Weeks of Wave Design

Techno Towers

During the last two weeks, I created level 2 and balanced waves of enemies for both levels 1 and 2. I also created a new terrain type for level two as well as fixing various bugs and started to balance the relics. I was also able to get some other people to playtest level 1 and adjust the level accordingly.

Level 1

While making the waves for Level 1 I was aiming for a moderate difficulty and slow introduction of new enemies. My attempts at creating a moderate difficulty were somewhat unsuccessful since no one who playtested it was able to beat it. This was because I had to maintain a delicate balance between keeping the player busy and punishing them for idle-ness and making it so that the player would be forgiven for their mistakes. Because of feedback from the playtesters, I reduced the number of enemies spawned and increased the amount of room that the player is able to place turrets in. I am currently waiting for feedback on the reduced difficulty.

Level 2

I had a similar goal when designing level 2 as I did when designing level 1 except that I wanted to add a new mechanic and test the player's mastery over the skills they learn in level 1. The mechanics I added were:

• Conveyor Belts - Which pushed the player and any towers the player placed on them. The purpose of these was to create a new way for towers to interact with the environment in order to create more strategies when placing towers.

• Shield Enemy - This enemy has a rapidly regenerating shield that is intended to require either very high DPS or an extremely large single hit attack to kill. This created a new niche for towers that can easily defeat this enemy.

• Dasher Enemy - This enemy will dramatically increase its speed when it is first hit. This is intended to further discourage bunching up of defense and encourage the player to make plans in order to defeat this enemy.

• Lizard Boss - This enemy is the final boss for the level and has one impenetrable shield on its head and two orbiting impenetrable shields. This enemy is intended to encourage the rapid movement of towers so that they can target the bosses' ever-changing weak points.

While designing the level itself I was aiming for each path to feel unique and for the paths to have a wide variety of difficulties. I also wanted certain paths to require planning in order to effectively fight towers on them.

While designing the waves I tried to introduce new enemies slowly and on the easiest path so the player would have time to experiment with them and make plans about how to defeat the enemy in the future. I also spawned the tougher enemies from level one early in the level in order to challenge the play and ensure that they have mastered their skills from level 1.