Seven Towers · FredyGames

About the game

Seven Towers is a tower defense game on a grid. Enemies come out of the red tile, walk to a green tile and hurt you when they reach it, and you start with 40 health. In between you have a pile of money and a store of towers. The twist is that the map is open: there are no fixed roads, and the enemies always walk the shortest path around whatever is in their way. Where you put a tower decides where they go, so you can build a long winding path in front of your guns, or a wall that sends them the long way round.

There are seven towers: a cheap gun tower, a laser, a slow tower that makes enemies crawl, a long-range sniper, a rocket launcher, a bomb tower and the tesla coil. Each can be upgraded, and each has its own damage, range and firing rate, shown in the panel on the right when you click it. Enemies come in many kinds as the waves go on: weak and strong ones, fast ones, medics that heal the others, armoured tanks, taunting ones and spawners that release more of them when they die. Kills pay money, and money buys more towers.

Sixteen maps are included, from empty boards to ones full of walls, loops and forks. The map and the board size can be changed in the middle of a game, and a map can be exported as a short text string and imported again to share it.

Playing it here

Click Play, pick a tower in the Store on the left and click a free tile on the board to build it. Then press Start (or Space) to send the first wave. Waves wait a short time between them; press W to turn on starting the next one as soon as the last enemy is out. You can't build a tower that closes the path completely, because enemies must always have a way through. The game is made for a mouse and a keyboard on a roomy screen and does not fit a phone. Nothing is saved: closing the page ends the game.

Controls

Input	Action
Click a Store button, or keys 1 to 7	pick a tower to build
Click a free tile	build the picked tower
Click a tower	select it and see its stats
U / S	upgrade / sell the selected tower
Esc	deselect
Space	start or pause
W	switch on or off "next wave starts as soon as the last enemy is out"
R	restart
[ and ]	smaller / bigger tiles (restarts the game)
P	switch particle effects off or on (helps on slow computers)
H	show enemy health bars
V	mute the sound
X / M	export the map as text / import a map from text

A few things worth knowing

Shape the path. Enemies take the shortest way, so a tower is also a wall. A zig-zag in front of your guns is worth more than another tower at the end.

Slow them first. Slow towers make everything easier; put them where the path doubles back and let the damage towers do the work.

Don't sell too early. Selling returns only part of what you paid, so upgrade a good position instead of moving a tower around.

Medics first. They heal the enemies around them; the sniper is good at picking them out.

Credits and licence

Seven Towers was written by Amelia Clarke (selenebun) in 2020 with p5.js, released under the MIT licence, and its original name was just Tower Defense. This version is renamed to avoid confusion with other games. It uses p5.js 0.5.16 (LGPL-2.1, the Processing Foundation and contributors), served unchanged with its source code hosted next to the game, p5.sound 0.3.7 (MIT) and lz-string 1.4.4 (WTFPL). The font is Source Code Pro (Adobe, SIL Open Font License 1.1). The sounds are credited by the author: the missile launch is by Mike Koenig, the pop by Mark DiAngelo and the mortar blast by snottyboy, all from SoundBible under CC BY 3.0, and the sniper shot is by Kibblesbob, in the public domain. Changes made for this site: the new name, the link to an external map editor and three sound effects without a licence were removed (the rocket and tesla towers are quiet now). The licence texts and the unmodified source are linked from this page.