Grubs TD 🐜

▶ Play now (no install): https://workflo17.github.io/ant-td/

Works in any modern browser, on desktop or phone. First time? Just hit Play — a guided tutorial walks you through your first round.

🧪 Testing this for me? Thank you! Critiques and bug reports are the whole point. → Open an issue and tell me: which map & round, what you were doing, and what felt off (too easy/hard, confusing, ugly, a bug). Rough notes are fine — even "the menu confused me" helps.

The six hours

Every map commits to a time of day — and the air is alive in each one:

---

A Bloons-style tower defense: pest bugs march a pheromone trail toward the colony's sugar stash, and you place ant towers on the grass to pop them. Bright, chunky, cartoon — all art drawn procedurally on Canvas 2D, all sound synthesized with WebAudio. No framework, no build step, no external assets. Runs fully offline.

Run it

Any static file server works (ES modules need http, not file://):

python -m http.server 5410 --directory .
# → http://localhost:5410

Or use the Claude Code preview config ant-td (.claude/launch.json).

Debug mode: open http://localhost:5410/?debug for the debug panel (grant sugar, jump to round, auto-start, hitboxes, turbo 10×, spawn any bug, god mode) plus a window.TD scripting API (TD.place, TD.up, TD.spawn, TD.hit, TD.acquire).

The Bloons DNA

• Layered bugs — damage peels layers; a popped bug reveals what's inside. Chain: Mite → Gnat → Weevil → Hopper (fast) → Moth (fastest). Overkill damage carries down the chain.
• Specials — Pillbug (armored: only explosions/crush/shell-piercers hurt it → 2 Weevils), Snail (10 HP shell → 2 Hoppers), Stag Beetle (round-24 armored mid-boss, 320 HP → 3 Pillbugs; every 6s it digs in for a 1.5s slowed telegraph — trembling, gold flash — then charges at +120% speed for 1.2s; all generic data, charge:{every,dur,mul,tele}), Caterpillar (200 HP blimp → 4 Snails), Hornet Queen (round-40 boss, 700 HP → 4 Caterpillars; at half health she rages once: +35% speed, releases 2 Caterpillars, and holds a 1.5s damage-immune gold shield).
• Boss health bars — while any boss bug is alive, a BTD6-style segmented bar sits top-center (name, hp/max, gold border; up to 2 stack, "+N more" past that). The Queen's rage shield makes her whole bar flash gold.
• Species intro cards — the first time each bug TYPE ever spawns for this player, a one-time sticker card (top-right) introduces it: name, what it does, and the counter hint (hint field in data/enemies.js). Persisted in save.seenBugs, never repeats.
• Modifiers — composable on any bug: camo (stick-bug stripes; untargetable without scent detection) and regen (regrows one chain layer every 3 s).
• Free placement with live range preview, footprint collision, 70% sell-back.
• Targeting modes per tower: First / Last / Strong / Close.
• Sugar = money (1 per layer popped + round bonus). Crumbs = lives (leaks cost the bug's remaining layer count).

Towers (2 paths × 3 tiers; only one path may go past tier 2)

Tower	Role	Path A	Path B
Worker Ant	dart shooter	damage + pierce	attack speed / twin shot
Trap-Jaw Ant	360° crush snap	radius + targets	stun chance
Acid Archer	long-range sniper	armor-shred (pops Pillbugs) + shell bonus	raw damage
Exploding Ant	AoE lobber (real Colobopsis!)	blast radius	sticky burn DoT (burn pierces armor)
Weaver Ant	silk slow	slow strength / snare	pierce + splash webs
Army Ant Camp	trail traps (Spike Factory) — piles bite camo and armor	pile size + damage	production + pile count
Majoress Guard	late-game DPS anchor (Super)	damage + armor-shred at tier 2	attack speed / twin shot
Honeypot Replete	income	sugar per round	end-round interest
Pheromone Beacon	aura buff; camo detection lives on Path B	attack speed / damage aura	camo scent / aura radius + range

Structure — data-driven everything

index.html            page shell
css/style.css         picnic-sticker UI language
data/enemies.js       bug stats, children, immunities
data/towers.js        tower stats + upgrade tiers (add/mul/set patches)
data/waves.js         40 scripted rounds + freeplay generator + economy constants
data/starRewards.js   the ⭐ backyard-star reward track (thresholds + effects)
data/maps.js          6 maps: waypoint polylines, blockers, per-type speed twists, hazard sectors
js/main.js            fixed-timestep loop (60 Hz sim; speed = steps/frame)
js/game.js            rounds, economy, placement, buffs, win/lose
js/enemies.js         movement, layered damage, statuses (slow/stun/burn/regen)
js/towers.js          stats recompute, targeting, firing
js/projectiles.js     pooled pellets / bombs / silk
js/particles.js       pooled shards, rings, floating text
js/render.js          frame orchestration: maps, decals, projectiles, critters, HUD bars
js/render/helpers.js  shared render helpers (ink, cached gradients, chitin-noise, rects)
js/render/bugs.js     bug (enemy) body art: silhouettes, shells, status FX, HP bars
js/render/ants.js     ant (tower) body art: procedural silhouettes, tiers, tower icons
js/sound.js           WebAudio SFX: self-authored sample bank + convolution reverb
js/ui.js              menu, HUD, shop, tower panel, modals
js/save.js            localStorage (best rounds, wins, mute)
js/debug.js           ?debug panel + TD scripting API

Balance tuning knobs

All balance lives in data/ — engine code never needs touching:

• Economy: START_SUGAR, roundBonus(), HONEYPOT_STACK (each extra Honeypot pays ×0.7 of the previous — farms have diminishing returns) in waves.js; per-layer sugar is 1.
• Difficulty: DIFFICULTY.{easy,medium,hard} cost/speed/boss-HP multipliers plus easyAdjust (thinner waves, camo delayed) and hardAdjust (+25% bugs, tighter gaps, camo from r6 and on every round past r15) wave shaping (waves.js).
• Round pressure: group n/gap/delay per round in WAVES; debut rounds are commented (camo r8, pillbug r12, regen r16, wasp r18, snail r22, stag beetle r24, caterpillar r30, queen r40; stags return r34 and in overtime r47/r53). Rounds 41–60 are scripted "overtime" after the campaign win (multi-queen finale at r60); the freeplay generator takes over from r61.
• Freeplay scaling: freeplayRound() + freeplayHpMul() (+8% boss HP per round past 40).
• Tower power: every stat and tier cost in towers.js; upgrade tiers are declarative patches (add/mul/set).
• Bug toughness: hp/speed/children in enemies.js; slowResist/stunImmune guard bosses from permastun.
• Leak pain: leakValue = remaining layers (RBE); path geometry in maps.js.

Balance notes from the tuning passes (pre-v15 numbers — the v15 pass capped the Archer's range, buffed the Exploder, moved camo scent to Beacon Path B, thickened Hard-mode waves and made ascension repeatable, so retest before trusting these):

• A mixed strategy (workers → beacon by r8 → trap-jaw/exploder before r12 pillbugs → archer with Shell Piercer → inferno/husk-splitter tiers by r30) beats Easy r40 with no Honeypot farming, finishing with ~⅔ of starting crumbs.
• Overtime (r41–60) expects a full late-game board: in testing, a 16-tower maxed army (with Majoress Guards and Army Ant Camps) cleared the r60 four-queen finale at 100 crumbs, while a 10-tower board fell at r57. That cliff is intentional endless-mode pressure — tune via freeplayHpMul if it should be gentler.

Roguelite, paragons & meta-progression

• 🌿 Foraging Run (menu button): roguelite mode. Start with Worker + 2 random ants; after every round, draft 1 of 3 — unlock a locked ant, take a relic (data/relics.js: colony-wide passives like +10% range, camo sight for everyone, slower bugs), or grab a sugar cache. Relics persist through save/resume.
• 👑 Ascension: any tower with a maxed path can ascend: +100% damage, +25% range, +30% speed, golden aura. Repeatable — each ascension costs ×1.6 the last (3500🍬 base, ASCEND_GROWTH in relics.js) — so late-game sugar always has a sink.
• 🍯 Colony Perks: permanent meta-progression bought with Royal Jelly (1 per achievement, 1/2/3 per bronze/silver/gold map medal): starting sugar/crumbs, pop income, faster veteran stars (data/perks.js).

Depth & density (the "plays for hours" layer)

• Tower veterancy: every ant tracks layers dealt; 100/400/1200 earn ★/★★/★★★ (+5% damage per star, +1 flat at ★★). Stars render above the ant; the service record ("★★ · 450 layers dealt · ≈2.4 dps") lives in its panel.
• Live stat panels: damage/speed/range/pierce/blast/slow bars + DPS estimate for every selected tower; income/aura bars for support ants.
• Tier growth: ants grow ~5% per purchased tier — a maxed veteran is visibly a unit.
• Damage-type chips on shop cards (🧪💥💣🕸️✨) teach counter-play at a glance.
• Dressed maps: trail-edge pebbles, crumb scatters, cutlery/napkin (picnic), grass tufts (garden), coffee rings + sugar (kitchen), fallen leaves (flower bed), lamplit indigo porch boards + fireflies (night porch), framed border.
• Night Porch (5th map, unlock best ≥ 36): a long wraparound trail with one crossing over dark porch planks, baked warm lamplight pools, glowing lantern/flowerpot/moth-swarm set-pieces, and ambient fireflies. Map twist: moths fly +10% here, via a generic map.speedMulByType field applied in the enemy speed calc. Live entity lighting: a per-frame additive pass re-tints every bug and ant standing in a lamp pool warm and cools everything outside them (pool positions cached at bake time, one glow sprite).
• Bath Time (6th map, unlock best ≥ 38, tag Soaked): aqua bathroom tile with grout, a foamy bathtub + rubber duck set-piece, puddle blockers, dropped soap, drifting soap bubbles. The twist: a shower-spray sector (map.hazard {type:'sweep', period, width}, handled generically in the engine) sweeps the room — bugs inside move at 60% speed, but ants inside attack 35% slower too. Drawn as a translucent blue band full of falling drops.
• Tier-3 transforms: any ant with a maxed path grows a distinct silhouette piece — worker banded cannon-gaster, trapjaw crested helm, archer twin barrels, exploder double payload, weaver silk cape, army second gold war-standard, majoress full crown + royal cape.
• Upgrade-delta previews: every buyable tier button shows the concrete effect on the live tower ("DPS 1.3→2.0 · range 110→128", max 3 changed stats), computed by re-running the stat pipeline on a temp clone — buffs, veterancy and ascension included.
• Round-end punctuation: finish a round with zero leaks and a gold PERFECT ROUND! banner stamps down with its own jingle; the final bug of a round dying to a pop (not a leak) triggers 0.5s of slow-mo and a deep-then-bright "last pop" button.
• iOS-ready: standalone web-app metas, no-zoom viewport, touch-action locked canvas, 44px+ touch targets (every HUD button forces min-height: 44px at ≤700px), installable PWA.
• Mobile layout: phone portrait gets a slim wrapping HUD, full-width canvas and a horizontal shop strip; phone landscape keeps canvas + sidebar side by side with the canvas capped to the fold. Small screens scroll from the top instead of center-clipping.

Air war, powers & terrain

• Wasps (debut r18): flying bugs that ignore the trail and take a straight air lane to the basket. Trap-Jaws, Exploders, Army Camp piles and Guard Detail are ground-only — keep pellets, arrows and silk on air duty. Camo wasps exist. Air lanes render as dashed lines while flyers are aloft.
• Colony Powers (free, cooldown, click-to-cast): ☄️ Acid Rain (Q — 10 acid damage in a blast zone, hits camo and flyers, armored bugs immune, 60s) and 🛡️ Guard Detail (E — soldier squad holds a spot 8s, slowing 70% and biting ground bugs, 45s).
• 🧊 Sugar Decoy (D, the signature verb): a paid consumable (120🍬, no cooldown, max 2 out) — click the grass to drop a sticker-style crystal sugar cube. Ground bugs within radius 70 stop and eat (a hard snare refreshed while the cube endures); bosses and flyers ignore it. The cube has 25 bites — each of up to 6 simultaneous eaters takes 1 bite/0.5 s (extras walk on) — then crumbles in a puff of crumbs: pure stall, no reward. Cubes shrink as they're eaten, judder under nibbling, and survive save/resume. All knobs in DECOY (data/waves.js); a one-time coach bubble fires when it first becomes affordable.
• High-ground mounds: 2 dirt mounds per map grant +25% range to any ant placed on them (chevron mark; they glow while placing). Scarce real estate — fight for it.

Heroes, music & meta

• Hero ants (data/heroes.js): pick one on the menu, place free once per game. Levels 1–10 from the colony's total pops; ability unlocks at Lv 3 (button in HUD, hotkey A). General Formica (crush melee, Rally Cry: +50% attack speed 10s), Vespula Silkmother (biting silk, Web the World: global 60% slow 6s), Melissa the Provider (economy: gentle pellets, a per-round sugar stipend of 15+5×level, Harvest Time: +200 sugar and every Honeypot pays out instantly), or Sergeant Tenebra the Summoner (dark violet; passive: every 12s in-round a minion guard-ant appears on the trail near her — 6s life, bites ground bugs via the guards system; Muster L3: 3 minions along the trail).
• Second hero actives at Lv 7 (button appears next to the first, hotkey S, own cooldown, snapshot-safe): Formica's Iron Wall (90s — an elite gold guard post barricades the trail exit for 6s: bites for 4, 80% body-block slow), Vespula's Gossamer Shroud (75s — every ant gains camo detection for 12s), Melissa's Honey Flood (80s — all bugs slowed 40% for 5s, +1 sugar per bug caught), Tenebra's Legion (90s — 6 minions that also slow bugs 50%).
• Adaptive music (js/music.js): WebAudio step-sequencer, no assets. Layers by intensity: menu/build → combat (+bass/hats) → swarm (+kick) → boss (minor key, arp). Separate 🎵 toggle from SFX mute. Per-map identity via setMapTheme(mapId): picnic = sunny A major · garden = up a minor third · kitchen = swung 8ths, down two · flower bed = minor-leaning, 108 BPM · night porch = minor, slow 96 BPM, down four · bath = light minor, 104 BPM, up two.
• Audio craft (v14 — sampled, roomed, composed): a convolution reverb send bus (synthetic 2 s impulse response, lowpass-darkened tail, built at init) puts every voice in a real acoustic space — SFX ride ≈80/20 dry/wet, music ≈65/35. The hot one-shots are a pre-rendered sample bank: 8 "samples" (pop_small/mid/big, kick thump, snap crack, FM-bell chime, whoosh, splat) rendered once into AudioBuffers via OfflineAudioContext and played back with ±8 % rate jitter — sampled playback, authored in-house at boot. Percussion is a real kit (sampled kick, layered tone+noise snare on the backbeats, hats with a 16-step accent pattern), and the score has song form: every map theme owns a 16-step A melody and a B melody (A A B B by bar), every 4th bar closes with an arp-run fill, and the bass gains passing tones in the B section. Win/lose screens get proper 4-phrase compositions (I–IV–V–I victory tune with walking bass; a minor lament whose drone sags a half step). TD.sound() reports the live graph (bank, IR, wet sends).
• Audio polish: SFX and music route through one master DynamicsCompressorNode (swarms stop clipping); pop pitch tracks bug size (mite plink → boss thump, wired from the pop layer with the bug's radius); boss-specific horn stingers (stag = low brass blast, queen = two-chord menace); and per-map ambient beds under the music — breeze noise (picnic/flower bed), bird chirps (garden), 50 Hz fridge hum (kitchen), cricket pulses (night porch), echoing drips (bath) — all tied to the music mute/volume and reported by musicState().ambient.
• 📅 Daily Run: a seeded challenge (seed = YYYYMMDD) — the same deterministic map, hero and 1–2 challenge mods for the whole day, on Medium. Local per-date best lives in save.dailyBest and shows on the menu button.
• 🐜 Rival Colony → 😤 NEMESIS: every daily spawns a deterministic rival from the same seed — a named neighborhood colony ("The Tool Shed Hill"), an emoji face, and a base round target (18–34, mid-weighted). The target escalates honestly: +2 per current 🔥 streak day (capped +12), with the math spelled out in the modal ("round 28
  • streak bonus 6"). Crush a rival and they return tomorrow as your nemesis (same name/face, persisted in save.nemesis): +3 target per prior defeat, escalating revenge taunts, an 😤 callout on the daily button. The feud ends when they finally beat you (they gloat, your streak resets) or after 5 defeats (they bow out with respect); defeating the same rival 3 days running earns the Nemesis achievement. Today's rival is frozen at first sight (save.dailyRivalDef) so mid-day state changes never rewrite the day's challenge. Judged once per run (win, lose, or leaving to the menu): beat the target → 🏆 RIVAL CRUSHED + save.dailyStreak++; fall short → a seeded taunt. Honestly local — the modal says so; no fake online claims.
• Loadout: the hero picker and challenge chips fold into one collapsible menu sticker ("▸ LOADOUT — ⭐ Formica · 💀🕶️ 2 challenges"), collapsed by default — map cards, difficulty and the big buttons stay front and center.
• 📊 Stats page (menu, next to Achievements): lifetime ledger — games played, wins & win rate, rounds fought, lifetime layers popped, achievement %, royal jelly earned, and best round per map with its medal.
• 🌾 The Backyard Trail: the campaign menu is a journey — a winding dotted trail across the backyard connecting all 6 maps as circular emblem nodes (each map's preview clipped into a circle), showing lock state, medal, best round, and up to 3 stars (one per difficulty won, derived from save.wins). A "⭐ N/18 backyard stars" counter totals the campaign; the selected node lifts gold; a 🗂 toggle flips back to the classic card list. On phones the strip scrolls horizontally inside itself.
• ⭐ Star Rewards (data/starRewards.js): backyard stars are a currency you never spend — a reward track under the trail unlocks automatically at thresholds: ⭐3 Sunny Start (+25 starting sugar) · ⭐6 Crumb Cushion (+5 starting crumbs, not in Crumbs of Steel) · ⭐9 Scout's Eye (the wave preview also scouts the round after next) · ⭐12 Golden Anthill (gold trail trim, 👑 on the counter, a pennant on the basket) · ⭐15 Veteran Colony (every placed ant starts with 25 layers of veterancy credit) · ⭐18 Backyard Legend (golden logo, its own achievement, all Honeypots +10% income). Crossing a threshold on a win toasts the unlock; the strip shows locked/unlocked chips with the next target pulsing. Stars flow into runs via mods.stars (snapshot-safe like perks).
• Medals per map (🥉 reach r20 · 🥈 win · 🥇 win without leaking) on trail nodes and map cards, and 16 achievements (data/achievements.js) with toast popups and a menu panel.
• Challenge modes (menu chips, stackable): 💀 Crumbs of Steel (1 life) · 🕶️ Camo Chaos (all bugs camo) · ⚡ Speed Demon (+40% bug speed) · 💸 Poverty Colony (half income).
• Colony report on win/lose: per-ant-type damage leaderboard, layers, earnings, leaks, hero level, and active challenges.
• Mid-run save & resume: runs persist between rounds; the menu offers "▶ Resume <map> — round N" (cleared on defeat).
• Next-wave preview in the idle panel: exact bug counts with 🕶️/💗 flags, boss warnings.
• Installable PWA: manifest + service worker (network-first, offline fallback) + icon.
• Hotkeys: 1–9 shop · Z/X buy upgrade paths · Backspace sell · A hero ability · S second hero ability · Q/E colony powers · D sugar decoy · Space start · F speed · P pause · M mute.

Game feel ("juice")

One motion identity everywhere — Playful: ease-out-back, 150–300ms, 10–20% overshoot (boss moments deliberately slower and heavier; error feedback firm, no overshoot).

• Depth: drop shadows under every entity; baked vignette + film grain per map.
• Hits: white flash + squash on damage, spring-in on spawns/reveals, spinning shell chunks on deaths, tower recoil on fire.
• World: pheromone dots stream along the trail toward the basket; per-bug hue jitter.
• Combat theater: three-stage explosions (flash → additive glow → smoke) with lingering scorch decals on a fading offscreen layer; projectile ribbon trails; directional camera kick; boss-pop hitstop; one-time cinematic boss intros (slow-mo + darkened banner + horn).
• UI: round banners with debut warnings, coin-fly from pops to a tweened sugar counter, can't-afford shake, placement drop-in, upgrade bursts.

Dev note: serve.py sends Cache-Control: no-store so module edits always load fresh, and speaks HTTP/1.1 keep-alive so the ~22-module boot doesn't open a fresh socket per request (intermittent ERR_CONNECTION_RESET behind localhost-filtering antivirus).

Visual fidelity

Three-layer rendering model, all procedural: lighting (cached radial gradients with a top-left key light on every body and prop, weighted hand-drawn outlines, bake-time soft occlusion and drop shadows), materials (masked chitin-noise composited soft-light, rim light, wing iridescence, jointed knee legs, distance-phased gait sway, trail speckle, ambient wildlife), and retina (DPR-aware backing store up to 2×, auto-detected; force with ?dpr=2). Per-type body silhouettes live in data/enemies.js (bodyL/bodyW).

The hour of light (v16): every map commits to a time of day, declared as data (light: { mood, clouds, motes } in data/maps.js). Baked per mood: a warm sun wash with a complementary cool-shade corner, low-sun shafts (picnic golden hour, garden morning, flower bed late afternoon), a paned window-light band on the kitchen, cool skylight in the bath, long stretched prop shadows at low sun. Live per mood: drifting cloud shade on outdoor maps, and each map's living air — dandelion seeds, pollen motes, falling petals, dust sinking through the window light, tub steam (fireflies still own the night). The sugar stash glows like a hearth on every map, and boss intros get a cinema letterbox.

Performance

• Fixed 60 Hz simulation; game speed multiplies steps per frame (1×/3×/debug 10×), so fast-forward is physics-identical.
• Object pools for enemies, projectiles, particles; per-map background baked once to an offscreen canvas; zero per-frame allocations in hot paths.
• A background setInterval keeps the sim running when the tab is hidden (rAF pauses).

Asset credits

The game is procedural-first; two small asset sets are layered on top (both self-hosted, offline-friendly, with graceful fallbacks when absent):

• Foley: 21 one-shots curated from Kenney — "Impact Sounds" (kenney.nl), licensed CC0 / public domain (assets/sfx/, license copy included). Loaded at boot and preferred over the synthesized sample bank; browsers that can't decode ogg fall back to the synth bank automatically.
• Display font: Baloo 2 variable font (Ek Type), licensed SIL OFL 1.1 (assets/fonts/, license copy included). Falls back to Trebuchet MS.