Stage 1 — Mossy Crossing. The chest is bottom right. They are coming for it.
Every tower defense casts you as the kingdom. This one doesn't. You are the thing at the bottom of the dungeon with a pile of gold, and a steady stream of armoured heroes has decided that pile belongs to them.
You start each stage with 100 gold in your chest. Every adventurer who reaches it walks off with 10 — and master thieves and bosses take a great deal more. Run the chest to zero and the stage is lost.
Every adventurer you kill pays silver, and silver is how you raise more monsters and level up the ones you have. The whole game is that loop: bleed them on the way in, spend the proceeds, and make the road worse.
Plate blunts arrows and blades far more than it blunts fire, frost or venom. A wall of archers melts squires and bounces off paladins — knights want a dragon, not another bow.
Kills and stage clears earn XP across the whole campaign. Every level grants a perk point to spend between maps on damage, range, attack speed, richer kills or a heavier chest lid — and perks apply to stages you already beat.
Greenwood, Emberwood, the Mirefen, the Underdeep, an old keep and the volcanic Cinderhalls. Each stage is a real 3D scene rendered to a painted board, with its own stone road and pad layout.
Confident? Summon the next wave before the timer and pocket a bounty in silver. Greedy, and occasionally fatal.
Clerics and paladins patch up the column as it walks. Rogues dodge. Master thieves take 25 gold instead of 10. You have to read the wave, not just wall it.
There are no audio files. Bowstrings, firepots, dragon breath, the coin-clink of a leak and the ambient bed under each biome are all built live from oscillators and shaped noise — so the whole soundtrack costs zero bytes of download.
Trespassers, Adventurers, Heroes, Legends and Myths. Each raises adventurer health a lot and their speed a little — speed is the crueller dial. Harder tiers pay more silver and far more experience, and Myths is a real fight even with every perk bought.
Adventurers only ever run for the hoard. What you build stays built — the pressure comes from the road, not from losing towers.
One hand-written HTML5 game — no engine, no framework. Every monster, adventurer, tree and stone road was modelled procedurally in Blender from a Python script and rendered to sprites and painted boards, so the whole game is about three megabytes and loads in a couple of seconds.
The audio is generated the same way: no samples, just the Web Audio graph driven by code, with a limiter holding the mix together when a dozen effects land at once.