Small spoiler Warning: We’ll be discussing design and gameplay decisions we made for the game.

If you’d prefer to experience these elements for yourself, we recommend playing the game first and returning to read this later. Otherwise, we hope you enjoy this behind-the-scenes look at our process!

Dev Blog

For our first game, we thought we'd dip our toes in with a good old "classic tower defense" game.

The basics are simple, but we really want players to have a blast with our first release. So, in addition to solid gameplay, we're putting extra care into making sure the "look and feel" of the game is just as fun and exciting!

Concepting

and

After creating the design document, it was time to start brainstorming concepts.

It took us a while to nail down the right shapes for our bugs. We went through tons of iterations, experimenting with organic creatures, mixing bipeds with mammals, and trying out all sorts of ideas we had in mind for these little critters!

Creature

design

We were lucky to have already brainstormed abilities for them ahead of time. It gave us a better sense of how their shapes should reflect their "roles." That said, a few abilities ended up changing as we refined the concepts!

Of course, our Troopers needed some attention too!

At first, we wanted to create a wide variety of troopers, so we experimented with different designs to give them unique looks. We ended up making more than the ones that made it into the game, but due to time constraints and new ideas we had, we decided to focus more on tower-oriented gameplay instead.

Troopers


Still, we needed quite few trooper types for the corporate enemy type, that appear in the later levels

so we played around with those.

2D

or

Choices, choices!

We went back and forth for quite a while on whether to go with 2D or 3D for our game. But after settling on a style and aiming for as much consistency as possible, we chose 3D and a specific shader to bring it all together.

3D

Another big factor in our decision was that most of the team is skilled in 3D modeling—we’re all comfortable using various 3D programs.

This is when we shifted from drawing concepts to creating quick, rough 3D models, especially for the mechanical enemies, which are much easier to handle in 3D.

Since tower defense games can get pretty chaotic with so many enemies on screen, especially in the later levels, we decided to go with relatively low-poly models.

For those of you who are curious: each model falls between 2K and 6K triangles.


The first step was turning our early concept drawings into 3D models. Naturally, we aimed to capture the shape language as closely as possible while keeping the polygon count as low as we could.

After that, we started concepting directly in 3D, which gave us the advantage of being able to immediately use the models we decided on, as long as we kept them "clean." As mentioned earlier, many of the enemies later in the game are more mechanical in nature, which made working with low-poly shapes much easier.

towers

For these designs, we wanted to show clear progression through the first three upgrades. And as soon as you pick a specialization, we go BIG.

A phrase we often yelled around the design table was:

"WE NEED BIGGER GUNS!"

But there is not much to say besides that we locked them in pretty quickly, the thing that took the longest was actually making all 25 designs.

The

style

This was one of our bigger decisions!

Took us a while too; now you might say “but shouldn't that be decided before you even get to concepting?” And yes actually.

Since we hadn't decided on 2D or 3D at that point, it was up in the air for quite a while. We discussed full 3D environments versus a 2D environment with sprites, but there’s so much charm in hand-drawn games—and we love charm!

So, we decided to do both. We created a post-processing shader that made our 3D objects look hand-drawn, combining the best of both worlds.

The environments themselves were initially drawn out on paper, with basic "blocking" in place. However, many of the maps went through radical changes as development progressed. Plus, through gameplay testing, we discovered that certain tower placements just didn’t work as hoped.

  • First blocking and style idea

  • After more time the style changes so much we needed to adapt the first level.

  • Final look.

We decided to make Billy’s crash site the first location and focused on clearly conveying the scale of the crash.

Since this is meant to be a tutorial level, we wanted to keep it simple to play, but not too boring to look at.

Level 6 is another great example. Even though Kernas is a desert planet, we didn’t want to make every level just a sandy landscape.

For both us and the players, sure, we could alter the sand colors since there are so many types of deserts.

But rather we decided on increasing the Flora due to company experimentation on the planet.

Level one; progression of the changes through the design process

ui

design

This one took us much longer than we anticipated.

Looking back, it seems a bit silly, since it’s woven into the entire game. We especially wanted to consider how many times players have to click to accomplish anything—the fewer, the better. And we’re pretty sure that’s the approach most game developers would agree with!

We did quite a lot of searching to get to where we are now with the UI, starting with the font and logo for the main menu.

We didn’t want to go overboard with the font, since it’s important that people can actually read the text.

But the start screen? That took quite a few ideas before we were all satisfied with it.

  • Were we going with a 2D art background?

  • Or Holographic start screen with 3D models turning on their axis.

  • Where do we put the logo? It has to be sci-fi but has to be practical too.

  • What about the menu controls? Middle? Side?

  • Once we figured that having it to the side so windows can open next to “the banner” it clicked.

  • The player didn't have to jump from screen to screen.

  • Final Design

  • Settings menu

For the in-game menu, when choosing or upgrading towers, we decided to go with a radial design. We wanted to find the one that visually worked best, balancing both practicality and looks.

For the in-game menu we chose a radial design. We experimented to see which version looked best, always aiming to strike a balance between practicality and visuals.


So we went about finding a bit of an interesting shape

What will be the look of the radial itself?

Another question was how many spots we needed for placing the symbols for the towers and their skills. And, of course, how much spacing between the buttons to make it comfortable to use. It may seem simple, but it’s surprisingly more demanding than you’d expect. We definitely understand why this is a specialized role in larger studios.

And of course, every skill, tower, and ability needed a symbol to represent it.

There were long debates about whether we should add more color to the symbols to make them easier to recognize at a glance. But since it’s a sci-fi setting and we included the option to change the UI colors, we decided to keep the symbols "simple." After all, we also had tooltips, and after a few missions, players are likely to remember the positions of specific towers.


Inside the UI, we wanted to keep things visually pleasing, so we decided to incorporate drawn art.

Where it made sense at least.

The

Story

Initially, we weren’t planning to include a story since we wanted to keep the game small.

But after letting a few people playtest, we received feedback that while the game was fun, they really needed a reason “why” they were going through the levels.

We didn’t have the budget for cutscenes and such, so since we had already incorporated drawn art in the UI, we decided to create a simple comic to convey what was happening in the story.

We used as little text as possible because we wanted to launch the game in several languages. We do feel that we got the point across though.


We debated for a long time about which mechanics to use for our towers, keeping in mind that we didn’t have a large budget to work with. We had to be very careful to avoid the dreaded feature creep.

Gameplay

When it came to the wave structure, we opted for organized chaos. This means that a lot of enemies will try to get through at once. Waves start off slow but quickly escalate in intensity. The enemies were designed with the idea of surprising the player, with certain enemies requiring specific towers to stop them. For example, the burrower needs a trooper to block its path or an explosion from a mortar tower to shake it out of the ground. Otherwise, it just keeps heading toward the gate.

For coding simplicity, we chose static locations rather than free placement. This also gave the artists more freedom when designing the levels, allowing them to visually build the scene how they liked.

A leaper, for example, would jump over troopers to avoid them. This means you always need a firing tower behind the troopers when dealing with these bugs. We really didn’t want to take the simple route of saying, “Oh, these have more hit points, so they’re harder.” Sure, some enemies do take a lot of damage, but we aimed to make it more interesting than just that.

In that spirit, we aimed to add a new enemy in each level to keep the player on their toes.

We also wanted to make sure the player wasn’t just waiting for credits to upgrade a tower and otherwise staring at the screen. So, we added 4 active upgradable abilities that players can use to get out of a tight spot—2 of which need to be unlocked. Hooray for progression!

When it comes to upgrades, we opted for quite a few skills, since progression is just plain fun. There were long discussions on how linear we wanted the acquisition of new abilities and skills to be. Many games go with the approach of saving the best stuff for the end, which works. But we decided to go with the idea of freedom—8 main skills to unlock, each with branching upgrades, and allowing the player to reset their skills as often as they like. This way, if they’re struggling on a map, they can try out different “builds.”

You might say it’s too easy, and some of us agree. So instead of going in circles on the subject, we added a hardcore mode. In this mode, you get limited medals, only one starting HP, and no skill resets—perfect for those who enjoy punishing themselves. And for those who just want to chill? They can still do that too.

It really is important to us that people can play our games their own way.

fights

Boss

Though there was the concern of time. We really wanted to put in a boss for each “faction”.

We made them progressively harder. The first boss just summons a lot of enemies. The second one shuts down towers temporarily while calling for backup. And the final boss destroys the player's towers as it summons even more backup.

In the hopes of surprising the player by introducing something new each encounter.

Wow, you made it all the way down here! Thanks for reading through all of this and for your interest in our reasoning and process. We hope you found it interesting and informative. If you haven’t bought our game yet, we hope you didn’t mind the spoilers—and that maybe you’ll give our little game a chance!

It’s our first game, so if you’d like to give us feedback or anything of the sort, feel free to join us here:

Hope to see you soon!

And thank you from all of us at

Couch Potato Studios!

WISHLIST NOW