Circuit Defense was a small team project that I worked on initially for only 2 weeks. My team and I later picked up the project again for a month or so in order to expand the game's content and get it working on our university's arcade machine!

I've always been a fan of the tower defense genre, with popular mobile titles such as Bloons TD and Kingdom Rush being at the forefront of these addicting time-killers. My goal when designing Circuit Defense was to put a bit of a twist on the tower defense formula, while still maintaining the addicting nature and arcadey feel of the genre.

Often what differentiates tower defense games from each other are the ways in which the player is allowed to interact with their towers. Most have a simple upgrade system, affecting turret stats in a straightforward manner. I wanted to expand upon this, allowing players a more modular approach to upgrading their towers.

For this, I came up with a system of upgrades that killed enemies could drop that would be represented by little microchips to match the game's circuit board theme. These chips could be slotted into the player's towers, with each chip granting a unique bonus that would alter how that tower functioned. I had many ideas for these chips, but sadly we never got around to implementing them.

As my team's lead designer, a lot of my time spent on our limited dev period was used for communicating intended functionality to the programmers on the team. I would test and go over code in-engine to ensure mechanics were working as intended. I also worked closely with our pixel artist to ensure the visuals remained coherent and matched the game's overall theme.

I used Excel spreadsheets for balancing the game's resource economy. Since the game is essentially endless, formulas were needed to ensure player towers could keep up with the scaling waves of enemies and vice versa. The only limiting factor on this system is space. Players will eventually run out of spots to place towers, while the enemy waves will continue to scale in power.

Despite my balancing, players will eventually lose regardless of skill level. The score variance between an expert and a beginner player, though, is very high, so I think I succeeded. An interesting mechanic that I implemented to reward skilled play is the score multiplier. If a player manually calls in a wave while they're already dealing with another, they'll receive a multiplier that doubles all score gained for a short time. This creates an interesting high risk/reward dynamic where players can push their defenses to the limit. If they survive, they'll come out with much better high scores.

Circuit Defense taught me many lessons about scope and systems design, and even though I was never able to implement the feature that would set it apart from other tower defense titles, it's design remains in my documents for the future. I plan on making another version of it someday.