100 Day Siege

Foundry Six

Overview:

100 Day Siege is a VR tower defense game where players defend a castle against hundreds of enemies utilizing their stationary slingshot, artillery upgrades, and powerups.

Role: Game Designer

Team size: 10

Engine: Unity

February - March 2025

Platform: Meta Quest Headsets

Contributions

Game balance to over 30 enemy types and 15 levels
Data analysis on player and enemy stats
Designed in game economy and upgrade path
Optimized lighting solutions for VR platform

Design Goals

Increase level completion by players
Balance difficulty of enemy units
Balance enemy units on screen, difficulty, and performance
Use player data to inform design decisions

Enemy Unit Balancing

Enemy stats include:

Unit count per wave
Health
Damage per second (DPS)
Score

The combination of these stats is combined to a max DPS value that is shown in the graph. I used this value to roughly estimate difficulty in a wave. While DPS alone doesn't fully grasp difficulty, it was a jumping off point.

In the graph there usually is a large dip between the last and first wave between levels. This is intentional as player mechanics such as their ground artillery and money gets reset after each level, but not each wave.

Version 0.12: There is a large DPS drop off at 801, level 8 wave 1. This comes off the tail of a fairly consistent waves of increasing difficulty.

Version 0.13: Increasing unit counts in days 8-10 increases the enemy DPS in each wave. Further testing is required to validate whether this is harder, but it's a start

Level & Wave Balancing

Each Wave Contains:

Varying enemy types
Varying amount of enemies
Varying speeds of enemies

To account for player stats resetting on each level, the first wave of each level needs to be the easiest. This allows players to safely gain money and ammunition for the rest of the level.

Design considerations:

Each wave cannot exceed 600 units for performance purposes
The player have permanent upgrades that significantly increase their stats
Time it takes to complete a level as VR players have an average of 30-45 minutes playtime

If I had the opportunity to do this again, I would connect the Google Sheets Unity API and write a script to collect all the units and output their combined DPS in a spreadsheet.