Developer Log: Building Guardian Towers
Guardian Towers is our tribute to the golden age of Flash tower defense games. We wanted to recapture the strategic depth of placing specialized towers along a winding path while managing a strict economy of gold and mana.
Balancing the Towers
The biggest challenge in developing Guardian Towers was balancing the four primary tower types: Archer, Mage, Cannon, and Slow. We spent weeks running automated simulations to ensure no single tower type overpowered the others, forcing the player to build synergistic defenses to survive the later waves of heavily armored Orcs and fast-moving Goblins.
Pathfinding and Performance
Rendering hundreds of enemies simultaneously without causing browser lag required us to optimize our pathfinding. Instead of calculating the A* path for every single enemy every frame, we pre-compute a flow field based on the map's waypoints. Enemies simply query the flow field for their next movement vector, reducing CPU overhead to almost zero.