MERGE YOUR TOWERS

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  Our title screen, featuring the logo, some tower models, options and start button

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  a view of our first zone, right at the start of the game with a single tower placed down

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  A tower card, showcasing a fresh tower that has been summoned

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  our Summoning merge mechanic screen, showing components that players can merge together to create crates

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  An example of the upgrades available to the player

Inspiration

With MERGE YOUR TOWERS! I have taken a lot of inspiration from Bloons Tower Defence and Lottery Defence (a Starcraft 2 Arcade Mod).

Bloons has a very easy to digest play style and Lottery Defence has really fun and engaging merge mechanics that make gameplay and progression feel really rewarding!

What it does

The core loop is simple - summon and then merge components together to make a crate, then bust open the crate to get a tower! Place those towers and defend your base!

Towers can be merged together to make even stronger towers!

Survive against increasingly difficult waves for bigger rewards and to unlock more challenges!

How we built it

MERGE YOUR TOWERS! was built using OpenAI's Codex, using a human-guided AI prompting workflow.

Suno AI was used for music and some sound generation.

Challenges we ran into

This was my first time trying to build anything using Codex - and I'm quite happy I tried! The biggest difficulty has been reigning myself in and not letting myself go overboard on scope creep! With the AI tools, development was very fast and I have been able to iterate on my ideas very quickly.

Performance did become an issue and I noticed the game ran quite hot on mobile initially. Thankfully, with some more prompting we were able to streamline our final build and get things running smoothly whilst still retaining a lot of the "sauce" in our effects and UI.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I've fallen in love with the Summon and Merge mechanic that I designed for this game. The mechanic has been designed so that there's no "losing", a player is essentially opening a bunch of loot - then merging that loot together to build a whole new lootbox, then they get to open that too!

It's a really positive and engaging mechanic that I think ties the whole game together.

What we learned

I've been a Cursor user for the past 3 years or so - and this was the first time I've actually tackled a project with another tool. I've learned I need to be more open to what's out there!

What's next for MERGE YOUR TOWERS

The game loop we've created here feels so engaging and simple that it's left me wanting to pursue more for this game!

With the prototype complete, I'll be spending time improving the progression and content in the game - I think there's a very nice path to making this feel like an incremental-style tower defence game where numbers get insanely large and players want to push and progress!

More Unit tiers to merge to (Mythic and Celestial) with new systems and requirements that players will need to follow to get there! (Upgrading units for gold, and more!)

Lots of ideas! I'll likely continue to iterate and push towards building for mobile in the near future.

Built With

• ai
• codex
• javascript