Level & Design Philosophy
One of the core design philosophies on this project was to create a tower defense experience that is easy to read, strategically engaging, and rewarding to master. This was a two-week project developed in Unreal Engine, where I worked as the primary designer in close collaboration with a programmer. Within that timeframe, the goal was to give players clear information and meaningful choices while still allowing room for experimentation and personal strategy.
When designing the game’s systems and levels, I focused on clarity and consistency. Enemy paths are clearly defined, tower placement follows a grid-based system, and visual feedback such as range indicators and placement outlines helps players quickly understand what is possible and why. Verticality was also used as a strategic layer, where towers placed on higher ground gained increased effective range, encouraging thoughtful positioning rather than flat, uniform layouts.
A key challenge was balancing accessibility with depth under a tight production schedule. To address this, systems were kept simple to understand but designed to scale in complexity through wave progression, enemy variety, economy pacing, and terrain usage, ensuring the experience remained engaging without becoming overwhelming or unfair.
Level Design
When creating levels for this project, I focused on designing clear, readable tower defense spaces that support strategic planning and long-term decision-making. Level layouts were built iteratively inside Unreal Engine using blockouts and Unreal’s Modeling Mode to shape paths, choke points, and buildable areas directly in-engine.
A constant focus throughout the process was readability and balance. Enemy paths clearly communicate direction and pressure points, while grid-based tower placement ensures consistency and fairness. Elevation was used as an additional strategic layer, where towers placed on higher ground gain increased effective range compared to those on lower terrain.
Beyond combat flow, levels were also designed with moments of downtime in mind. Between waves, players are able to explore the map, so I placed visual points of interest and landmarks to draw attention beyond the enemy paths. This helped give the levels a sense of place and rewarded curiosity without distracting from core gameplay.
To reinforce strategic depth, I designed levels around key choke points, vertical variation, and overlapping tower coverage. When certain layouts made it too easy to fully lock down enemy waves, I adjusted path width, spacing, angles, and elevation to reintroduce meaningful choices and trade-offs.
Throughout development, I continuously evaluated player flow and spatial clarity through testing and iteration. Adjustments were based on how players interpreted paths, reacted to wave pressure, and positioned towers in practice, ensuring the level design supported both accessibility and long-term strategic depth.
Game Design
I designed and helped implement the game’s core systems and mechanics, including tower placement, targeting logic, wave progression, enemy behaviors, resource management, and lose conditions. All systems were built to support strategic decision-making and provide clear, readable player feedback.
I collaborated closely with a programmer to define how towers detect and prioritize enemies, how different enemy types behave along paths, and how economy and wave scaling influence difficulty over time. A key focus was keeping systems easy to understand while still allowing meaningful depth through variation in tower roles, enemy composition, and wave pacing.
As development progressed, frequent balance adjustments were needed to maintain challenge without overwhelming the player. To support rapid iteration, systems were designed with tunable values such as tower cost, damage, range, attack rate, enemy health, and wave scaling exposed directly in the editor. This enabled faster testing, tighter feedback loops, and reduced dependency on code changes.
Technical Design & UI/UX
Since this was a two-person project over two weeks, I was responsible for all UI and UX implementation aswell. Every menu and in-game UI element was built by me using Unreal’s UMG system, including the main menu, level select, pause and options menus, HUD elements, and a lore widget used to establish tone and context at the start of the game.
A key focus was performance and clarity. UI was built using overlays instead of canvas panels to reduce draw calls between CPU and GPU, and visual feedback systems such as tower placement indicators, range visualization, health bars, and wave information were designed to clearly communicate game state under pressure.
On the technical side, I worked extensively with Blueprints to structure systems in a clean, maintainable way. This included consistent naming conventions, reusable functions, and editor-facing parameters to reduce spaghetti code and improve iteration speed. These workflow decisions helped keep the project scalable and readable despite the short development timeframe.