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Tower Defense Simulator

GAME INFO

  • Genre: Tower Defense and Strategy

  • Engine: Roblox Studio

  • Avg Concurrent Players: 20,000+

  • Total Visits: 4.2+ Billion visits

CONTRIBUTIONS

  • System and Feature Design

  • Balancing and Economy Design

  • Live Ops Content and Seasonal Event Design

  • Playtesting

PROJECT BACKGROUND

  • A traditional tower defense game on the Roblox platform that receives live ops support in the form of new features, new towers, new gamemodes, reworks/rebalances, and a steady stream of limited time seasonal content and events. Designed to be accessible for new and younger players while also offering challenging gameplay for older and more experienced fans.

DESIGN GOALS

  • Create a balanced and varied tower defense sandbox for a wide range of players of different skill levels.

  • Create exciting and new seasonal events and rewards.

  • Plan future content and features that can be scaled up indefinitely.

SYSTEM AND FEATURE DESIGN

  • Since my time working on the project, the game has seen multiple new features and systems added to the game; each one I've lead the design and planning on.

​The list of added features includes:​​​​

  • ​Challenge Maps

  • Daily Rewards

  • "Fallen" Difficulty Rework

  • "Molten" Difficulty Rework

  • Seasonal Battlepasses

  • Boss and Enemy Design for New and Reworked Gamemodes

  • In-game Achievements

  • Skill Tree

  • 12 New Towers Released

  • 12 Old Towers Reworked/Redesigned

  • 7 Seasonal Events

  • Onboarding Tutorial​

  • ​Missions

  • Intermediate Difficulty

  • Casual Difficulty

  • PvP Mode

  • Each of these new features went through a process of being designed via documentation before being discussed with creative and team leads for final approval. From there the feature is further planned out with more definitive numbers and values for testing and rapid implementation, before than be tested amongst myself and our internal QA team.

  • Once released, these features would continue to be supported and monitored through analytics, while we stay closely connected with our community for feedback.

SEASONAL EVENTS AND COLLABS

  • As a live service game we tried to take advantage of seasonal hype by releasing limited time event game-modes and season passes to improve player retention on a quarterly schedule. Additionally each event is a great potential to boost our player count to gain new players. (During Halloween for example we saw a 70,000 increase in our concurrent player count)​​

Events I took design lead on includes:​​

  • ​"The Hunt" Roblox Spring Event (2024)​

  • "The Classic" Roblox Summer Event (2024)

  • "PLS Donate" Easter Collab (2024)

  • "Hexscape" Halloween Event and Battlepass (2024)

  • "Operation I.C.E" Christmas Event and Battlepass (2024)

  • "The Hunt" Roblox Spring Event (2025)

  • "Ducky" Easter Event and Battlepass (2025)​

  • "Surf and Turf" Summer Battlepass (2025)​​

  • Planning these events would begin with a collaborative brainstorming meeting with me and the creative/team leads to see what would be doable and exciting given our timeframe. From there I would properly scope out each aspect and detail of these events regarding any new gameplay modifiers and functionality, as well as figuring out what specific assets and rewards we want to include in the seasonal battlepass.​

ECONOMY AND GAMEPLAY BALANCING

  • As the primary game designer I take lead in approaching the current state of the game's sandbox and balancing. Working with our analytics I'm able to see win loss ratio across multiple game modes as well as the popularity across the different towers and tools in the game. Furthermore our community is very vocal regarding feedback and helps to keep us informed of the shifting "Meta" in the game.

  • While its always important to put our best foot forward to create the most balanced experience possible I also understand that the Meta of the game is ultimately designed by the player base; therefore my goal is to make sure that the sandbox never gets stale.

  • I regularly on a weekly bases work with our community to implement a variety of different tower and gameplay rebalances; going back and forth with our players to collect feedback to make sure that what we release is not only fun and favorable for our community but that they also have full transparency over what is being worked on and implemented.

  • Regarding the economy design and progression of our game, I work with the creative lead to figure out various game-time milestones we'd like to see from our player base. From there using spreadsheets I'm able to create estimates regarding the allotted playtime for players to make sure there is a balance between accessibly and long term retention regarding the game's progression.

Balancing_Example_1_edited.jpg
Balancing_Example_2_edited.jpg

CONCLUSION

This being my by first live ops game that I joined far into development its been a very eye opening experience to work with an active community and analytics. The biggest lesson I've learned that its important to keep an open mind and be flexible with understanding the community's expectations. The main benefit of being a live service title is that we're able to create a game with our fanbase. Iteration is essential both with new upcoming features and old pre-existing ones. Overall I'm very proud of what I've learned and how much the team has transformed the game overtime.

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