Our game, packet.Breach(), is a tower defense with some interesting mechanics. Notably, most towers have the ability to modify bullets (packets) in some way.

When I began coding the game, it very very quickly became apparent that it would be very very easy to add new towers to the game. With an hour or two's work, I created at least a dozen towers, if not two dozens. The system was modular, and each tower simply required a small script to be created, or required reusing another script (maybe even multiple scripts) with different arguments. A small sample of some of the scripts for this:

Naturally, this gave us so much time to create new towers! Towers that rotate bullets, towers that make bullets home towards enemies, towers that make bullets explode, towers that slow enemies down, towers that increase the size of bullets, anything is possible! UNLIMITED POWER! This is a very very small section of the document that contained the list of tower ideas we came up with:

But at the end of the jam, we only have 9 towers available to our players. Why?

This game is about strategy. Other tower defense games appreciate ridiculous amounts of towers, but not this one. Each tower has a very specific role in the factory, each tower modifies bullets in very specific ways, creating a chain reaction that the player has to be able to understand and modify easily.

Take this gif for example:

You can probably take a guess at what some of the things in that setup are doing. There are towers that rotate, towers that produce, and towers that duplicate. Easy enough to understand, right? But what about the red drum? What about the orange scorpion, or the blue medusa head? What do those mean?

If you play the game for a little bit, you'll figure out that the drum makes bullets explode, the scorpion increases damage, and the medusa multiplies damage.

Now imagine that you have five times that many towers. Suddenly, nothing makes sense. Because you weren't given enough time to understand. You were given three towers to choose from, and two of them you will never see again for a long time simply because there are that many towers.

Less can be more. In this game, less was much more than more.

It was a hard decision to make, to get rid of dozens of ideas and a few scripts, even hours of work. But it was worth it, from a game-design perspective. Now all of the towers in the game have a distinct purpose, specific use cases, and you can plan ahead because you know what's common and what's not. This game would have been so much worse if we didn't force ourselves to use less towers.

Play packet.Breach()!

And if you come up with any ideas for towers you think would be interesting to see in the full game, let us know!