I love what you have going on in TDD Duel! At first read it makes me think of it as a twist of Kingdom Rush, Clash Royale and Bloons TD 6 Vs. where the twist is your custom pathing to the enemy base.

Your GDD is extensive but good at hitting most of the design features of your game. It's specific in its description of user interaction and menu navigation which leaves little to the imagination there; it's a good thing it does. The one thing I had trouble piecing together when I read it was exactly how you create your custom paths to the map border edge. 

Do you just build it up to the edge and units will march off/attack from there? Do some units attack earlier along the path or later rushing down the enemy base? Are there units that might ignore the pathing once spawned and require a special kind of Defender, like a Flying unit that just goes straight for the base that's weak, but needs an Anti-Air style defender to gun them down? Can players in a game of TDD disrupt or interrupt each others path? Can they use sabotage powers or abilities to make a path through an opponents path? What kinds of map design features will prevent a player from just building "the shortest path" to the base each match to make sure their troops consistently get there first?

Bombardment of wondering aside, I'd add this game to my library for the challenge and tower building aspects. I like fantasy, sci-fi and tower defense games so this is a great all-in-one package for someone like me!

This is spot-on for the theme--I think this sort of thing is exactly what Willem was angling for. Tower defense has always occupied a funny space of almost-but-not-quite taking off, and you make a nice compelling case about how you could expand it into a deeper experience that would encourage repeat play. I like that the player is both attacker and defender simultaneously and that you have to choose and customize both types of units. Between team play, AI bosses, quests, seasonal events, and everything, you're really describing a rich and rewarding experience here. I would play it for sure.

My main comment is just on the GDD itself; I think you hewed too closely to the template and could have just cut big sections that aren't relevant to your game, like the entire Plot section. I could also have done without the Midjourney pictures, especially since they don't fit your written description very well. But hey, if the worst criticism I have is your document formatting, you're doing well.

Really liked this idea, and as a tower defense fan I would be so down to play this!

The initial genre definition of ‘PvP tower defense’ seemed to not be as genre-defining, but the inclusion of drawing your own paths around immovable obstacles seemed very interesting - would have loved to see that explored in more detail.

I really liked the Twitch integration idea, which (if I understood it right) would allow teams of players to fight against each other, each with a streamer or captain as its head. This sounds pretty innovative and would definitely make this genre-defining in my eyes, and potentially make the multiplayer aspect a lot more popular.

The overall design sounded interesting and fun to play, and I appreciated the detail given to describing the phases and potential strategies and edge cases (like the AI completing your path if you don’t finish in time.)

However, the document definitely felt too long to me, and very often repetitive, which made it hard to extract the relevant details without skimming too much. It might have helped to modify the original template a bit to match your game - eliminate the sections which aren’t relevant to your game, and merge the sections that tend to repeat essentially the same information. I also felt that the ‘Genre’ section was mostly empty and could have had a lot of good arguments for why this game defines an all-new genre - information that I would otherwise have had to gather from pockets elsewhere in the doc.

Some more diagrams or references in the doc would have been helpful to visualize the map and the gameplay better - but the art references and moodboards at the end of the document were a nice touch, definitely helped me understand the intended look and feel better.

There are a bunch of submissions and I wanted to give feedback to everyone, so I'm going to list some strengths and weaknesses that I perceive from the GDD's in this challenge (take with a grain of salt, I recognize the challenge this jam theme + time limitations, especially during a holiday weekend).

Strengths: I really liked that you added a mood board to establish visual style. I LOVE that you included this description of integrating this game for Twitch streaming! I think it's a popular and fun option, and I think that would make this game 1000x more playable/popular.

Weaknesses: I think given the length of the doc, you could have found ways to make this more concise. There are a lot of sections that don't have a lot of information written or you describe a section as not applicable or that you don't know enough about it. It might have been better to consolidate formatting or eliminate sections that were not relevant. I also would have liked more diagrams. It's a document, but diagrams are super instructive and can eliminate large descriptive chunks, while getting the same info across. This would be especially helpful when discussing core loop or other technical aspects of the game.

There is some uncertainty in the document that ideally would have been resolved before submission, such as what the actual genre was meant to be. I think from a technical stand point, I would need some further clarification/meetings to figure out how we wanted to implement this game. I also (personally) didn't like that the document was sometimes written in first person, but this is absolutely my preference, I don't know how many people would care about that detail.

Overall, I think this would be a fun game to play!