Inspiration
I wanted to put a fresh spin on tower defense by leaning into something most TD games avoid: making the player’s units unreliable. Corgis are an obvious source of comedy: round, well-meaning, and famously easy to distract. The idea clicked once I realized the joke could become the actual mechanic. Instead of placing perfectly reliable defenders, the player would be managing tired, hungry, occasionally sleepy dogs whose effectiveness visibly shrinks the longer they go without a snack or a nap, and the comedy of “of course Sir Biscotti fell asleep again” would become the heart of every failure state.
What it does
Chonky Corgis is a tower defense game where a kingdom of corgis defends the Royal Bakery from waves of mischievous cats. Each corgi projects a glowing Effectiveness Radius that scales directly with their Energy Bar: well-fed and rested corgis cover wide ground, while tired ones shrink down to almost nothing, letting cats slip through. Players manage that energy in real time using two currencies: spending precious bakery biscuits for an instant restore that keeps a corgi on post, or sending them off to the free feeding station or for a nap, which costs nothing but leaves the lane open. Coins earned from scared-off cats fund defensive structures and Bakery Upgrades that speed up biscuit production, the long-game strategy that keeps the whole system from collapsing under pressure.
How I built it
I built this as a complete four-document pre-production package: a Game Design Document covering the core mechanics, four named corgis with distinct roles, and an enemy taxonomy that escalates meaningfully; a Player Journey Map mapping the first 15 minutes with a tension curve and a minute-by-minute teaching sequence; a Visual Concept Package grounded in real gameplay screenshots, including a pixel-sampled color palette and annotated UI zones; and a Production Plan with a phased build sequence and an honest MVP scope. I iterated across many rounds, evaluating each draft against the official contest rubric and fixing coherence gaps between documents as the mechanics evolved, including a full prose pass to remove filler and sharpen the comedic voice throughout.
Challenges I ran into
The hardest part was keeping four separate documents telling one consistent story as the core mechanic kept getting refined. Early drafts had stat-card numbers in the Visual Concept Package that didn’t match the events described in the same panel, a Production Plan that undercounted the MVP’s player actions, and features like Offline Progression and Social Gameplay that existed in the GDD but were missing entirely from the build plan’s cut list. I also had to rebuild the entire color palette from scratch once I had real screenshots: my assumed palette didn’t match the actual warm, storybook art at all, so I resampled every hex value directly from the game art.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I’m proud that the shrinking radius mechanic does double duty: it’s a genuine strategic system (energy management, nap rotations, the biscuit-spend tradeoff) and it’s also where almost all the comedy comes from, without those two things working against each other. I’m proud of how distinct the four corgis feel: Sir Biscotti’s loud, exhausting enthusiasm, Lady Pudge’s unshakeable steadiness, Baron Flops’ chaotic wide patrol, and Duchess Crumble’s perfectionist support role all map cleanly to different defensive functions. And I’m proud of catching and fixing every cross-document inconsistency before submission, so the final package genuinely reads as one coherent game rather than four separate assignments.
What I learned
I learned that a tower defense game’s “unit variety” doesn’t have to come from different attack types; it can come from different relationships to the same core resource, which made the whole roster feel more personal than a typical stat sheet. I also learned that compressing a design document to a strict page count is its own design skill: cutting the GDD down to exactly seven pages while keeping all twelve sections forced me to find the single sentence that did the work of three, which made the writing better, not just shorter. And I relearned the lesson that visual identity should follow the real art, not the other way around, once actual screenshots forced me to throw out my guessed-at colors and resample everything by hand.
What's next for Chonky Corgis
I can't wait to make the actual game using the Meta Horizon game engine. I will focus on the MVP as described in the production plan and hope to have the game up and running within 2-3 months.
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