Designing Town Guardians: three pillars of a roguelike defense RPG
June 29, 2026
Town Guardians is our first mobile game — a roguelike defense RPG arriving in 2026. Before we show much of it, we wanted to start this devlog with the part that never makes it into a trailer: the three pillars we come back to every time a design decision gets hard.
The premise, in one line
You rally the Successors — beast-folk heirs to the divine beasts — and hold the Wall of Divine Beasts against the Legion of Ruin. Every run is a siege. Every wave asks the same quiet question: do you have enough wall left to answer it?
It sounds tense, and it is. But the feeling we’re chasing isn’t stress — it’s the calm confidence of watching a team you assembled do its job. The space between comfort and pressure is the whole game.
Pillar 1 — Idle comfort you can trust
Defense games live or die on whether auto-battle feels fair. If your front line crumbles the moment you look away, the genre’s core promise breaks. So our first rule is that the idle layer has to be legible: you should be able to glance at a run and understand why it’s going well or badly.
That shapes everything downstream. Somteori and Hwaran anchor the back line as supports; Shadowfoot and Molt are dealers who want a wall to stand behind. When you leave, the team plays the plan you set — no hidden dice, no silent losses. Comfort isn’t the absence of challenge. It’s trust.
Pillar 2 — Roguelike runs that never repeat
Comfort without variety becomes a chore, so the second pillar pushes the other way. Each run remixes the offer: which Successors you field, which upgrades a wave drops, which threat is bearing down.
The Legion of Ruin does a lot of that work. A wall of Rotten Spore Mushrooms is a patience problem; a Corrupted Tree Spirit is a priority problem; the Unraveler Narak is a “rethink your whole board” problem. Because the foes ask different questions, the same roster plays differently every time. The goal: no two sieges feel copy-pasted, even with the heroes you love.
Pillar 3 — Hold the wall
The third pillar is the emotional one. The wall isn’t just a health bar — it’s the thing you’re for. We want the moment a wave breaks through to land, and the moment you barely hold to feel earned.
So losing ground is never silent and never sudden. You see it coming, you get one more decision, and sometimes the smart play is a clean retreat to meet the next wave whole. A loss should read as “I got out-planned,” never “the game cheated.” Holding the wall has to mean something — which means it has to be possible to almost lose it.
If it isn’t fun or genuinely useful, we don’t ship it.
That’s the studio’s oldest rule, and it’s the tie-breaker whenever these pillars pull against each other. Light enough to pick up between bus stops. Fast enough that a run respects your time. Fun enough that you start one more anyway.
There’s a lot more to share — the heroes, the upgrade economy, how waves are tuned — and we’ll get into all of it here as we go. If you want to know the moment it’s playable, the game section has a one-tap reminder. See you at the wall.
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