Stick Tower Defense

A free browser-based tower defense game with stickman towers that level up and evolve into distinct classes, an expanding spiral map, infinite waves, a hero item system, breakaway enemies that ambush your towers, path-blocking barricades, forensic-grade blood/gore effects, and full save/load. Single self-contained HTML file — no install, no build step, just open and play.

Play it here · Full changelog

Zero dependencies: no external images, no external audio, nothing to install. Every stickman, weapon, and effect is drawn procedurally on an HTML5 Canvas, and every sound is synthesized live with the Web Audio API.

How to play

Tap Build, pick a tower, then tap a hedge tile to place it. It shows a brief class-flavored quip and plays a cute gibberish "spawn chatter" voice blip when placed.
Tap a placed tower to see its nameplate — a portrait, HP bar, an EXP bar, and combat stats. Tap the nameplate again (or the scroll icon, which glows green when you have points to spend) to expand into full options: upgrade, sell, move, buy it gear from the Shop, cycle its targeting priority, or spend stat points.
Every tower has its own EXP level, up to 99, separate from its gold-bought upgrade tier — see Leveling below. Investing enough points into one stat evolves the tower into a distinct new class — see the tree below.
The map starts as a tiny 2x2 area and grows outward as you clear waves — some expansions are free milestones, others cost gold. Only one expansion can happen per round; extras queue for the next.
The path is a genuine spiral, regenerated (and re-checked against your existing towers) every time the map expands.
Waves continue indefinitely past 100 with procedurally scaling difficulty across 9 rotating wave archetypes — this is built to be a long-haul hero-building grind, not a sprint.
Runs on desktop (mouse + scroll-to-zoom) and mobile (touch, pinch-to-zoom, drag-to-pan).
Speed up simulation from 1x up to 10x via the HUD speed button. When a tower is selected and actively attacking, a red-bordered target frame shows what it's aiming at — HP, armor, and speed.

Stat icon legend

Every icon used across the HUD, a tower's inspect panel, its target frame, and its stat buttons:

Top HUD bar

Icon	Meaning
❤️	Lives remaining — reaching 0 ends the run
💰	Gold — spent on building most towers, upgrading, expanding, and the Shop
🔀	Free tower relocations left (earn 1 more every 2 waves, capped)
🏗️ Build / 🛒 Shop / ⚙️	Open the build tray, item shop, or settings
⏸/▶ and 1x/2x/.../10x	Pause/resume and simulation speed

Tower inspect panel — combat stats (left to right: HP/armor first, then the damage cluster)

Icon	Meaning
❤️	Current / max HP
🛡️	Armor — percentage damage reduction on incoming hits
⚔️	Damage, shown as its real min-max range (the actual random roll band every hit uses)
💥	Critical hits — shown as chance, then ⚔️ and the damage multiplier (e.g. "2.5% ⚔️1.20")
⏳	Time per attack, in seconds — how long one full attack cycle takes, not a frequency
🥈	Real DPS — average damage per hit (crit's expected-value contribution included) × attacks/second, discounted by the tower's own miss chance (burst-fire towers use their true full attack cycle, not just the reload cooldown)
🎯	Range — attack radius in world units
🍀	Luck — bonus % gold from this tower's kills

This row never wraps to a second line — if its content is too wide for the panel, it shrinks (with no minimum size) to always fit on one line instead.

Tower inspect panel — stat allocation

Icon	Stat	What it does
💪	STR	+3% max HP per point for every class; additionally the sole source of damage for Warrior-archetype towers (Swordsman and its evolutions), on a curve built to keep scaling meaningfully into the late game
🏃	DEX	Universal +3% attack speed, reduced miss chance, and 💥 crit chance per point for every class, regardless of archetype; additionally the sole source of damage for Archer-archetype towers
🧠	INT	+6 range and 💥 crit damage multiplier per point for every class (Cleric uses it to boost heal amount instead of range); additionally the sole source of damage for Mage-archetype towers

Damage is strictly archetype-exclusive — only STR drives Warrior damage, only DEX drives Archer damage, only INT drives Mage damage, with no cross-class bonus. Miss chance itself has a different baseline per archetype on purpose (Mage misses the most at 22% starting out, Archer a moderate 14%, Warriors the least at 7%), but the DEX formula that reduces it from there is identical for every tower, with no exceptions. Critical hits work the same way: base 2.5% chance for 1.20x damage before any investment, with DEX raising the chance (capped 50%) and INT raising the multiplier (capped 3x) — a real damage effect now, applied before armor mitigation, not just a cosmetic floating-text color.

Tower strategy (the aura box) — evolved/specialist towers (anything beyond base Swordsman/ Archer/Mage) show a round glowing WC3-style icon next to their inventory slots. Tap it to open a one-line strategy note explaining that class's niche. Basic classes and Barricade don't have one — they don't have a specialized niche yet to explain.

Target frame (shown when a selected tower is actively attacking something)

Icon	Meaning
🛡️	The target enemy's armor
👟	The target enemy's movement speed

Towers & evolutions

Only Swordsman, Archer, Mage, and Barricade are built directly. Every other class is reached by investing stat points into an existing tower.

Tower	Role
⚔️ Swordsman	Melee cone sweep — the starting warrior
🏹 Archer	Ranged, visibly draws the bow before firing — slower arrows, real power behind each shot
🔮 Mage	Slows whatever it hits, small chance to burn, freeze, or shock
🚧 Barricade	Doesn't attack — extremely tough, placeable directly on the path, freezes the first enemy that touches it
🔨 Hammerman	(Swordsman → STR) Stuns on hit, carries a shield and extra HP
🪓 Axeman	(Swordsman → DEX) Dual hand axes; manually toggle between a close swing and a ranged throw
🔱 Spearman	(Swordsman → INT) Long melee reach, slow but hard-hitting
⚜️ Paladin	(Hammerman → INT, 2nd tier) Every hit deals holy pure damage, bypassing armor entirely
🔫 Gatling	(Archer → STR) Very fast, low damage per shot — shreds swarms
🎯 Blowdart	(Archer → DEX) Short range, fast fire rate, every dart poisons
💣 Bomber	(Archer → INT) Splash damage against groups
🔫 Gunalinder	(Bomber → INT, 2nd tier) Trades splash for precision — fires all six chambers of a revolver in a rapid burst, then a long reload
🎯 Sniper	(Gunalinder → INT, 3rd tier) The deepest INT investment in the game — one devastating shot at the longest range of any tower
🔫 Dual Squirt Gun	(Blowdart → DEX, 2nd tier) Dual-wielded, deeper DEX specialization
✝️ Cleric	(Mage → INT) Curses the nearest enemy of any type with a lingering damage-over-time affliction — 5x tick damage against undead. Also heals your lowest-HP tower once per wave.

Gold-tier upgrades (paid with gold, separate from EXP levels) raise range, cooldown, and unlock class mechanics, with a modest damage bump included — but damage growth is weighted so a tower's primary stat (see Leveling) is the dominant lever for how hard it actually hits, not the tier level by itself.

Tower appearance

Every individual tower rolls its own unique look the moment it's built, independent of every other tower of the same class:

Height & weight — a per-tower silhouette variance around that class's baseline proportions, so two Mages (for example) can read as visibly taller/leaner or shorter/stockier rather than sharing one fixed build.
Skin tone & pants tone — each rolled as a fully independent random shade across a wide range, not tied to each other and not anchored to the class's own preset color, so within one class you'll see every combination: darker skin with lighter pants, lighter skin with darker pants, or anything in between. Hue stays per-class (Mage always reads violet, Archer always reads green); only lightness is randomized.
Face color is the one deliberate exception — always a subtle shade darker than that specific tower's own skin tone, so the face reliably reads as part of the same figure.

Re-rolled (fresh randomization) on upgrade and on evolution, so leveling up and evolving visibly show growth and change, not just a stat readout.

Enemies

Grunt, Swarm, Tank, and Runner make up the early roster, alongside a Boss on wave 15. Fire and Ice enemies can break off the path entirely to 1v1 a tower directly, inflicting burn or a slow debuff on it. Splitter breaks into two smaller Splitmini on death; Boulder does the same but tankier. Healer keeps nearby enemies topped up; Shielded absorbs hits until its shield breaks. Wolf hunts in a coordinated pack. The Troll has a big bounty and roughly double HP, but walks backward toward the entrance instead of forward — kill it for the payout before it wanders off.

Undead (Zombie, Wraith, Skeleton, Reaper) carry real armor and are the intended target for a Cleric's curse, which deals 5x damage to them specifically. Skeleton revives once on death. Reaper is the heaviest-armored undead in the roster.

Status effects

Burn, curse (poison-style DoT), bleeding (see Blood & gore), slow, and stun all show a periodic reminder label above an affected unit every 120 seconds, so long-running effects stay visible instead of only appearing the instant they're applied. Each also gets a themed visual — drifting ice crystals for slow/freeze, flickering flames for burn, lightning bolts orbiting the head for stun — instead of a flat colored tint. A stun or slow correctly propagates backward through an entire queued line of enemies, not just to the one directly behind it.

Blood & gore

An 18+ toggle in Settings → Game controls all of it — off by default. With it on, damage produces biologically-flavored, forensic-style bloodstain effects rather than a generic hit spark:

Cast-off arc direction is now a fixed per-tower handedness, not a fresh random coin-flip on every hit — a real swordsman swings with a consistent dominant direction, and the blood now matches. A brief "air line" also traces the blade's actual swept path at the moment of the swing, geometrically identical to the angle driving the cast-off, so the blood pattern is directly, visibly verifiable against the swing that caused it.
Ground-pool size now reads directly from where a hit's damage roll landed in its own min-max range, AND from the actual target's own body size — a genuine minimum-roll hit pools ~30% smaller, a genuine maximum-roll hit ~30% bigger, shown alongside the tower's min-max damage range in its stat panel; independently, a tiny Swarm ant leaves a visibly smaller pool than a Boss for the same weapon type, instead of every enemy producing an identically-sized pool regardless of how big or small its own emoji actually is. The same size-blending applies to death-burst particle counts, not just the pool.
Per-species blood profiles — insects (green hemolymph), undead (necrotic dark ooze), and rock/stone-bodied enemies (Boulder, Rocklet, Tank — no blood at all, only dust and small 🪨 chip debris, 2-5 scattered on death and a 1-in-10 chance per non-lethal hit, each chip a fixed 1/10 of the enemy's own size) each bleed a distinct color and texture, and every individual enemy additionally rolls its own subtle blood tint, so no two enemies bleed an identical, flat color.
Weapon-specific wound identity — melee sub-branches by actual weapon geometry: a bladed cut (cut-line plus a curved cast-off arc trailing away, matching how blood actually flies off a swinging blade), a blunt crushing impact (wider radial spatter plus a circular shockring — the one case where a round mark is forensically correct), or a piercing thrust (a strong forward gush along one line, no perpendicular cut). Archer hits stay low-impact and puncture-like (minimal spray, mostly dripping). Mage hits are a fast, wide, high-energy burst of long radiating cast-off streaks with a touch of back-spatter toward the source — no ring, since a magical bolt has no crushing surface to leave a round mark. Ground stains persist with distinct shape and size per archetype too — Archer pools are small and elongated, Mage pools are the largest of the four.
Running drip trails — a gently curved, gravity-affected trickle with a small pooled bead at the tip, distinct from the initial impact streak — this is what blood does a beat after landing, not another copy of the impact spatter.
Bleeding (DOT) — a sufficiently heavy hit opens an actual wound: a ticking damage-over-time effect that keeps the enemy actively bleeding (tapering off as the wound nears its end, not cutting off at full intensity) on top of ambient low-HP dripping below 40% HP.
Barricade contact-transfer smears — an enemy pressed against a barricade while bleeding leaves a directional wipe stain on the barricade itself, not just a puddle beneath it.
Walking blood / footprints — an enemy that steps in fresh blood (including the edge of a large pool, not just its exact center) picks it up and leaves a fading trail of footprints.
Forensic aging — a fresh stain is bright oxyhemoglobin red, passes through a reddish-brown oxidizing stage as it dries, and (once old enough) shows a darker, coagulated skeletonization ring around a lighter, flatter interior — real bloodstain-pattern-analysis aging, not a flat color fade. Every stain lasts up to 30 minutes with individual per-decal variance, and a local saturation cap keeps a heavily-fought corridor from growing into one unbroken mass.
Instant, not delayed — every blood effect fires at the actual moment of the hit or the moment of death, at full size immediately — no delayed trickle, no grow-in animation.
Skeletal remains and the worms that eventually crawl out of them — a death has a 78% chance to scatter a few bone fragments and a 45% chance to leave a skull, both permanent (never fade) and always rendered above blood, guaranteed by draw order rather than left to chance. Each round, every skull on the map has a 1-in-10 chance to be marked for a worm — which doesn't actually appear until the round after it's rolled — and each skull only ever grows one. A worm never fades either, but it isn't permanent: it lives twice as long as a blood stain and shrinks smoothly to nothing near the end of its life instead of fading out, like it's burrowing away.

Leveling

Every tower has its own EXP level (1-99), separate from its gold-bought upgrade tier. EXP comes from landing kills, killstreak milestones, spending gold to upgrade a tower's tier, and simply surviving to the end of a round. Each level-up grants exactly one stat point — small and frequent rather than big lump sums — for the player to allocate manually via the STR/DEX/INT buttons. Barricades don't fight, so they don't earn EXP.

Stat damage bonuses are class-exclusive, Dota-style, with no exceptions: STR only boosts damage for Warrior-archetype towers (Swordsman and its evolutions), DEX only for Archer-style towers (Archer, Gatling, Blowdart, Bomber, Dual Squirt Gun, Gunalinder, Sniper, Snap Caster), and INT only for Mage-archetype towers (Mage, Cleric). STR's max-HP bonus and DEX's attack-speed/luck/ accuracy bonus stay universal across every class — DEX-based accuracy in particular scales via the exact same formula for every tower regardless of archetype, with no early-game caps for any class. A tower's primary stat is the dominant driver of how hard it hits, with Warriors using a separate, steeper damage curve from the other two archetypes specifically so heavy STR investment keeps compounding meaningfully into the deep endgame instead of flattening out.

Spending gold to upgrade a tower's tier also grants random stat growth on top of its guaranteed tier stat bump: 3 independent rolls of 1-6 points each into a randomly chosen stat, plus a guaranteed extra 1-3 points into the tower's own favored/main stat. This is separate from — and in addition to — the 1 stat point every EXP level grants.

Baseline (zero-DEX) miss chance differs by archetype on purpose: Mage misses the most (22%), Archer a moderate amount (14%), and Warriors (melee) the least (7%) — a deliberate hierarchy, not a bug, reflecting how forgiving each class's attack type is to land. All three converge toward a 2% floor with enough DEX investment, since the accuracy formula itself is identical for everyone.

The inspect panel shows each tower's real min-max damage range (no separate flat number alongside it) and its actual DPS — average damage per hit times attacks per second, discounted by the tower's own miss chance, with burst-fire towers (Gunalinder, Snap Caster) using their real full attack-cycle time rather than just the reload cooldown.

Waves

100 hand-authored waves, then infinite procedurally-generated ones cycling through 9 archetypes — Standard, Swarm Surge, Elite Vanguard, Undead Uprising, Ambush Tactics, Siege Assault (boss rush), Stone Push (a heavily-armored crowd-control test), Trick Rush (looks like an easy opener, then springs a real threat partway through), and The Grind (a long, sustained economy/DPS test rather than a fast burst). A Boss periodically spawns Grunt minions while active; an off-screen compass arrow points toward it when it's out of view.

The first 15 waves each introduce at most one brand-new enemy type, with a popup explaining its HP, speed, bounty, and any special behavior the first time it appears. A summary popup at the end of every wave shows total gold gained and a per-class EXP breakdown.

Enemies within a wave are spaced out on spawn — both within one enemy type's own group and across every other group spawning that same wave — so a wave with several concurrent enemy types never dumps them all onto the entrance at the exact same moment.

Pathing & AI

Enemies path along the map's spiral in genuine single file: a faster unit won't try to overtake a slower one directly ahead of it (there's no lane to pass in), a queue naturally forms behind an active Barricade with only one enemy actually engaging it at a time, and a swept collision check catches fast-moving units that would otherwise tunnel straight through each other within a single frame. Wave spawning pauses while a barricade queue is backed up rather than piling more enemies onto it, with a safety timeout so a jam can never permanently block progress. Corner-turning uses a forgiving waypoint-arrival margin so units don't overshoot and backtrack into the units behind them.

Items & Heroes

Every tower starts with empty item slots — WC3/Dota-style, not a class-specific starter kit. Two shared items exist, usable by any tower regardless of class: the Lucky Branch 🌿 (+1 STR/+1 DEX/+1 INT, gold + wood), and the Barricade 🚧 item (see Resources below) — both buyable from the Shop for whichever tower you have selected. Items can be dragged directly from one tower's inventory onto another to transfer them, or dropped on the ground first. A ground item bobs gently with a soft pulsing ring around it at every graphics setting, and while you're actively dragging one, a 👇🏻 indicator appears above whichever tower is currently the valid drop target. Global passive upgrades apply to every tower you own, current and future. A tower with all 6 item slots filled awakens into a Hero, with a permanent stat bonus and a visible crown.

Resources

Gold from kills and wave clears — spent on most towers, upgrades, and expanding the map. Wood and stone from clearing scattered trees and rocks (rocks cost noticeably more gold to clear than an equivalently-sized tree), rare treasure chests, and relic drops — spent on the priciest tier of shop gear, and on Barricades. Barricades aren't built from the Build menu — they're bought as an item from the Shop (600🪵/300🪨) into a tower's inventory, then dragged out onto a valid path tile to place them live, or onto any tower's inventory to store or move them; a live Barricade can be picked back up with its "Store" button. Every 5 waves cleared banks one free-barricade charge (capped at 3), consumed automatically on your next Barricade purchase before any wood/stone is spent. Tank (🗿) drops stone instead of gold on death — the game's one enemy-side source of stone beyond clearing rocks yourself.

Lives

Start with 100. Buy an extra life with gold from the Shop — each purchase costs substantially more than the last (exponential scaling), so it's a real emergency valve rather than a routine top-up.

Settings

Video (graphics quality: Low / Medium / High, trading off shadows and particle-heavy effects for performance), Audio (mute), Game (18+ gore toggle, save/load), and About (in-app README viewer/downloader).

Save / Load

Progress isn't auto-saved. Settings → Game → Save Game downloads a .txt file with a random seed and your full game state. Load Save on that same screen restores it — on this device or any other.

Tech stack

HTML5 Canvas 2D for all rendering — every stickman, weapon, enemy, particle, and decal is drawn procedurally with CanvasRenderingContext2D calls, no sprite sheets or image assets.
Vanilla JavaScript, no framework, no bundler, no transpilation step.
Web Audio API for synthesized sound effects — no audio files.
A single self-contained index.html — HTML, CSS, and JS all live in one file by design (see Contributing), so the entire game is one download and one <script> tag away from running.

Project structure

StickTD/
├── index.html      # the entire game — markup, styles, and all game logic
├── AGENTS.md        # workflow rules for AI agents/contributors making changes
├── CHANGELOG.md      # full version history, newest first
├── BACKLOG.md        # ideas and planned features not yet built
├── LICENSE            # MIT
└── README.md          # this file

Code map

Direct links into index.html on GitHub, jumping straight to where each system actually lives. Line numbers drift as the file changes — treat these as a starting point to search from rather than a permanently exact address, and if a link lands a little off, the section-header comment right above that spot (/* ===== ... ===== */) is the reliable anchor, not the line number itself.

Major sections

Core gameplay systems

Blood & gore system (see Blood & gore above for the player-facing description)

Running locally

No build step, no package manager, no server required:

Clone or download the repo.
Open index.html directly in any modern browser.

That's it. If your browser restricts local-file features (some autoplay/audio policies behave differently under file://), serve it with any static file server instead, e.g.:

python3 -m http.server 8000
# then visit http://localhost:8000/

Contributing

This repo deliberately stays a single-file, zero-dependency project — see AGENTS.md for the exact workflow any contributor (human or AI agent) follows when making a change: bumping GAME_VERSION by one patch level per meaningful change, adding a changelog entry that explains why something changed and not just what, and running a syntax check before finalizing. Check the live version and/or pull the current main before starting work, since this repo may be updated between sessions.

Version History

See CHANGELOG.md for the full version history, and BACKLOG.md for ideas not yet built.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Navigation Menu

Repository files navigation

Stick Tower Defense

Contents

How to play

Stat icon legend

Towers & evolutions

Tower appearance

Enemies

Status effects

Blood & gore

Leveling

Waves

Pathing & AI

Items & Heroes

Resources

Lives

Settings

Save / Load

Tech stack

Project structure

Code map

Running locally

Contributing

Version History

License

About

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Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
AGENTS.md		AGENTS.md
BACKLOG.md		BACKLOG.md
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
favicon.png		favicon.png
index.html		index.html
og-image.png		og-image.png

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Stick Tower Defense

Contents

How to play

Stat icon legend

Towers & evolutions

Tower appearance

Enemies

Status effects

Blood & gore

Leveling

Waves

Pathing & AI

Items & Heroes

Resources

Lives

Settings

Save / Load

Tech stack

Project structure

Code map

Running locally

Contributing

Version History

License

About

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