I used to spend my time before classes playing the original Desktop Tower Defense. It had a long loading screen, it lagged when there are too many units, and it was written in Flash. I wanted to make a modern JavaScript version that’s smoother and more optimized, but I wasn’t a web developer… until LLMs came along.
It still took me about 30-40 hours to arrive at a playable, relatively bug-free state. Along the way, I picked up a lot of best practices for coding with Claude, which will be documented here. BUT the end result is a highly configurable, extendable, fast, browser-based tower defense game.
Tip: If you’re on a PC or Mac, use keyboard shortcuts (also see Menu -> Keyboard Shortcuts):
- Numbers
1-5chooses different towers Fchanges the game speedNspawns the next wave of enemiesMtoggles the menuspacebarpauses the gameUupgrades the selected towerSsells the selected tower
I hope you enjoy the game, and please drop feature requests in the comments.