Dramatic title since I am creating one lol…
Most tower defenses are the same you place a tower upgrade the tower and thats all you do. Some tower defenses have abilities which you have to manually activate, but I personally find it annoying to have to do. I also have a couple questions about Tower Defenses in general as that is currently what I am making.
How do I create interactability in my game without it being annoying?
Why do people play tower defense games like TDS or Tower Battles still when there are tower defense games that offer way more content?
Anything else to improve/any bugs would be helpful.
What features can I add that are fun in other tower defenses? TCTD
I think because its like a puzzle, since you need to know which towers are best in its position, timing of its placement and when it was upgraded according to its stats.
It’s easy and doesn’t require much usage of the brain. As you probably know that most kids these days have their brain rotted by skibidi toilet and the gen alpha stuff . So, most kids like games which do not require much work for their brain, hence tower defense games where you simply place things and you win. Does that require any thinking? Absolutely NOT!
For the older audience I suppose it has some strategic-ness to it that’s why it also appeals to the old peeps.
One of the greatest appeals of Tower Defence games is that they can be as easy or as hard as the player wants. If I want to relax after a long day I can load up a tower defense game, quickly choose my favourite towers, and casually play for the next hour or two letting my brain wind down. On the other hand, I could spend my weekend collating all units in the game and their stats into a spreadsheet, trialing decks, and analysing the data to formulate the optimal unit composition and strategy for different situations.
While most games definitely have a mix of casual and serious players, TD’s naturally lend themselves to catering to both communities. Difficulty levels in combination with unit rarity give a sense of progression for new and casual players. Engaging gameplay based on unique game mechanics and interconnected stats introduce challenge and strategy for serious players. While some would discredit games for not “[requiring] any thinking” or being ‘too easy’, its naive to believe that a game is only good if its hard. Sometimes people just want to watch pretend soldiers run across their screen to relax their already overstimulated brains. Cater to a wide range of difficulties, and encourage people to enjoy playing your game, not just beating it.
Edit: I accidently posted before I was finished writing lol
Two other areas of TD’s are Theme and Collectability. I play STDS because it’s Star Wars themed and I like Star Wars. I enjoy collecting ships for a specific faction and limiting myself to doing the best with that specific faction. If someone made a Star Trek TD, I’d definitely play that - even if it was objectively a bad game. The theme would be enough to carry the game for me. So in your own TD, try and consider what kind of theme you’d like to target. Is it a specific franchise? Is it historic, a specific time period? Is it some form of abstract concept or even a very generic style like ‘post apocalyptic future’? Combine your theme with a good selection of units and people will keep coming back to try and finish their collection.
If you want a good tower defence game you need to innovate. A lot of tower defence games are fun because the devs create their own ideas for how it works tdx and tower blitz have split upgrading paths that add more choices. Tdx has health for the towers adding more strategy to the game. Tower galactica had bosses that would attack the player and upgrade paths where you can upgrade each stat individually. World tower defence has moving towers and no real path. Critical tower defence had all sorts of concepts for enemys with timed ones, ones that dont take damage until others are killed, etc.
In general if you want people to play your game you need to inovate and change the game.
One other thing too is that your progression needs to be fun because people dont like playing the same mode over and over again just to unlock some boring tower.
To answer question 3 and 4
3.
Systems
I haven’t seen your movement system or played the game you linked, but make sure to use OOP for an enemies class and tower class. This will help with changing and fixing bugs far easier. Having multiple modules that handle single towers will cause you to fix similar issues more than once and will lead to increased memory consumption. Have ABSOLUTELY NO memory leaks within the enemy in parts of the game. With the amount of enemies that you may be spawning it can easily crash the player.
Movement
Avoid using movement systems that stutter as seen in (Classic Tower battles). Another system to avoid is humanoids. The only humanoids that should be the players humanoids. Attempt to implement a movement system that relies on the client to handle the smoothing out of movement, while the server handles the position. I managed to do this by tweeting a part on the server to positions while the client attached an align position to the part. This removes all the movement systems physics allowing for engine to run loops faster(tower fire-rate will be less affected by high amounts of enemies).
With this system the server can handle 2k+ enemies. While the client can handle 600-800. You could then further improve this by adding a check to the players physics heartbeat. If the heartbeat goes below the threshold you could then change the align positions for welds to remove the physics from the client entirely which improves performance.(If you would like to see this system in action just message me).
In a nutshell, you just want to optimize the game in this section because this happens to be the laggiest part of the game.
Gameplay:
You are going to want incentive for players to push into harder modes. A game you mentioned lacks this. All of its triumph rewards are 150c, this leads to the majority of players just wanting to play the most boring map and causes new players to become disengaged and leave. TDS succeeds where TB has failed but that works both ways. TDS has map rewards that scale upon difficulty of the map, but TB has added a competitive feel for the game which brings an audience of strategy and competitive players out. That is an untapped demographic for TDS.(this wasn’t always a the case for tds, back when it was more of a TB rip it had versus). You are going to have to decide if you want to target the strategy junkies as WTD(rts not a td) and TB do, or the casual child( toilet tower defense and TDS).
Features: complementary towers. This idea pretty much is summed up to two towers being better when used together. Given a hypothetical of a DJ support tower and a partier tower. In someway the DJ tower grants additional stats to the specified tower.
Attempt to make each map bias to a group of towers, this will fix your gameplay loop being the same as every other TD game. This will make there not be one set of ‘meta towers’. Meaning the player has to learn which maps and will make players not as easily bored of the loop. Some maps may favor splash towers because of how densely packed the road is, where a different map may favor single target high fire rate towers. Limiting the players to a specific 5 towers that can beat any map in the game is what is currently harming the TD games on Roblox the most.
I just typed off of this up on my phone and it may be hard to read. Well have a good day.
and the gen alpha stuff 
. So, most kids like games which do not require much work for their brain, hence tower defense games where you simply place things and you win. Does that require any thinking? Absolutely NOT!