As the original concept designer for Soul Tower, I set out to dissect established tower-defense games, extract their fundamental elements, and subvert these conventions to create a wholly new experience.

During development, I was the driving force behind the game’s production and design vision. I established strict guidelines for our combat system and developed enemies, traps, and rooms that fit these parameters. I then worked alongside programmers in GameMaker Studio 2 to bring these concepts to life.

Soul Tower encourages experimentation with various trap and room combinations, allowing for emergent gameplay where players develop their own strategies and play-styles. This necessitated extensive playtesting and iteration to ensure a proper balance of our game systems and economy.

A particular issue revealed by player feedback was low resource accrual in the early-game. To remedy this, I implemented a combo system that increased soul-point yield when taking out multiple enemies with a single trap activation. This added additional depth to our game loop both by incentivizing skillful and attentive play as well as introducing combo-potential as a strategic factor for players to consider when determining their trap layout.

With metrics solidified, I collaborated with our principal programmer to script enemy behavior, trap interactions, and our game system managers. To facilitate live testing, I also developed an in-game debug console that allowed us to spawn enemies, increase soul-point count, and toggle trap placement mode at will.

As the project evolved, I steadily replaced temp assets with completed sprites by our lead artist. In addition, my programming partner and I utilized GameMaker's object parenting system to optimize implementation of new traps, rooms, and enemies. This made it far easier to add and iterate content in our demo up to its completion.