I'm excited to announce that I'm working on a tower defense game. As part of my exploration of the design space, I noticed that there's a severe lack of resources discussing the design of tower defenses. Thus I've recorded the first in what I hope to be a series of videos to provide some of that discussion.
This video lays a foundation for thinking about the relationship between designer and player by providing 2 frameworks. The first is a set of player motivations that describe what may appeal to a given player about the genre. The second is a description of the core challenges that players engage with as they play. Check out the playlist.
If enough people engage with the videos to make them worth the production time, I have plans to do in-depth discussion of subjects such as:
Maze vs. fixed path design
Hard vs. soft counters
Damage resistance
Map layouts
Tower combos
Cost curves
The effect of various tower stats on DPS
Metagame progression
Common tower and enemy types
Targeting
Come join the Discord, or discuss this on Reddit. I'd love to hear your feedback, and what you'd like me to talk about in future episodes.