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Floppy Defense
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About the game
The board of this tower defence game is the motherboard of a 90s PC, modelled in 3D and seen from above: green circuit board, golden traces, a big CPU, a fan, chips, jumpers and slots, all of it made in code. Viruses come in through the serial ports, COM1 and COM2, and crawl along the traces toward the processor. If the CPU integrity reaches zero, you get a blue screen.
Your weapons are floppy disks. You click a free drive bay beside a trace to insert one, paying for it with kilobytes of memory, and every deleted virus pays some back. Antivirus (blue) fires fast bolts at one virus at a time, Firewall (red) burns everything around it, and Defrag (yellow) slows the viruses down. Each floppy can be upgraded twice, from v1.0 to v3.0, and you can change what it targets first, last, strongest or closest, or sell it. The viruses have their own character: worms are fast and fragile, trojans are slow and wooden, macros split in two when they die, and bosses named after famous old viruses turn up every five waves.
Then there is the heat. During waves a chip on the board starts to overheat and you have to click the CPU fan to cool it, or the floppies around it fire at half speed. After the first ten waves a second set of waves begins, in 1999, with new viruses and two new floppies, Scandisk and Format C:. Clearing all twenty waves unlocks an endless mode and the high-score table. The music, the sound effects, even the dial-up modem handshake and the chatter of a floppy drive are synthesised while you play.
The game starts with an old BIOS start-up screen and ends with a blue screen, and it is written in English and Italian. Andrea of Anathema Studio made it in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 60, whose theme was "Old tech".
Playing it here
Click Play, then press any key or click on the boot screen. The game needs WebGL (hardware acceleration on in your browser). Click a bay beside a glowing trace to insert your first floppy, then press Run. Settings and high scores are kept in this browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Click a free drive bay | open the floppy menu |
| 1 to 5 | insert the floppy of that number on the selected bay |
| U, S, R | upgrade, sell or change the target of the selected floppy |
| Space | run the wave (early gives bonus KB) |
| T | overclock for a few seconds |
| F, P, M | double speed, pause, sound |
| Click the CPU fan | cool a chip that is overheating |
A few things worth knowing
Spend on the first corners. Viruses spend the most time near the bends of the traces, so floppies there reach them for longer.
Mix the floppies. Trojans resist the antivirus but burn well, so a firewall next to an antivirus covers both.
Watch the temperature. A chip that overheats makes the floppies near it much slower, and the fan is the fastest way to fix that.
Credits and licence
Floppy Defense was made by Andrea (Anathema Studio) for Ludum Dare 60 and is released under the MIT licence. It is built on three.js (MIT) and Vite. The licence texts are linked from this page. The only changes made for this site are in the text of the start-up screen and the game-over messages, to avoid showing real brand names and wording copied from other products: the BIOS and chipset names, the processor model, an Intel part number and the Windows error messages were replaced with text of the game's own.