In 2007, Paul Preece created Desktop Tower Defense. Desktop Tower Defense has become a landmark in the history of successful casual games developed in Adobe Flash. Preece had no prior game design experience, and while he worked as a programmer, initially delayed work on developing the game as he felt that Flash was too difficult to learn.
Over 15 million plays later, Desktop Tower Defense has made Preece over $12000 profit in advertising revenue alone. The success of the game allowed Preece to quit his programming job and become a full-time casual game designer. Co-founder of the Casual Collective, today Preece continues to profit from Flash games.
The Tower Defense Game Genre
The tower defense game genre involves preventing waves of enemies known as “creeps” from crossing the game playing area. Preventing enemy movement is done by building and strategically placing towers, turrets and other static structures with a variety of offensive and defensive capabilities along the route of the creep advance. The aim is to destroy the entire wave. This produces resources with which to develop and build new or upgrade existing towers.
What separates Paul Preece's Desktop Tower Defence from other tower defense games is that in Preece's game, the enemy creeps do not simply follow a predefined path. Rather, the placement of tower structures can stall their advance, or funnel creeps in a certain direction in a strategy known as “mazing”.
This interaction between creep waves and the tower defenses added a new tactical dimension to the tower defense genre, and contributed to the runaway success of Desktop Tower Defense.
Desktop Tower Defense Gameplay
Desktop Tower Defense shares a gameplay style with other tower defense games. Towers are purchased and placed in the game area to fend off the advancement of creep waves. However, whereas most tower defense games have a predefined creep “path” on which towers cannot be built, and from which creeps never deviate, in Desktop Tower Defense, towers can be placed anywhere and creeps can roam at will.
To buy and upgrade towers, the player needs to spend gold. Gold is earned by destroying creeps, with bonuses for destroying a boss creep. No gold is received for destroying spawned creeps.
Once play begins, there is no stopping the creep waves. The player must make decisions on tower purchase, placement and upgrading in real-time, often while being overwhelmed by a wave of creeps. After each wave, there is a respite of a few seconds before the next creep wave advances.
Depending on the game type and difficulty chosen, the player begins with a certain number of lives. A life is lost each time a creep successfully evades destruction and passes across the game level. The game ends when the player has been over-run by creeps and runs out of lives, or all creep waves have been successfully destroyed.
Desktop Tower Defense Waves
There are currently nine different creep wave types in Desktop Tower Defense, though the combinations of wave types are often incorporated to create a Boss or new type of creep. Paul Preece continues to add new creep types with each new release of the game. Currently, the creep wave types are:
- Normal: The standard creep.
- Immune: Cannot be damaged or slowed down by frost towers.
- Group: These creeps stick close together. A perfect target for splash towers.
- Fast: These quick-moving creeps are half again as fast as normal creeps.
- Spawn: Each spawn creep splits into 2 half-sized creeps when destroyed.
- Flying: These creeps fly over your towers, and are immune to ground-attacking defenses.
- Dark: A highly armoured creep. Only major damage-dealing upgraded towers can hurt them.
- Morph: This creep cycles through different creep types as it advances.
- Boss: A single creep with a great deal of energy, a boss creep may be of any creep type.
Desktop Tower Defense Towers
There are nine different towers used to defend against creep waves in the game. Depending on the difficulty level or type of game, certain towers may not be available. The towers include:
- Pellet: Air and ground attack. Upgrades to sniper tower.
- Squirt: Air and ground attack. Upgrades to typhoon tower.
- Dart: Ground attack only. Upgrades to ICBM tower.
- Swarm: Air attack only. Upgrades to storm tower.
- Frost: Air and ground attack. Upgrades to blizzard tower. Slows enemies for a short period.
- Bash: Ground only. Upgrades to quake tower.
- Ink: Ground only. Upgrades to ink-blot tower.
- Snap: Air and ground attack. Upgrades to spike tower.
- Boost: A special tower that augments that abilities of any tower it is in contact with.
As with the creep wave types, Paul Preece is constantly developing additional tower types to add to the player's arsenal.
Desktop Tower Defense Conclusion
This game is very addictive: so much so that Michael Arrington of TechCrunch suggested that the game “should be banned”. The addictive nature of Desktop Tower Defense is a major element of the game's success. Quick to play, easy to learn but difficult to master, Desktop Tower Defense found itself on webpage bookmark lists worldwide. Word of mouth spread the game in a classic example of viral marketing at work.
Paul Preece's Desktop Tower Defense has inspired many attempts to imitate its success. However, the original remains the best, and Preece continues to stay one step ahead of his imitators by constantly developing and improving upon his game.
To play Desktop Tower Defense, visit the Hand-Drawn Games website.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
