I did it this way because I wanted you to have some choice in where your towers go. If you could only place on bombs, there's only one solution. Then the strategy would be in which order you place towers and which towers you placed where. Which is an interesting proposition, but I decided to explore being more free in where to place towers. In my head, I thought that you would have more freedom, but when I got it implemented, it doesn't give you very much more freedom so it's mostly negligible. I also thought the way a minesweeper game unfolds is you get a large contiguous region of blank tiles where there are no mines and the whole map is usually connected. I thought that would be antithetical to the Isolation theme. Not that my version really does much better, but this is what I thought early on when I decided what route to take. I thought with a system with no set bombs, you could safely click anywhere to open up a new section to build around. But I didn't get that to work so you don't see that phenomenon in game.

I do have a couple ideas of how I could preserve the early game - mostly just things I realized I designed wrong. It is kind of weird how the game can feel so different in the early game than even the mid game. Just the lack of choices in placement early makes a big difference in the game feel.

Some things I've already learned about the director is you need multiple enemy types to make it works. Spawning enemies in a different pattern like I did is a poor substitute. And that the idea of having multiple directors running in parallel is probably the right way to go. I noticed that the line spawns almost feel like a separate director because the enemies take so long to get to you so they start to overlap with other spawns and arrive at the same time. Multiple groups of enemies arriving at overlapping times is quite compelling.