Systems and Economy Design (SaED) Week 1: Game Overview & Goal

08/03/21

For my Systems Design Module, I have decided to choose the project that was provided. As many of the assets are already made, it gives me more time to test, analyse and iterate on the project to the best of my ability, so as to produce a Tower Defence game that is balanced and challenges players, yet still remains fun to play and interesting to explore.

In relation to the project, it is a very standard Tower Defence game. It spawns waves of enemies, known as creeps, that make their way from one end of the map to the other. If one creep reaches the end, the players lose a life. In order to prevent this, players must build towers with the gold that they have collected, which attack these creeps on sight, therefore preventing them from reaching the end.

The first thing I must establish, before creating any new towers or creeps for the game, is to understand the general idea of balance in a game like this. Once I have completed that, I shall continually tweak ideas, with the use of playtesting each week. It’s important to have a vision to iterate upon, otherwise there will be no clear way to achieve this goal.

For a Tower Defence game, the core balance is going to be, the time needed to build and kill with towers-versus-the various creeps within the game. This is assuming that the standard creep has a health of 100 and a formula is set up that determines how long it will take a given tower to kill it. This will require some deviation when it comes to towers that work in different ways, for example, towers that have an Area of Effect ability. Another metric to consider is the range in which the tower is placed. There are several empty slots, where towers can be built upon, dotted around the map. Certain locations on the map would be advantageous for the players to place different kinds of towers optimally, in order to get the most out of the tower being placed within that area. With a sufficient number of these, players can get an idea of how many enemies a given tower can kill. Therefore, many variables need to be considered, leading to the reason why spreadsheets will be utilised to encapsulate this data. These will be tweaked considerably throughout development, and it will be interesting to compare the first iteration of the spreadsheets to the final versions.

In terms of level design, I anticipate that the way in which waves are set up and paced, will reveal to players an understanding that it is possible to win the game. This is achievable, as long as I am able to tweak the variables of each tower and creep in a way that demonstrates the difficulty curve is as smooth as possible. This will require a lot of playtesting to ensure that there are no harsh spikes in difficulty. I will have a lot of data to look at, via the spreadsheets, to figure out how long the creeps would be in the range of towers and I will do a sanity check to see how much damage I expect the tower to be able to accomplish.

I want each new tower and creep, which I create, to be simple to understand the immediate advantage it gives to the players, just by its name alone. For each new unit, the role it should embody shall be created first, along with statistics that will be assigned, initially based on instinct, to give me a general starting point. The towers and creeps will then be incrementally adjusted to make sure that they are balanced fairly, while also making them useful. If I balance a certain unit too much, so that it is overpowered, players will simply decide to pick that unit over all others and it will make the game too easy. I have to find that balance of making a tower useful while not making them the dominant tower of choice.