ExalTD

As the lead developer, and with the exception of the audio system, all of the gameplay code, in-game balance, and codebase architecture was designed and implemented by me. I had a lot of fun implementing and playtesting each part of this game, and the owner of the project is a great person who not only accepted me as a developer of this project, but also listened to my thoughts, let me implement my own ideas, and let me be a real part of the development.

Here are a few of my many works that went into ExalTD throughout the 2+ years I have been working on the project.

Gameplay

• Implemented the core tower systems, which play uniquely between the creature and fighter towers, each one with a unique kit in their arsenal.
• Created a wave economy and enemy system, making some enemies split up upon being defeated, adding even more challenge into the waves.
• Implemented all interfaces with mobile device compatibility in mind.
• Implemented many user-experience improvements into the interfaces to make sure players always have maximum quality of life and information available to them, such as recursive keyword tooltips that detail any mechanic in-game for players to see.
• Designed and implemented an interactive, step-by-step in-game tutorial for players who are new to the genre or need a quick refresher for the game.

Optimization

• Enemies, projectiles, and damage numbers are all pooled to make sure players do not have hiccups from the game generating so many nodes all at once.
• Towers have various targeting modes, so I created a central targeting logic that prevents each tower from constantly sorting through a massive number of enemies all at once, and instead lets them use only what they need and take their targets quickly.
• I implemented a shader compilation and asset pre-warm system that handles all “first time encounter” hiccups during a loading screen, to keep players from stuttering during gameplay.

Tool development

• The enemies are animated in Spine2D, but running SpineSprite for all of the enemies, which did not really need a Spine runtime, was causing a massive performance hit. So I wrote an editor addon that takes a Spine packed-atlas export and converts it into an easily usable SpriteFrames resource or an AnimatedSprite2D for direct use, with the animation, playback type, and even a blend-mode material generated automatically when the asset is exported with premultiplied alpha. It is published separately as Spine Atlas Parser.
• I also developed many in-editor docks and tools that allow for easy, visual rebalancing of the game overall.
• Created an in-engine VFX test environment to let the VFX artist test their assets without requiring any help.

Git version control

• The whole project’s version control is managed by me alone.