Indie Games Spotlight: Defiant Development

Defiant Development, the Australian based developers of Hand of Fate, are the latest indie studio to get our spotlight treatment. We gave Hand of Fate glowing marks for making bad luck so much fun and bringing the classic art of imagination back to gaming, but now it’s time to focus on the group of people behind the game. 

Defiant Development began in May 2010 in the aftermath of some turmoil in the Australian game development community that took place thanks to the global economic crisis. When a group of people were left without jobs, they took matters into their own hands and decided to capitalize on the growing mobile gaming market. Since then, they have amassed a team of local veterans of the console industry from companies such as Pandemic, THQ, Sega and Krome, as well as fresh talent in the industry. 

Their name reflects their resilience in getting a team together despite the grim outlook of  Brisbane game development, hence Defiant Development. They employ 13 full timers and between three to five contractors at any given time. You can meet the full team and see what they all do here. 

Defiant Development’s Games Gallery

Recent Game Highlight: Hand of Fate

We’ve already given you our thoughts on Hand of Fate, which mixes elements of Dungeons & Dragons, collectible card games, and roguelikes, while adding in a dash of imagination. We’ve even shown you the first 13 minutes of gameplay to get you enticed and playing the game. But we wanted to get a deeper look at what inspired the game and some behind the scenes information about it, so here’s what Defiant themselves had to say about Hand of Fate. 

“We have an avid bunch of boardgamers here at the office and we especially like card games as lots of them can be played during our lunch breaks. Hand of Fate began with the idea that we could take the architecture and randomness of rogue-like games and afford the player more control over the challenges they would face and the rewards they would receive. These card games that we play in the office are filled with ‘Random Event’ decks and ‘Treasure’ piles out of these two concepts sprung Hand of Fate.”

“Jerry from Penny Arcade was playing Hand of Fate at the first PAX Aus (2013) and nailed it as a ‘Deckbuilding Rogue-like” . We had been struggling to get to such a succinct summation ourselves for weeks.”

“A Twitch streamer once played Hand of Fate using a Dance Dance Revolution mat.”

The Defiant Development Team

A huge thanks to Kim Allom of Definat Development for providing us with the information found in this feature. You can follow her on Twitter @KimAllom, follow Defiant Development @DefinantDev, and be sure to check out their latest game, Hand of Fate, available now on the PSN for PS4.