Dungeon Defender is a real time strategy defense hybrid. You are the dungeon overlord
and swarms of heroes are invading your lair and attempting to steal your gems. You
must stop them by building creature lairs, traps, and sending your avatar out to defeat
them. Luckily for you, we will provide some instructions on how to do just that!

When you create a new game you have to choose your avatar(a powerful being which you directly control). Each avatar has different strengths and different magic abilities. You can mouse over each one for more information. The death knight is harder to play then the others so you may not want to use him the first time you play. You move the avatar with wasd or arrow keys. Get them in range and they will start attacking. Death knight is melee only so get him really close.
When you have a game created and you want to play, you have to choose a map. Grayed out maps are ones you have not unlocked. Each time you beat a map you will gain a reward and unlock the next map. You can go back and replay maps you already defeated if you want. Every few maps a new game concept will be introduced and an in-game tutorial will explain it.
Lets get started with the most important thing. Making buildings! Here you can see a dungeon with some enemies coming, but nothing to stop them. The lairs tab is selected on the right and we can place buildings. The shovel icon is the dig tool. When you use the dig tool, you are marking tiles you want cleared out to make room for buildings. Most of the options are grayed out, we can only place lairs which are less then or equal to our avatar's level. There are other build options on the support tab.
This picture shows a few things of note Some lairs have been built, namely centaur and goblin lairs. A centaur lair is selected and you can see the range of the centaurs(the blue circle). Goblin lairs were placed in front of the centaurs and the goblins come forth from their lair to stop the progress of the heroes. The green health bars on units shows their hit points, and the red health bar on lairs show their population.
Lair Control This goblin lair has a red radius circle which can be controlled using the slider to the right. The goblins will come out and attack anything that walks into that circle. You can see what is living inside the lair in the list on the right. The avatar has been moved up into a position to fire at anything the goblins attack.
When you select a unit you will see the Stats Panel on the right. The details text can be moused over for extra details about special attacks, hit points etc. Each of the stats is listed here. You can mouse over any of them to get details about what they do.
When you select the items tab you will see something like this The items in the list on the left are in your inventory, but not equipped. Drag an item onto the correct slot to equip it(or double click on the item). Mousing over an item shows its bonuses. The background color of the item represents its quality. Higher quality items have more, and better, stat bonuses.
The rewards of success! Each victory will earn you a talent campaign bonus point which you can use to boost various game abilities. Mouse over each talent to see what it does. You will only get eight talent points so decide ahead of time what you want to choose. Black and white talents have not been unlocked. Glowing talents are ones you can pick right now. Regular color talents are ones you already have.