A roguelite horde survival game with a tower defense theme and a twist: you don't have to move to avoid enemies but must use skills actively. Pick your tower, equip up to 4 skills, and choose from a variety of traits and items to craft unique builds that can survive waves of hostile aliens.

🪧[ Demo Notice]

The game is still in development, everything you play here is just a demo. 

The descriptions are for the final game.

Learn more: https://minifun.games/td/

📖 Story

As a Resistance leader on Zalax, you fight for freedom against the oppressive Dominion. Your tower is your only weapon and refuge in this alien civil war. Can you hold out against the enemy's overwhelming forces?

🎮 Gameplay

Your objective for each non-endless run is to defend your only tower from hordes of aggressive enemies till the end. A non-endless run is divided into 20 waves, and you can take a break after beating each wave to shop for items.

About the combat, you have the only tower at the center of view, enemies come to you from all directions. Your tower can automatically shoot bullets at the enemies, and you can also have other passive support units, too, but the best part of the game though, in most builds, comes from your manual skills. They are the major sources of damage and the triggers of powerful synergies. When and how you use your manual skills in combat matter!

To get better at the game, there are two domains you must try to master: using your skills effectively in the combats and choosing the items so they work best together (a.k.a crafting your best builds).

🔖 Features

  • Roguelike/roguelite experience: this game has a run structure with permanent death, auto-generated levels, and randomized item offers so no run is the same. The roguelite part, in a sense of progression outside runs, is very mild. You don’t have any permanent upgrades outside runs, but you can permanently unlock more contents of the game (be it difficulties, towers, skills, or items) by achieving certain requirements in a run.
  • Towers: there are many towers you can choose from to start a run. Each tower has a unique set of buffs and debuffs that can significantly affect the strategic feel of the run.
  • Skills: there are many skills you can choose from to equip your tower with. You can equip up to 4 skills simultaneously. Each skill can be upgraded up to 2 times, has a unique enhancement, and has at least 3 traits. Skills can be acquired in the prep phase of each run, and throughout the run. The first skill you pick each run has additional benefits.
  • Combat: to win a wave, you simply have to survive a fixed time duration. Each wave lasts from 20 to 90 seconds.
  • Items and shop: most items have both negative and positive effects, and are offered randomly within certain rules. Improvise to craft your best builds. Shop, even though is relatively simple, has its own set of features that you should consider to optimize your strategy.
  • Difficulties: the game comes with 5 difficulties, whether you're new to the genre or a veteran, you will find the right challenge for you. The different difficulties modify enemies' health, damage, and spawning rate, and add new enemies, including elite, regular, and boss enemies.
  • Endless mode: you only have to survive 20 waves to be considered beat a difficulty. But you can opt into Endless mode to test how long you can hold it!

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

[Demo] macOS 0.32.13.zip 208 MB
[Demo] Windows 0.32.11.zip 199 MB
[Demo] Linux 0.32.11.zip 197 MB

Development log

Comments

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This game is like Brotato if it was completely different

(+1)

Tried to send feeback using the ingame menu, but it said "ConnectionError", so I'll put it here instead.

Having to switch between active skills using hotkeys is really annoying, and makes the game feel like a juggling act that gets in the way of the main gameplay of aiming, timing, and enemy prioritization. So I usually forego alternate skills entirely. Also, when the cooldown gets too fast, you're incentivized to spam click in order to activate it as soon as possible. Honestly, that can even happen at longer cooldowns, because every second you don't use your ability is wasted damage potential.

I feel like both of these issues could be solved by having an autofire toggle of some sort, where you check a box next to the skill icon at the bottom, and it automatically activates at the cursor's position every time it's ready. Maybe even make it so that holding down the mouse button activates the skill as SOON as it's ready.

An alternate way to solve the issue of the player being incentivized to spam click in order to not waste cooldown time would be to allow the player to hold multiple "charges" of skills. That could be a fun thing to make upgradeable as well. If that feels like it would be overkill to have available from the start, maybe the player could still build up to slightly above 100% charge to begin with. 110%? 150%? Something like that. Just to prevent carpal tunnel.

Besides that, it feels disingenuous to not label this as a demo ANYWHERE on the game's page. The entire "features" section is a lie, because none of the stuff listed is actually available in this version. It's a bait and switch, and I feel less inclined to wishlist the full version thanks to that deception.

Hello, thanks for the feedback. 

- I'm sorry for the confusion about the demo version. I'll make it clear on the game page.

- I'm working on a version that you can disable skill confirmation (a.k.a fire skill as soon as you press the key/left click, at the mouse position). It will be out soon.

- Also, I'm opening playtest for everyone during a Steam fest, if you're interested, visit it here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2453610/Towerful_Defense_A_Rogue_TD/

I feel like that still doesn't solve the issue of the game incentivizing the player to spam click until their finger hurts, but it's a start! I still think a true autofire function would be the easiest approach, but of course, it's not the only one.

Most powerful stats so far. (200+ luck, 100% crit, 32+ targets, dodge capped, 96 firerate) Its one of the most engaging on roguelikes on the site.

insane ammount of upgrades

(1 edit) (+1)

Insane, indeed! Glad you like it, did you find any bugs?

So far not, the last fight ends before the boss dies and I do not know what happens is that on purpose due to the demo?

Yeah, it's because of the demo.

cool 🤘

(+1)

Good job!

Interesting gameplay I think the game is about which stats you choose to dump and trade.

Trading money for luck

Elemental for multi target. Crit for damage. HP on supply.

To trade back and forth is possible but choosing to go negative I think works out better.

Really fun demo!  won with bullets, zapper, mines, -not sword.  very fun loop

in the mine build it got a bit tedious having to place a mine every second, because if I miss-timed the "q" it wouldnt register and i'd have to re-click.  I think forgiving "coyote-time" would be a nice quality of life feature here, where if you click "q" while its on cooldown it should still register at least within ~.3s of it being ready


thank you, I'll work on that

Cool game, a bit short but still lots of fun.

Also WHY DO I GET SO MANY GLITCHYS?????

you must buy them to make them go away, or ignore i usually ignore

it's because the game is still in development, there aren't enough other items implemented. You'll see less and less Glitchies in future updates.

Feedback:

certain game builds seem vastly underpowered or require upgrades otherwise they perform terribly (mainly, game is nearly impossible without sufficient cooldown upgrades. So make cooldown upgrades more common/consistent to acquire?)


Also, the HP-recovered-from-supplies stat isn't shown.

It's a great game overall, btw!