Project Overview
Xenite Defender is a sci-fi tower defense game where players must build defenses at night to protect xenite mining operations from waves of enemy droid fleets. The core challenge: managing resources, placement decisions, and upgrade priorities under time pressure.
What I Built
- Core gameplay loop: day phase (build/upgrade) → night phase (defend) → repeat
- Enemy wave pacing system with escalating difficulty and variety
- Simple but tuned economy — resource drops, tower costs, upgrade tiers
- Clean separation between placement logic, targeting logic, and wave management
- Tower targeting AI with configurable priority modes (closest, strongest, first)
Systems Highlight: Separation of Concerns
One of the key engineering goals was keeping placement, targeting, and wave logic fully decoupled. Each tower doesn't know about waves; the wave manager doesn't know about tower internals. This made balancing and extending the game dramatically easier.
Key Takeaway
Tower defense games are deceptively complex systems problems. Getting wave pacing and economy tuning right required extensive playtesting — and taught me how small numeric changes cascade through an entire game feel.