Sockless Tower Defense

Every screen shares one brass-and-copper visual language, from the title screen to the in-game HUD. Players sign in to a commander account, and their progress is saved to the cloud so a campaign can continue on any device.

The campaign runs for 100 levels across 25 maps, with a boss encounter every tenth level. Each map introduces its own mechanic, such as trains, floodgates, rotating walls, tides, lightning rods or conveyor belts, together with an interaction the player can trigger. New towers are unlocked as the campaign progresses, and each level awards up to three stars.

The arsenal covers 31 towers in seven categories. Each tower has branching upgrade tiers (II A/B, III A/B and an Ultimate), synergies with neighbouring towers and five prestige ranks. They face 22 enemy archetypes, including flyers, cloaked units, burrowers, shield-bearers, healers, saboteurs, splitters and three multi-phase bosses. Placing towers reshapes the enemy route in real time, so building a maze is as important as choosing the firepower.

Beyond the campaign, the Operations hub offers Survival, Endless Nightmare, a rotating Daily Challenge and a Weekly Event, each with its own leaderboard. There are also 25 rule-bending challenges such as Guns Only, Single Core and Air Raid. Eight difficulty presets and nine custom modifiers let players tune the difficulty, and the server calculates the reward multiplier from the final set of modifiers.

A 75-node research tree spans Steam Power, Engineering, Electricity, Chemistry and further disciplines. Research points come from victories, new stars and commander promotions. Some projects depend on breakthroughs in other disciplines, and experimental towers are unlocked here.

Progression continues through 100 commander levels, which unlock perks, features and cosmetics. There are also 53 achievements that track milestones ranging from a first victory to defeating every boss, together with leaderboards and cloud saves.

When a battle starts, the server issues an HMAC-signed session. The session fixes the level, the difficulty modifiers, research and commander bonuses, prestige ranks and the available towers. The client runs a deterministic, fixed-tick simulation whose random number generator gives bit-identical results in C# and TypeScript, and it records every player action.

When the battle ends, the server's run validator replays the economy and structure of the action log exactly, including costs, refunds, tile legality, route-sealing and upgrade order. It also places bounds on everything it cannot replay directly, such as total income, kills, bosses and elapsed wall-clock time. Stars, XP, research points, achievements and leaderboard scores are calculated only on the server. Because the simulation is deterministic, a save is simply a session plus its action log, so a battle can be resumed on any device.

A shared contract test keeps client and server in agreement: the client test suite produces a real simulated run, and the server suite must accept it unchanged. Any disagreement over costs, placement or rules fails the build.

The game has no placeholder assets. Every texture, tower, enemy, sound effect and piece of music is generated at runtime with PixiJS and the Web Audio API, which keeps the download small and the art style consistent. Recorded audio can still be added through a manifest if it is needed later.