WIP - Tower Defense

The Situation

A mobile-browser "puzzle tower defense" game I'm building solo, built on Phaser 3 with TypeScript and Vite, with a Firebase/Firestore-backed global leaderboard.

The Task

My focus is the core loop first — the "mazing" mechanic, dynamic pathfinding, wave scaling, and tower leveling — before layering in menu polish or content variety.

The Action

The game runs portrait, mobile-first: the grid occupies the top two-thirds of the screen, the bottom third is the tower tray and HUD. The core mechanic is "mazing" — with a limited set of towers, the player drags them onto the grid to block and lengthen the enemy path before starting a wave, rather than just placing turrets in the open. Enemies find their way from spawn to base with a dynamic A* pathfinder, so blocking the path is a real tactical choice, not cosmetic.

Once a wave starts it doesn't stop — there's no fixed enemy count or victory state. Enemy health scales up on a timer the longer a wave runs, and the displayed "wave" number is really a readout of how many of those health-scale bumps have happened. The only way the game ends is running out of lives.

Mazing, pathfinding, and tower leveling:

• Dynamic A* pathfinding: enemies recalculate their route in real time whenever the maze changes. Placing a tower is rejected outright if it would fully seal off the path to the base — the grid always stays theoretically solvable.
• Drag-and-drop placement: towers are dragged from the tray onto the grid rather than tap-selected; dropping one onto an already-placed tower upgrades it instead of placing a new one (capped at level 3), scaling its damage/range/fire-rate and swapping in progressively more detailed sprite art per level rather than just a color tint.
• Mid-wave building: placing or upgrading towers is allowed both before and during an active wave, immediately rerouting any enemies already in flight.
• Object pooling: enemies and projectiles run through Phaser.Physics.Arcade.Group pools instead of being instantiated/destroyed per use, since GC stutter is a real problem on mobile.

Technical architecture:

• Phaser 3 + TypeScript + Vite, targeting a portrait 720×1280 base resolution with Scale.FIT.
• Scene split: PreloaderScene, MainMenuScene, GamePlayScene (grid, pathfinding, towers/enemies, wave state) and UILayerScene, which runs concurrently on top of it for the tower tray, HUD, and game-over/leaderboard panel — the two communicate only through a shared event bus, never by reaching into each other's internals.
• Decoupled systems: Pathfinding (pure A*), GridSystem (grid state + placement validation), WaveManager (endless interval-based spawning), and ObjectPooling all live independent of any Scene.
• Firebase/Firestore leaderboard: a lazily-initialized FirebaseService singleton submits score, level, and remaining resources at game over; without Firebase config present it degrades gracefully instead of crashing.
• Art: the "Free Stone Tower Defense Game Art" pack from itch.io, sorted into towers/effects/ui/projectiles, with generated placeholder tiles and enemy sprites since the pack ships neither.

The Result

Still in active development — the core loop (mazing, pathfinding, wave scaling, tower leveling) is built and playable, but the game is unreleased, with no public build or repo yet.

Future Improvements

• Additional tower types beyond the current single stone-tower line, each with distinct upgrade art
• Level/stage variety instead of a single random start/goal maze
• Menu and game-over screen polish, and surfacing the Firebase leaderboard more prominently
• A real win condition — the wave loop is currently endless-only by design, with "victory" scaffolded in the state types but nothing triggers it yet