Alright, let me walk you through how I ended up making this ‘ball td value list’. I was messing around with my little tower defense project, the one with the rolling balls as towers, you know? And things just felt… wrong. Seriously off. Some levels felt like a walk in the park, then the next one would just crush you instantly. My main ‘ball’ tower, the basic one, seemed totally unpredictable in its usefulness.
I figured I needed to stop just tweaking numbers randomly in the editor. It was chaos. So, I decided to actually list out all the important bits for that basic ball tower. Get it all down in one place where I could actually see it.
Getting Started – Just Dumping the Numbers
So, I booted up the project. Had to dig into the config files, or scripts, wherever I’d stashed the tower stats. It was a bit messy, gotta admit. I just started writing stuff down in a plain text file at first.
- Damage
- How fast it shoots (fire rate)
- How far it shoots (range)
- Cost to build it
- Cost for each upgrade
- What each upgrade actually did
It was just a raw list. Better than nothing, but still kinda hard to make sense of.
Making it Make Sense
Looking at that raw dump, I realized I needed some structure. Just a list of numbers wasn’t cutting it. So, I started grouping things. I decided to use sections, like breaking it down by the base tower stats and then each upgrade path, if it had branches.
I ended up with something like this in my notes:
Base Ball Tower Stats
- Damage: 5
- Fire Rate: 1 shot per second
- Range: 150 units
- Build Cost: 50 gold
Upgrade Path 1 – Faster Shooting
- Level 1 Cost: 75 gold
- Level 1 Fire Rate: 1.5 shots per second
- Level 2 Cost: 150 gold
- Level 2 Fire Rate: 2 shots per second
- Level 3 Cost: 400 gold <– Saw this and thought, wow, that jump is huge!
- Level 3 Fire Rate: 2.5 shots per second
Upgrade Path 2 – More Damage
- Level 1 Cost: 80 gold
- Level 1 Damage: 8
- Level 2 Cost: 160 gold
- Level 2 Damage: 12
Putting it down like this, using simple lists under headings, made the problems jump out. Like that massive cost spike for the third upgrade on the speed path. No wonder nobody was using it!
The Back and Forth – Tweaking and Testing
So, with this list in hand, I started playing with the numbers on the list first. I’d pencil in changes, like “Okay, let’s drop that level 3 cost to 300 instead of 400.” Then, I’d go back into the actual game editor and punch in those new values.
Then came the real test: playing the game. I’d run those levels that felt broken before. Did the ball tower feel better? Was that upgrade path more appealing now? It was a lot of back and forth. Change the list, change the game, play, see how it feels, go back to the list.
Sometimes the changes worked great first try. Other times, I’d make something else feel weird. Like maybe making the base tower too cheap made the early game trivial. So, back to the list, tweak again, test again.
Why I Stick With It
Honestly, this ‘ball td value list’ became my anchor. It’s not fancy. It started as a text file, sometimes I use a basic spreadsheet now. But having all the core values for that tower laid out clearly stopped me from just guessing. When I add a new enemy or change the game speed, I look at the list first to see how it might affect the balance of my basic ball tower.
It’s a living document now. I update it whenever I make a significant balance change. It saves me a ton of headache compared to how I used to do things. Simple, maybe a bit crude, but it gets the job done and keeps my tower balancing somewhat sane.
