Procedural Generation of Tower Defense Levels

This report aims to present a method for generating levels for tower defense games. Tower defense games are digital strategy games played by defending bases against oncoming enemies that travel along pregenerated paths. The intended way of generating levels was to use Wave Function Collapse and Bézier curves to create paths and then generate a terrain mesh to match the paths using Marching Cubes. This approach was abandoned because it was considered unnecessarily complicated and there was a concern that there would not be enough time to complete a level generation system. The abandoned system was replaced by a system where a terrain mesh is generated first and is then used as the base for generating the paths iteratively where the direction of the path is changing based on a number of different rules. The path generation system was completed with a simple algorithm to decide on the number of enemies and defense towers. The result is a simple tower defense game with a complete but unbalanced system for generating levels. Though the system is unbalanced, it is implemented in a way that allows for balancing to be made. While a change in direction from the original idea was considered necessary, it only means that that approach was too time-consuming for this project, not that the techniques used in the original idea are inappropriate for these purposes