Tower Yeeters - A tower throwing defense

Inspiration

My harshest, most unreasonable product manager is my nephew, but boy, does he know games, and what he likes to play! When I ask him, "Oy! What you playing on that phone," the consistent answer is usually a Roblox, a tower defense game, or some quick portrait game with modular fusion. So I did intense scientific research (read: bribed him with ice cream) and three things kept showing up:

A dip-in, dip-out loop he could play between episodes of Ninjago,
The discovery high of stumbling into a combo nobody told him about, and
Juice — enemies bursting into confetti so he knows he cooked. So I mashed up some of the stuff I love with some of the stuff he likes to play and Tower Yeeters was born. I simplified some of the meta-games from games like Balatro and Infinite Craft to come up with my nice little one liner for Tower Yeeters: launch towers from a catapult, fuse them together, and protect the realm. My nephew approved and demanded an expedited timeline... so I better get to work!

What it does

Drag back an Angry-Birds-style catapult and yeet a tower up a branching road. Depending on your aim and an intentionally iffy mid-air steering system you'll try to land towers close to monster choke-points and also fuse elements together to forge increasingly powerful towers! The "Brain Rot" and its minions (Forehead Frank, Delulu Dani, etc) are attacking your base, Yeeter, it's time to rise and yeet to victory!!

How we built it

Did a deep design pass and then prototyped with light javascript to get a feel for the vibes. Long term we'll probably implement this fully in unity or another native 3d engine. All the prototypes use super simple art and elements for now (3d spheres and other primatives) to get the game vibes across, but I want to develop more art as well as this project progresses.

Challenges we ran into

Building a deep game with NO TUTORIAL ALLOWED. This is game has to be for ANYONE, and one thing anyone hates doing is reading tutorials. So yeah, doing the screen design and more to make that flow was no easy feat. Similarly understanding the GenZ and Gen Alpha audience and what humor hits for them is still something I'm struggling to grasp every day lol.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I loved that I could get a basic fusion system and database structure working in the java script iteration of this build (https://bossfeed.fun/games/tower-yeeters/). It gives me a LOT of confidence that this can easily be upscaled in a true 3d engine with the data structure working.

What we learned

Build for deep, and not complicated systems. (IMO: Little Alchemy depth beats deep Civ skill trees) Juice up everything: name-stamped discoveries, screen-burn combos, confetti — the feedback is the retention. And, of course, design a game for a bored nephew (the strictist critic).

What's next for Tower Yeeters - A tower throwing defense

Destructible towers with base HP, biome interactions (lava / ice / desert unlocking unique fusions), Slay-the-Spire-style silly narrative events, daily/weekly/monthly leaderboards with perks, and the dream: a LoL-style PvP mode with two tower-defense setups facing off.