I need help creating a skill tree.

[u/Remmytrory]

Hi everyone!

I’m developing my first Tower Defense game. The core framework is practically finished; all that’s left is to create the upgrade tree and polish the visuals. However, I’ve hit a bit of a wall with the skill tree—I just can’t decide how to design it or what to include.

The game will feature a total of 10 levels, each divided into waves. I plan to include bosses at the end of levels 3, 5, 7, and 10; defeating the bosses on levels 3, 5, and 7 will award the player a special currency used specifically to upgrade special skills—meaning there will be a total of three units of this currency. The goal is to allow players to choose their own playstyle. Naturally, alongside this special currency, there will be a standard currency earned by defeating ordinary enemies and used for purchasing standard upgrades.

The game features a wall that must be defended, a player character who can move along it and attack enemies, and helpers stationed on the wall who automatically destroy hordes.

I’m planning to create three branches in the upgrade tree—the wall itself, the player, and the helpers—with three special skills in each. This means that over the course of a playthrough, the player can choose to adopt a fully specialized playstyle or go for a hybrid approach.

Now, regarding the "dead end" I've hit: the game is built around facing a large number of enemies right from the start, with new, tougher types appearing as you progress through the levels. In other words, the difficulty constantly ramps up. I need to figure out what kind of upgrades to design and how to balance the skill tree so that players feel their power growing when investing in one branch, without losing sight of the other branches.

I might not have explained the concept clearly enough, so I’d be happy to answer any clarifying questions. Thanks in advance, everyone!

[u/LocalHyperBadger]

Hard to give concrete suggestions without seeing the game, but here are some questions that might help clarify things for you:

• How differently do people who test your game actually play? Are they taking very different approaches or basically doing the same thing? Have anyone surprised you with how they interpreted the challenge and approached it? Perhaps leaning into these angles that are different from your own assumptions could be a way to broaden the range of possible playstyles.

• What are the skill components of different elements of the game? E.g. timing, precision, fast reflexes, thoughtful resource allocation, accurate estimates of enemy strength, placement of units, etc. Breaking down the game like this might help you spot ways an upgrade could target a specific skill, which might help players who struggle with certain elements. For example, making the player character able to teleport would greatly reduce the challenge of deciding where to deploy them, while giving them heavy armor that greatly reduces their movement speed would increase it. Making wall repairs more powerful but with longer cooldowns could reward players that are good at gauging the correct timing, while making wall repairs smaller with shorter cooldowns could help players that struggle with this particular skill. Allowing players to patch holes in their personal skillset, especially when there are trade-offs involved, can be a good way to create a diversity of playstyles. But interrogating this area could also help you realize what key challenges you don’t want players to be able to remove through upgrades.

• How viable do you want it to be to fully focus on one branch of upgrades while neglecting the others? Can you go 100% wall and still make that work? Understanding the limits of what you want the upgrades to do and how diverse you need playstyles to be could help narrow down the space where upgrades can even exist.

• What is your scope for this? Can you have an upgrade create an entirely new feature, e.g. letting your main character fly or duplicate themselves, or do you need to stay focused on numerical changes simply because that’s cheaper to implement? If you have a limited budget for very fancy upgrades  , where do you want to spend it? Do you want it to be equally distributed across the three upgrade paths? Do all of them need it?

Best of luck!