I'm no artist, which explains the programmer art in the game sprites, but I do my best. I need to practice my pixel art as much as I need to practice game dev.

Anyway, thought people might be interested in seeing the evolution of the turret over the course of the game jam. You can see I oscillated between a flat 2D side-on view and a 2.5D angled view. Also, the first turret is 64x32 pixels, while the last three are 32x32, which was about the same time I put in the grid system requiring defences to be placed on a grid (before then, defences could be placed overlapping which looked truly awful).

Barriers also had a mini-evolution, changing from an ambiguous 8x64 top-down-or-is-it-side-on image to a 32x32 2.5D angled view.

Also, while I'm still working on this, I've only just realised I have a bit more freedom: the game jam's over so the theme.... no longer applies. The original design was that the player would inevitably be overwhelmed by the enemy horde, and the game's fun would come in the player trying to delay this inevitability, which requires some serious balancing to make the inevitable defeat "fun". Now, the player's defeat doesn't have to be inevitable; the player could have the opportunity to win.

Finally, I'm currently working on condensing the defences and the enemies into a single system. Right now, the defences and enemies are completely separate things, even though conceptually they all do the same thing: have health, take damage, some do damage, some move. The only real difference is who they do damage to: enemies do damage to player's defences, while (some) defences target enemies. And that can be reduced to a simple if-then check in the targeting routine.

The plan currently is everything is an Entity, and use scriptable objects to determine behaviour (how fast they move, how many hit points they start with, etc.). I also have a vague idea of how this system could also have  "hot pluggable" weapons, picked at random when the enemy is spawned (e.g., has a "melee" weapon, or  a gun, or a missile launcher).

(Huh. While writing this, I've been watching a Tarodev video on Unity game structure, and he's basically described -- at a very high-level -- what I've been thinking about.)