Undefended

About the game

Undefended is a tower defence game in which the tower builder is also a character you steer around the map. You are a small robot on a set of grey platforms floating in space. A line of red cubes crawls along a path across the platforms toward the end of the map, and every cube that gets there costs you one of your three hearts.

Nothing in the arena starts out armed. Two pads on your platform produce tower kits and ammo over time, and carrying them is your job: pick up a tower kit, walk to a tile next to the path and, facing it, put the kit down, and a laser tower grows there. A tower holds twenty shots; once it runs dry it stops, and you have to bring it a new load of ammo from the pad. Some of the platforms are on the move, sliding between the islands like a ferry. If you fall off an edge you are put back on the last tile you stood on, and whatever you were carrying is lost.

There are ten waves, alternating between small groups of tough cubes and bigger groups of weaker ones, and the cubes get tougher as the game goes on. There are a few seconds before the first wave and the waves are spaced out, which is the time you have to place and refill towers. The main menu lets you pick one of three difficulties, which add one or two hit points to every enemy, and set the volume of the sound effects and the music. When the last cube is gone you win; when the hearts run out you get a game-over screen and a button to play again.

It was made by Rob Parrett for Bevy Jam #3 and has been updated since, in Rust with the Bevy engine, with its own voxel-style models, sounds and music.

Playing it here

The game runs in the page and is played with the keyboard. Click Click to play; the first start loads about 9 MB of game code and then the menu appears. Choose the difficulty and volume with the mouse or the keyboard, and press Play. A gamepad also works. The game keeps only your settings (volume and difficulty), in the browser's local storage.

Controls

Tips

Feed the towers, not just the map. A tower with no ammo does nothing, so keep an eye on the little ammo counter above each one and bring a fresh load before it hits zero.

Mind the edges. Falling off a platform costs you the item you are holding. Jump onto a moving platform only when it is lined up with where you stand.

Build early. The first wave is small and slow. Use the pause before it to get at least one or two towers up along the longest straight part of the path.

Credits and licence

Undefended was made by Rob Parrett (rparrett on GitHub, euclidean-whale on itch.io). The code and the assets are released, at your option, under the MIT License or the Apache License 2.0; the author writes that all assets except the fonts are his own creations. The fonts are Orbitron (The Orbitron Project Authors) and PromptFont (Yukari Hafner and Severin Meyer), both under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The texts of the licences, and of the Rust libraries compiled into the game, are linked from this page together with the source and the build script.

FAQ

The keys do not work. Click on the game once so that the page has the keyboard focus. The Space bar and R are the only buttons you need besides the movement keys.

I fell off the platform and lost my tower kit. That is how the game works: you are put back on the last tile you stood on, and whatever you carried is gone. The pad makes more.

Does it save my progress? No. A run takes a few minutes. Only the difficulty and the volume are remembered.

Can I play with a gamepad? Yes. The left stick moves, the bottom face button jumps and the left face button picks up, builds and refills.