to take these risks — and something we take constant advantage of at Valve — is the freedom to iterate: to gather real player data, let it challenge our assumptions, and even change our minds. We often say we don’t fully understand what we’re building until we see players interact with it, so we try to get to that point as quickly as possible.