Game design of Infinitode 2

These are just my thoughts on this topic, don't use them as a reference as I may be completely wrong. I'm writing this only for you to understand my point of view - refer to wikipedia or some other websites like gamedeveloper.com for articles written by professionals.

General thoughts

Game design, in terms of game development, usually focuses on some specific parts of a game and their synergy - it does not give you a recipe for the whole game. Existing articles and solutions for an individual game design problems greatly help in these regards - not only do they consider many things and analyze the problem from different sides, but players are also used to those solutions, and they are comfortable with them.

When it comes to a design of the whole game, it is rarely beneficial to use the best solution you can find - most probably, such game already exists and following its design will only result in another "generic" game, whose success will not be based on things that are directly related to the gameplay but on such things as visual style, overall "feel" of the game, its stability and performance, some extra features that increase engagement or, in some cases - on how much funding goes into its advertisement.

I believe that any game has a chance to achieve some success in one of these cases:

The game has unique and interesting game loop, which makes it stand out - lots of well known games and those games that receive a huge attention all of a sudden go into this category (for example, Among us or Lethal Company). High risk, high reward.
The game uses well known genre loved by many players and brings a twist by combining it with some other, not typical for the genre mechanics (Palworld). The risk is a bit lower here, but the game also has less room for experimentation, and it is harder to come up with something greatly outstanding.
The game uses a design of some other game (or multiple games), typical for this genre, but tries to improve it. Such game does not receive an immediate attention, but it acts as an alternative for the well established audience of players and could be a safer bet, if it manages to improve the existing games somehow. The margin of risk and reward is probably the smallest in this case, and it all depends on the ability of the developer to actually improve something.

A direction Infinitode 2 takes

You've probably guessed that Infinitode follows the last path, and there are many reasons to that, but the most important is - I am a sole developer (an "indie"), my skills and resources are limited, so as the imagination. I like programming stuff, watching it work by itself (or shoot by itself) and making entangled things that are not easy to master - that's why it is comfortable for me to stick to a single genre (an imagination issue) and, by a pure coincidence, my favorite genre is Tower Defense.

As with any other game, one should define some goals he/she wants to achieve making the game and follow these goals in all the decisions made. Changing goals mid-development may be destructive, and I actually can suggest you an interesting video which explains this very nicely: Design Attractors.

Speaking of goals I'm pursuing during the development of Infinitode 2, here's a crude list for you:

It should be very close to a Tower Defense genre and should not mix a pure TD with other genres (for example, automation / realtime strategy / idle clicker etc.) if they conflict in any way.
It should allow the player to upgrade stuff between the runs (the research tree, quest rewards or any other means that do not introduce genre mixins), because that's what Infinitode started with - players (including me) like to become more powerful.
It aims at diversifying the strategies, because I believe that's what makes Tower Defense a "strategy" genre. There should be multiple ways to achieve something - be it the highest score or a maximum mining speed, the game should not force the player to use a single strategy to achieve something, otherwise it is no longer a strategy but a routine.
Every single tower, ability, modifier etc. must have its use. Nothing should be useless, and nothing should be clearly overpowered, because it will make everything else useless.
Players must have a fair environment for competition. Anything that degrades scoring in one or another way should not be introduced without purging the leaderboards, and seasons were designed specifically for that. Game balance in one season should not restrict decisions of the next season - there's no point in limiting that, because players preserve their progress and the competition remains fair due to the fact everyone competes in the same conditions.
I'm well aware that it is not possible to create a game which will remain interesting and fresh after thousands of hours of gameplay when there's only one person works on it. It is a common practice to measure the value of a game by the amount of hours of gameplay it can give to the player, and considering my abilities, resources and imagination, I can not guarantee more than 100 hours of gameplay (or a maxed regular research tree, whatever comes first) and will focus on those first 100 hours. Everything else (endless research / prestige) can be completely broken and not engaging at times, but I will still try to improve them when possible.

Speaking of design attractors - Infinitode currently follows those fixed goals. Tower defense genre, research tree, strategy diversification - these things should prevail when any decision is made in cases where some new idea starts to push the game further from any of those goals.

The most frustrating thing that usually happens between the seasons is a nerf of something overpowered, which has not been designed to be in the game in the first place. Overpowered values give a great feeling to the players and are painful to remove, and they act as a completely different goal the game could move to - a goal to make a game absolutely unbalanced but also extremely fun to play due to the nature of high values.

This is what many players want, but changing the direction of the game towards this new goal mid-development may be highly destructive. It constantly attracts decisions towards itself, it wants to turn the game into something more fun in the eyes of the players, but it also pushes the game further from the original goal mentioned above. Think about the Chess game - it does not allow you to nuke the opponent's king in one turn, it does not provide you a single winning strategy for every possible situation, and it even does not tell you which first move you should take - it is quite boring but interesting at the same time, and even a single pawn can turn the whole battle upside down. It just does that in a small steps, bit by bit, until the advantage becomes high enough. Infinitode tries to move towards this perfect definition of a strategy game - it should not dictate you when and what should be used to win, and I'm constantly working on eliminating the things that push the game further from this goal.

I believe that Tower Defense with virtually no balance and lots of overpowered features should be very fun to play, but unfortunately Infinitode 2 does not pursue this idea. It suits a new game much better, and I was actually going to follow that new goal in Infinitode 3 (or whatever it could be called) - that's another reason why I'm trying to avoid that goal, to make these two games clearly different.

You may be upset of this and may think that the game moves in a wrong direction, but its direction has been determined from the beginning, so it is more like "the game does not move in that other direction". Even if I like your ideas, even if they are great and fun - the original goal is what affects my decisions, please understand that and do not think that I don't want to listen to you or simply thinking that my decisions are better than yours. It is all about the goals and pursuing them, no matter what the final result will be.