Kindness TD

About the game

Kindness TD is a tower defense game with the violence taken out. The enemies are grumpies, little hearts with a sad meter, and they walk along a path toward the Happy Hangout. You do not defeat them. Your crew of buddies lowers the sad meter, and a grumpy that is cheered up in time becomes a happy one and goes hang out. If too many sad ones slip through, you lose: the counter at the top says how many missed hearts you have left, out of five.

You start with some Care Credits and spend them on buddies. The Hugger pulls in one grumpy and calms it quickly. The Therapy Dog helps up to four at once and gently pulls them closer. Affirming Words fires speech-bubble shots. The Glad Radio is passive and helps everyone nearby. Then there is the hero, Happy Horn, a unicorn who flies in circles around the nearest grumpy and paints a rainbow behind her, cheering up everything the rainbow touches. She is free, but only one can be on the field at a time, and you can click her to train her: pink and blue ones fly faster, purple and gold ones paint stronger.

Each of the ten rounds brings more grumpies, and more sadness for each. Round one has twenty-five of them, and the next adds ten more and a little more sadness. The art is all small pixel sprites, grumpies included. Kindness TD was made by EricOP for js13kGames 2026, where the whole game had to fit in 13 KB.

Playing it here

Click Play and then Start Game. Three short pages introduce the round: the goal, the hero and the size of the wave. Press Start Round, move over the grid and click a cell to open the build menu beside it, then click the buddy you want. The round starts running on its own, and you can keep placing buddies while it does, as long as you have credits. Missing too many hearts ends the game, and you tap to go back to the menu. The Pause and Full Screen buttons are inside the game, and the note in the corner turns the music on and off.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Start with the cheapest help. Affirming Words costs only 20 credits and the Happy Horn nothing, so you can have a crew on the field before the first grumpy arrives. Spend the rest as the credits come in.

Use the Therapy Dog where grumpies bunch up. It helps four at a time and pulls them closer, so it is wasted on a lone grumpy.

Keep the Happy Horn alive. She is free and covers a lot of ground, so train her early and let her paint where the crowd is thickest.

Credits and licence

Kindness TD was created by EricOP. The game is released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page.