Genre guidesSpatialPlanningResources
Tower defense
Enemies travel a route, and the player spends limited defenses in space so each tower answers a different stretch of the problem.
Guides explain combinations and are counted separately from individual mechanisms.
Core loop
- Read what the next wave contains
- Place or upgrade a defense beside the route
- See which stretch let an enemy through
- Spend that wave's income on the weakest spot
Key mechanisms
- The path and the range matter more than a raw attack number
- Defenses answer different enemies rather than only bigger numbers
- The gap between waves leaves time to look and choose once
Design notes
- Start with one bend and two towers so overlapping range is visible
- A leak should reveal whether speed, numbers, or armor was the problem
- Do not let the only correct layout be obvious on wave one
Reference games
- Kingdom Rush
- Bloons TD 6
- Plants vs. Zombies
Variants and combinations
- With management: repair the road by day and hold it by night
- With a roguelike run: each wave offers one random tower
- With supply: a tower stops firing until ammunition arrives
Common pitfall
Do not raise difficulty only through enemy health; vary routes and tower roles.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- Kingdom Rush
Compare route coverage, tower position and branching upgrades.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Make a tower defense: enemies follow one curved path, and the player may place only two tower types. One reaches far, the other fires quickly. There is time between waves to patch the weakest stretch. Five leaks end the game.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.