Designer-first configs: a month that turned a tester into a level designer

Early in Steam Defense, every balance change went through a programmer. I spent a whole month rebuilding all configs around the game designer: separate configs for gold and experience curves, values that could be overridden per monster at runtime, and a small lfloat type for parameters that grow along a curve with the level.

Scenarios were the opposite decision. Instead of a visual system of 10–20 predefined blocks, we wrote them in plain C#. Code gave level scripts unlimited freedom, and the config layer kept the numbers out of the code.

The result surprised us: one of our testers, armed with these tools, became our level designer.

The lesson: tooling for non-programmers pays off fastest exactly where the team argues most — balance and content.