A tower defense game maker where the balance is the whole job
By Eduardo Orellana · Updated
Flockbay is free on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Claude Pro or Max, or ChatGPT Plus or higher, builds a real Godot project in the Godot editor. Claude Free and ChatGPT Free do not run here. More models are optional, a credit reload at API prices. Windows today. The engine is the official Godot release. Tower defense is the genre where the design is almost entirely numbers. Range, cost, damage, wave size, the gap between waves. Getting one wrong is the difference between a good hour and a solved puzzle.
The genre in one paragraph
Things walk a path. You spend money on things that stop them. If the things that stop them are too strong, the game is over before it starts; too weak and it is a treadmill. The pleasure is in the gap between those, and the gap is narrow.
Everything else — theme, art, story — sits on top of that arithmetic. This is why so many tower defense games feel the same underneath and why the good ones feel distinctly different: the numbers are the design, not the decoration.
It is also why the genre is a good place to start. The scope is small, the loop is short, and you can tell within one playthrough whether something is wrong.
Building the map
A tower defense map is a puzzle about placement. Where the path bends, where a tower can cover two lanes at once, how much buildable ground sits near the choke, whether high ground is worth walking to.
You build that by hand in Flockbay, with whichever set of tools the project is carrying. A new project asks 2D or 3D before it makes anything, as two pictures, with no default. In 3D that hand work is terrain, water, buildings and the shape of the route. In 2D you drag to say which cells are ground, and the tiles, the edges and the collision all fall out of that coverage, so the lane and the buildable pockets are things you paint rather than assemble. Either way you then play it, find the one placement that trivialises the level, and go back and change the shape.
The two views change the genre in opposite directions, and both are useful. In 3D, height, line of sight and cover become real rather than notional, and a tower that cannot see over a ridge is a design element rather than a bug. On a flat board you give that up and get legibility back: every lane is visible at once, which is how Desktop Tower Defense worked in 2007 and why so much of the genre never left that view.
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Towers, waves and the tuning loop
Every tower is a small set of numbers with a rule attached: range, rate, damage, cost, what it is good against, what it cannot hit. Every wave is a composition and a timing. All of it is code, and Flockbay writes it as GDScript inside your project.
Which means the loop is: play a run, notice that the cheap tower is always the right answer, say so, play again. That is the entire craft of the genre and it depends on being able to change a number without it costing an evening.
The judgement is yours from beginning to end. Not writing the code does not mean not seeing that wave nine is where everyone will quit.
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The trap to avoid
Adding tower types. It always feels like progress and it usually is not. Five towers that interact meaningfully beat fifteen that are the same tower at different prices, and the fifteen take three times as long to balance.
The test is simple: if there is a tower you would never build, it is not a choice, it is a mistake with a price tag. Either give it a reason to exist or delete it.
The same goes for enemy types. Two enemies that demand opposite answers create more interesting play than eight that all die to the same thing.
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Feedback is half the genre
A tower that is firing and doing nothing is indistinguishable from a tower that is broken. Players read a tower defense game almost entirely through feedback: the hit, the number, the health bar, the sound when something dies.
Which means presentation work here is not polish, it is function. If a player cannot tell that their new tower is worse than the old one, they will not learn the system, and a system nobody learns is not a game.
The cheapest test is to play a wave and ask yourself which tower is contributing least. If you cannot tell, the player certainly cannot, and the fix is in what the game shows rather than in what it computes.
The practical facts
Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows with Godot bundled inside it, so the game runs locally on your machine. A late wave with a few hundred units in it is your hardware's problem rather than a browser tab's.
Your project is an ordinary Godot project on your own disk, and Godot is open source, so it opens without this app.
Building needs an internet connection, because the chat, asset generation and world data come over the network. Playing what you built does not. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.
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A starting project for this is the strategy game templates. The design note that goes with it is how level design tells a story.
Questions
- Can I make it 2D or top-down?
- Yes to both, and 2D is a first-class pick rather than a workaround. You choose 2D or 3D when the project is created, before anything exists, and there is no default. In a 2D project the map is painted directly: you drag to say which cells are ground, the tiles and the collision follow from that, and towers and enemies are sprites you place at an exact position, turn and size. A fixed overhead camera on a 3D map is also a workable shape for this genre if you want the height.
- How is pathfinding handled?
- It is code, so it is Flockbay's half. You describe how enemies should route and whether players can block the path, then judge it by playing.
- Do I need to write code?
- No. You build the map and tune the game by playing it. The GDScript is written for you and sits in your project.
- Is this a good first project?
- Yes, better than most. The scope is small and a single playthrough tells you whether the balance is wrong.
- Does it work offline?
- Playing does. Building does not, because the AI, asset generation and world data all come over the network.