Desktop Tower Defense - Hand Drawn Games - PC

[bhodi]

Yes, it's another flash game. It's also more fun than 90% of the games out on the market, right now. I'm not even kidding.

If you've ever played starcraft or warcraft 3 custom maps, there is a particular variety called tower defense. Basically, monsters of increasing strength come from off-map, wind through a specific path, and exit out the other side. If too many make it to the other side, you lose. To stop them, you have a variety of stationary towers that you build, place, and upgrade. Also, because the creatures enter and exit from a specific point, you can force them into self created tower-paths to maximize the time you have to kill them. This is called mazing.

This game embodies all that is good and holy in the different varieties of custom maps, thrown together and into a flash game for your pleasure. There are a few other, similar flash games, but this one is the king of them all. Well executed, fun, and with a ton of challenge modes.

You can complete most maps in about 15-30 minutes. The only downside to this game is the sounds; when a lot of towers fire, people nearby will wander over to figure out what the hell that popping sound is. Ignore them. Desktop tower defense is your master now.

Play it (it's free, play it now now now!)

[Aez]

Good fun. 
I started on hard and I'm getting pwned!

How do you kill the moon shaped black invincible monster?

[Aez]

Reached 2000 points on hard.

[bhodi]

Use squirts for the black guys. In general, a winning strategy is to maze with the little pellet towers and have one or two squirts that you constantly upgrade. I could post my builds, or you could look on youtube, but that would kind of be cheating :)

[Aez]

I've been doing good with bash tower.  I'll try squirt tower.  Any tips for air?  I can't make it with out 4-5 swarm towers (2 or 3 upgrade each).

[Samwise]

Max-upgraded squirts are civilization.

[bhodi]

I've been doing good with bash tower.  I'll try squirt tower.  Any tips for air?  I can't make it with out 4-5 swarm towers (2 or 3 upgrade each).

Squirts kill air too :)
Once you get two fully upgraded squirts per opening, you'll need to start to buy swarm towers and upgrading them... but if you put your money in squirts, at least early, you won't have any problem with air.

[Samwise]

Note also that upgrades get you more stopping power for your buck than extra towers do.  Which is why you want to build your maze with cheapie pellet towers and then just have a handful of max upgraded towers to actually kill shit while it's running the maze.

[Aez]

hum.  So I upgraded a squirt tower to max... hehe   

[eldaec]

How do you kill the moon shaped black invincible monster?

For the really hard stuff, I found it best to design your maze so that you can easily sell one block and fit another to send the black invincible monsters back around a detour, then when they almost finish that detour, you switch back so they have to come around again.

[Strazos]

Cheater.

[DeathInABottle]

So much fun.  I played for hours last night.  Question though: why can't I ugrade my spurt towers beyond level 4?  I can see that there IS a level 5, and it would cost 160 gold, and I've GOT 160 gold, but the upgrade button is greyed out.

[Azazel]

Fun little game, as far as useless distractions go. I can see myself spending some time on this during my breaks when I go back to work...

[Der Helm]

I created a group called "Bat Country" if you guys want to compare scores 

[Cryo]

I played this quite a while two months ago and I must admit it's addictive and fun. They did a good job with the balance because if you played a lot of tower defence  in Warcraft 3 you know that most of the time there's only 1 strategy to win. With this game I actually managed to win with different towers & strategies, which is nice.

The replayability is also very good with all the different challenge modes.

Agree with the OP and it's a must try if you like the tower defence type of game.

[DeathInABottle]

I can't get enough of this.  Finally beat hard, managing ~7500 points and only losing 7 creeps.  I'm dominating Bat Country.  Come fight me.

[tazelbain]

I'd love to hear soom stategies.  I can't get past med36.

So you have to build a maze, right? Do you build it it early with darts or build later with better weapons?

[bhodi]

I'm not going to inline these because they are ginormous spoilers.

Here's one way of mazing that I do to get past all but the hardest ones (this will beat the 100 challenge)
setup
step 1
then do this
Then simply continue upgrading your squirts.
You can put a boulder at the top of the first row if you feel like it, once you get two fully upgraded squirt towers, and gradually replace the pellets next to the squirts with more squirts one by one.

[Thrawn]

I played this quite a bit...at work...a few months ago, was very fun.

I gotta agree that it's cheating though if you delete and replace towers to make the creeps go back and forth through your maze.

[Mrbloodworth]

Gota say i still this this is a better version. Linky.

[Samwise]

The combo weapons in that one are good, but you don't get to create your own maze.   

[Mrbloodworth]

The combo weapons in that one are good, but you don't get to create your own maze.   

Linky.

[Samwise]

I mean as part of the actual game, and with built in balancing so you don't do stupid stuff like this:

[Mrbloodworth]

I mean as part of the actual game, and with built in balancing so you don't do stupid stuff like this:

It is part of the actual game..... In fact, it edits right in the game, and THEN Propagates to the shared site where people vote, and play them...

I guess i just don't know what you mean...

[Samwise]

By "part of the actual game" I mean that you create the maze as you're playing the game.  I don't care if it's part of the same Flash app or not.  The thing that makes the HandDrawn version cool is that each tower you place is a piece of the maze, and the placement of your towers dictates the movement of the creeps.  And that the game rules put constraints on the type of maze you can draw (each tower costs money to place, there must always be a path, the path must be of a certain width on a finite grid), which means a modicum of cleverness is required.

If you don't see the difference I can only assume you haven't actually played the Hand Drawn version.   

[Jimbo]

Both games are way cool!  I got onslaught figured out and beat, but I can't beat Desktop Tower Defense on hard yet...get to wave 41 and usually get spawns that get threw, or air waves that get threw.  Any ideas?  I've used both the upgrade like crazy bash/rock tower way, and I've used bhodi's way.  Bhodi's is actually easier till about wave 40.

[Mortriden]

I agree, both games are very fun.  Onslaught owns my work CPU though...

For DTD, the flying boss on level 56 usually gets through and then I really tank around level 74 or so.  I just can't seem to upgrade fast enough to deal enough damage.

[sidereal]

One of the leet tricks in DTD is leaving some unupgraded towers that you can later delete to give a quick path through for some of the harder bosses.  Later in the game, the waves start to stack on each other and you can have a ton of towers wasting their time trying to take out one boss and ignore a whole wave.  So you let the boss through quickly, replace the towers, and let your maze focus on the wave.

[grebo]

Anyone got thru the 100 level challenge yet?  It doesn't seem possible dammit.  I've spent almost the whole day on this damn thing and can't get past the 70s.

And if anyone did make it, what sort of strategy was employed?

[MaceVanHoffen]

Amazing little game, can't believe I didn't try this before.  I so completely suck ... which just makes me want to play it more!

[damijin]

This post is massive shillery, but my company did sponsor this game, so I hope it's excused.

DTD has been the most popular game on our site, with over 1.3 million gameplays. We currently have a version of DTD available that includes xbox-live style achievements for earning high scores. You can play it here, but you'll need an account to get the badges. There is a badge for completing the 100, it has to be done by using a technique known by DTD players as juggling. You can see it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCLIKykD0LU  You basically create and delete paths to trick the AI of the creeps and juggle them on the map.

We also have Onslaught 2, but there's no badges for it yet. I'm pretty sure it has the API implemented though, so maybe we should add some.