OVERVIEW

Game & Level Designer - (10/2022 - 03/2025)

GAME DESCRIPTION

Nomad Defender is a mix of Tower Defense, Deckbuilder & Roguelike genres.

You wake up in a dark and oppressive facility. Only by playing and beating a mysterious Tower Defense game can you uncover the secrets hidden in the shadows.

Build and customize a deck of turret cards, adding unique abilities and modifying projectiles to boost your defense. Discover devastating synergies and stop the relentless waves of enemies in intense strategic Tower Defense combat.

RESPONSABILITIES

Started an indie studio and brought a game from scratch to release.
Designed and balanced Tower Defense levels, ensuring engaging layouts that challenge and reward strategic play.
Defined the core game loop, shaping the player experience through pacing, progression, and decision-making.
Developed enemy design and behaviors, creating diverse threats that interact meaningfully with different player strategies.
Designed projectiles, abilities, and support buildings, enabling varied playstyles such as high-risk/high-reward currency stacking and card-stacking strategies.
Refined game pacing and difficulty curves, ensuring smooth and rewarding progression.
Iterated on level layouts and mechanics, playtesting and adjusting based on player feedback.

CONTRIBUTIONS

As a Game and Level Designer for Nomad Defender, my primary responsibility was to craft a satisfying and strategically engaging player experience by designing core gameplay systems and balancing the overall progression.

I played a key role in researching and understanding our Tower Defense player base, identifying their intrinsic motivations, and applying those insights to our gameplay, level design, and balance to ensure a rewarding and fair experience.

Beyond design, I also took on the role of Producer, guiding the team with agile methodologies, managing media, press kits, and pitches, and representing the game at major industry events. A highlight of this role was attending Gamescom 2024, where I met with multiple publishers and pitched Nomad Defender.

Understanding the Genre and Its Players

From the start, we prioritized prototyping while deeply analyzing the Tower Defense genre. We researched documentation and videos on its core mechanics, strategies, and player motivations—both intrinsic and extrinsic.

This groundwork allowed us to design a game that resonated with genre expectations while introducing fresh mechanics.

Our Roguelike Difficulty Formula

One challenge I faced was designing a system that ensured battles matched the expected difficulty as players progressed through a run.

To achieve this, I structured all battles into four distinct phases: Early, Mid, Late, and Boss Fight. Each phase followed specific design rules, shaping both the battlefield layout and the enemies players would encounter. This approach allowed us to maintain a balanced and steadily increasing challenge while ensuring each phase felt distinct yet cohesive.

Enemy Design & Classification

To create the right challenge for each phase of the run, we needed a diverse set of enemies. My role was to classify them in a way that aligned with the level design rules, ensuring a clear and structured progression. Enemies were divided into two major categories: Basics and Specials.

Basic Enemies

These enemies differ only in their stats (Health and Movement Speed) while sharing the same core behavior. This led to three distinct enemy types:

Minion – Balanced stats, serving as the standard enemy.
Tank – ▲ Health | ▼ Movement Speed – Slow but durable.
Fast – ▼ Health | ▲ Movement Speed – Fragile but quick.

Special Enemies

Special enemies are variations of basic ones, inheriting similar but not identical stats (Tanky, Fast, or Balanced) while introducing unique abilities that challenge players to adapt. They fall into two categories:

Support Enemies – Enhance other enemies, making them more effective.
Offensive Enemies – Possess abilities that make them individually more dangerous.

Layouts Evolution Among Stages

During early development, we faced issues with level layouts—since players encountered different layouts in a single run, a bad start could lead to an unfair loss.

To address this, I designed and applied a structured pipeline for the team:

Early Stage: We created a foundational layout with a distinct gimmick.
Mid & Late Stages: If the Early layout worked well, we adapted it into more challenging versions, introducing a new gimmick while preserving its core structure.

This approach ensured balanced progression, improved player experience, and streamlined level design by allowing us to quickly iterate and refine layouts.

Spiral Layouts Evolution

Early Stage

Mid Stage

Late Stage

2 Paths Squared Layouts Evolution

Early Stage

Mid Stage

Late Stage

Boss Fight Design

The Boss Fight is the game's final challenge, designed to feel both epic and fair. To make it stand out, we introduced two key mechanics:

Appearing Layout: The battle spans eight waves, with new enemy paths opening every two waves. This forces players to quickly adapt as the difficulty naturally escalates.
Disabler Bombs: These bombs disable nearby turrets on detonation unless manually disarmed by clicking multiple times. This mechanic keeps players engaged while reusing the Disabler Enemy’s ability.

These elements create a high-stakes, dynamic fight that demands constant adaptation while remaining rewarding.

Playstyle-Driven Design

Nomad Defender goes beyond traditional Tower Defense by introducing turret synergies, projectile interactions, modular abilities, and support buildings. To structure this complexity, we designed four distinct base playstyles:

Slowing Enemies – Focused on controlling enemy movement.
Wide Range – Covering large areas with consistent damage.
Self-Damaging – High-risk, high-reward strategies.
Duplicating Cards – Expanding deck options for adaptability.

These playstyles form the foundation of the four starter decks players can choose at the beginning of a run. However, the system is flexible—players can mix and match strategies by selecting upgrades throughout their run, encouraging experimentation and synergy discovery.

Documentation

I was responsible for creating and maintaining documentation for key Game and Level Design aspects, including level layouts, pacing, and enemy restrictions based on the run's progression.

For example, the Levels Document features:

An overview tab that automatically compiles all level types.
A searchable tab where specific levels and their key details can be easily accessed.

Ensuring these documents were clear and visually structured was essential for helping the team quickly understand and reference important design elements.

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