Defense Layout Design
A planning service that maps a thoughtful path and tower placement system. Suited to creators who enjoy careful, fair challenge design.
$260 USD
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Service 02 · Wave & Economy Build
A core loop that keeps players engaged without losing them
When waves feel varied and resources feel earnable, strategy clicks into place. This service builds that system — thoughtfully, with balance that rewards rather than punishes.
What this delivers
A wave system and economy that hold together across your whole game
Waves with shape and variety
Each wave has a clear role in the session arc — building pressure, offering breathing room, or escalating toward a specific kind of test. Players feel the variation without seeing the numbers behind it.
An economy that stays fair
Resource gain and upgrade costs are calibrated so that good decisions feel rewarded and poor ones feel recoverable. Strategy matters; luck doesn't dominate.
A results screen that communicates clearly
Players know what happened and why. A clean results screen closes the loop between the session and what comes next.
Where things get complicated
Wave and economy problems are easy to miss until they're very visible
A wave system that feels fine in isolation can create strange difficulty spikes when the economy isn't calibrated to match. Players grind to a halt not because the game is hard, but because the numbers are slightly off in ways that compound across sessions.
Economy problems tend to reveal themselves through player behaviour rather than through testing — when upgrades feel pointless, or when a single optimal path dominates everything else. By the time these patterns surface, reworking the underlying system is a significant effort. Getting the structure right during development saves that rework entirely.
Signs of underlying tension
- One or two waves dramatically harder than those around them
- Players hoard resources because spending feels risky
- A single tower or upgrade dominates all viable strategies
- The results screen doesn't clearly explain what happened
Our approach
Built for your specific loop, not adapted from somewhere else
We begin by understanding the session length you're targeting, the number of towers in your roster, and how you want the difficulty arc to feel across a typical run. These parameters shape everything: wave composition, enemy pacing, and the rate at which resources flow.
From there we build the wave structure and economy model together — iterating as we go rather than presenting a finished system all at once. You see the reasoning behind each decision and can redirect before anything is locked in.
The results screen is designed alongside the system, so it reflects how the economy actually works rather than being retrofitted after the fact.
This service covers
- Session arc scoping and wave count planning
- Full wave system with enemy composition and pacing
- Resource economy model with upgrade cost calibration
- Results screen layout and data presentation design
- Documentation of all values and the reasoning behind them
Working together
A collaborative build with checkpoints you can actually act on
01
Session parameters call
We discuss session length, tower roster size, and the difficulty feel you're aiming for. This sets the frame for everything that follows.
02
Wave system draft
We produce a draft wave structure with annotated composition notes. You review it before we move on to the economy layer.
03
Economy model delivery
The economy model and results screen are delivered with full documentation, ready for your team to integrate or hand off to engineering.
04
Review & adjust
After your team reviews, we address questions and make targeted adjustments before sign-off. The goal is a system your team feels confident using.
Pricing
What the service costs and what you receive
The scope and timeline are agreed before work starts. Payment details are discussed at that point — nothing is asked for before you're comfortable with the plan.
What's included
- Session parameters scoping call (~45 min)
- Full wave system document with composition and pacing notes
- Resource economy model with calibrated upgrade costs
- Results screen layout and data presentation design
- Full documentation of values and reasoning, review session included
How progress works
No black boxes — every output comes with an explanation
Wave-by-wave documentation
Each wave includes notes on its role in the session arc, enemy composition rationale, and how it interacts with the economy at that point in the run.
Economy values and logic
Resource gain rates, upgrade costs, and the relationships between them are all documented so your team can adjust individual values without breaking the system's structure.
Realistic timeline
This is a more involved service — most projects run 3–4 weeks from scoping call to final delivery. We'll confirm a timeline before starting and check in at each stage.
Our commitment
The goal is a system your team can own and extend
We don't hand over a spreadsheet and leave. The documentation is written so that a developer picking it up six months later can understand what the values mean and why they sit where they do. That's intentional.
If the first draft of the wave system or economy model doesn't fit what was discussed in the scoping call, we revisit it. The review session built into the service is there exactly for this — to surface misalignments before they become integration problems.
Scope is confirmed before work begins — no deliverables added mid-project without your agreement.
You review the wave draft before we move to the economy layer — no waiting until the end to flag issues.
A no-commitment conversation is how this starts. We discuss your project before any agreement is made.
Getting started
A short message is enough to get the conversation moving
01
Reach out
Tell us about your game and where you are in development. A few sentences is plenty — we'll reply within a couple of days and ask anything we need.
02
Scope the work
We align on session parameters, agree on the timeline, and confirm what the service covers for your specific project before anything moves forward.
03
We build together
Work proceeds in stages — wave draft first, then economy, then results screen — with your input at each point before the next stage begins.
Wave & Economy Build · $610 USD
Ready to shape your core loop?
No commitment needed to start. Share what you're working on and we'll let you know if this service fits where your project is right now.
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