This will be a post mortem explaining how i failed the game dev competition for a tower defense game, so here it goes.

In the start of june 2018 i found the tower challenge post by accident, read the description and was really excited.
So i decided to apply and started right away - without any planning whatsoever.

I created a new visual c++ project and after 3 evenings with a couple of hours i got the basic game mechanics nailed down:
Enemies could be spawned and moved from waypoint to waypoint along a direction and randomly placed towers could hit and destroy it.
Everything (tiles/enemies/towers) was defined in static int arrays, so i can adjust it however i like.
It was going very smoothly and i was very happy with it.

The next 2 evenings was a nightmare. I made a new map and suddently everything was broken.
All the towers was shooting randomly, the enemies was not following the waypoints anymore, bullets missed all the enemies and so on, even the spawning was behaving weirdly. So it took me 7 hours to find all those bugs and fix them.

After that in the next evening i refactored the current code, made it more robust and fixed a few bugs.
In addition i added basic HUD rendering to display lives, score, money, current wave, etc.
Now it was looking really good so far and the game was already playable.

The next day for whatever reason i decided to use the editor "TileD" to setup everything.
I have no idea why i wanted that, maybe i thought it would save me time or something but i was wrong.
Even after 5 evenings, i still couldnt´t figure out how to get towers/enemies/waves defined in the TMX file.
So i partly gave up on that idea and ended up just defining the walkable tiles and the waypoints in the TMX file.
In addition i created a shitton of code just to parse a TMX file - including writing a generic xml parser in C99.
The only thing useful i made in that 5 evening was that parser ?
This entire process took me ~20 hours -> 4*8 useless workhours minus 2 hours for writing the xml parser.

After that the next 3 evenings i did of lot of refactoring needed to get the TMX loaded in the way i wanted. The result was not that bad. I now could define all the waypoints, the walkable and placeable tiles in the editor and setup as many spawners as i want. This took me about ~6 hours.

The next 2 evenings was a blast! I was very productive and added a lot of functionality and fixed a lot of bugs.
I now had a fine looking HUD , multliple waves with multiple spawners for each wave.
In addition i improved almost every part of the game, even the towers was rotating smoothly against the target now and you could lose or win the game.
The "game" finally started to take shape.

Of course after a blast, there comes the opposite of that: Destroying and unproductivity!
In one evening i broke the tower rotation, the enemy position prediction, the rendering and even the HUD.
Why of a sudden did everything brake? It may be that i just wanted to make it "even better" -> Over complicating simple things!

In the following evening i reverted everything and simplified a lot of the game mechanics.
Now all of a sudden the enemy prediction worked and the tower rotation was correct and very smooth.
But the font rendering seems to be totally broken now - after switching to a new font. So i had no choice to still use the old font ?

Many evenings later with a lot of delays between, i finally fixed the nasty font rendering bug.
It took me over 10 hours to find that bug and 5 seconds to fix it... Now the new font or any other font works just fine.
In addition i made a few simple functions to render and handle UI buttons - to select the appropriate tower.

Now i got sick i could barely do anything, so i was of for over a week.

After that i wanted get rid of the ugly dev graphics, so in 2 hours i made a push rendering system + opengl implementation and changed everything to it.
It looked exactly the same as it was before, but now it was much more flexible and i finally could add sprites to the game.

The next day i successfully added loading and rendering of sprites in just about 30 minutes.
Then i searched the net for a free tileset, which i can use to test the sprite rendering. After i found one, i changed the TMX map to use it.

The following 4 evenings i have written a lot of code for parsing/converting/rendering the tilesets from the TMX, but with wrong results.
All the UV´s was incorrect and even after spending hours of debugging i could not find the bug at all.

Now there was a full week where i didn´t do anything. The motivation was gone.

The first evening in the following week i was still not motivated at all, but i wanted to get this finally fixed so i forced myself to analyze the code again - searching for the UV bug and after a short amount of time, i finally found the bug... It was just a typo... After fixing that typo now all the UV´s was correct and everything looked fine.

In the next evening i added 3 more layers to the TMX map, trying to make it look more prettier. But there was a problem, the fixed map dimension was not sufficient to make use of the tilesheet i was going for. So i decided to change the entire system from a fixed map size to a dynamic one and this was pretty expensive from a time perspective, it took me around 2-3 hours.

Now i had just a few days left before the deadline.

The following days i moved all the wave/enemy/tower definitions into separated xml files, so i can starting making the actual 20 waves/enemies and a few towers. Of course this required me to change a lot of the internal systems, but the written xml parser now payed of and in an hour it was changed very easialy. Now i started to fiddle around with the data, trying to add more waves, more towers... Such tasks are not my thing, so it took me two hours just to add another wave and another tower ?

So now i had one day left before the deadline and the game was not even close to be finished.
I had one level, two waves, two towers, two enemies and very basic game mechanics working, without upgradable towers.
Also i had no final art, no sound or music, not even a menu ?

The following days i was really depressed about it, so i was not working at the project at all, so i failed and missed the deadline.

So now comes my reasons why i failed it:

1.) I didn´t plan anything

I had no idea which art style i was going for
I had not slicest idea what type of waves/towers/enemies i want
I had no idea how the level should look like
I didn´t set any goals or milestones or tasks whatsoever

2.) Forcing myself to use the TileD editor was a huge mistake

For such a little project, one level should be just fine. So why the heck do i need a editor when i just want to have one level anyway?
The only thing i needed to setup in the editor was the visual tiles, the walkable and placable areas and the positions for the spawners and thats it.

3.) I added a lot of complexity without thinking it through

At work i always do that, but for some f*cking reason on private projects i never do that and that always kills me.
I should have sticked with the simplest solution in all cases, then i may had finished it in time.

4.) I didn´t continously worked on the game

There was too many days of me not working on the game at all. I should at least made one little thing each day or something like that.

But not everything was bad, at various point i made a lot of progress and the last build i made was not that bad.
It was playable, you can win or lose the game - it just lacks content in a all places, so i decided to finish the game to end of september - to have at least one finished game made in my life. Thats almost two month´s from today - counting just the days, that should be doable - even with my limited time budget.