YouTD

YouTD is a remake of the Warcraft III custom map by geX and the YouTD community.

Research an element, spend the roll, build whatever comes out. A run is what you do with the hand you're dealt: 235 tower families across seven elements, most of them built around one specific stat interaction, and a wave list that tells you exactly what's coming so you can see the problem four waves before it arrives.

The roll is the game

Gold buys towers. Datacores buy element research, and your element levels decide what the roll can even give you. Push one element deep and you start seeing its rare and unique towers.

Every tower belongs to a family that upgrades through tiers, so the Tiny Shrub you built in wave 2 is still relevant at wave 60.. if you fed it.

Towers that actually do something

These aren't stat blocks with a damage number. Towers carry real behaviours:  bounce attacks, chain lightning, auras that buff their neighbours, autocasts, on-hit procs, buffs that stack in groups. Crit and multicrit compose rather than replace each other. Items and oils slot into towers to push a build somewhere specific.

The tower panel shows you the whole chain: base damage, every modifier applied to it, and what it works out to. If a build is doing something you didn't expect, you can read why.

Read the wave, not the wiki

Each wave announces its armour type, what it's weak to, and any special abilities before it spawns. Boss waves are flagged well in advance. Losing lives is usually the result of ignoring a tag you could see, which is the kind of loss you can learn from.

Play it with people

Up to eight players. Everyone runs their own economy, their own research and their own wave, so nobody is waiting on anybody. What you share is ground.

Solo is a full game too, and there are AI opponents if you want the pressure without the coordination.

Where it's at

Work in progress, and honest about it. The simulation is complete and heavily tested. The whole game logic is a separate deterministic layer with a few thousand tests behind it,  but the presentation is still catching up in places, multiplayer over the browser is the newest part and the least proven, and balance beyond the early waves needs real players more than it needs me.

Runs in the browser

Needs WebGL2, which any current desktop browser has. Around 15 MB to the main menu.

Credits

Based on YouTD by geX and the YouTD community, originally hosted at eeve.org. Balance data and the reference implementation come from YouTD2 by Praytic and Dmitry Degtyarev (Kvel2D), used under CC BY-NC 4.0. Fifty-odd community authors wrote the towers and items in this game and are credited individually in-game on the attribution screen.

Music is Cylinders and Stellar Catharsis by Chris Zabriskie, CC BY 4.0.