Desktop Tower Defense

In May 2009, a commercial Nintendo DS version became available.

• Title — Desktop Tower Defense • Developer — Paul Preece • Designer — Paul Preece • Released — March 3, 2007 • Genre — Tower defense • Modes — Single-player, multiplayer • Platforms — Adobe Flash

Desktop Tower Defense is played on a map resembling an office desktop. The player must stop a set number of enemies, known in the genre as "creeps", from reaching a set point on the playing field. This is accomplished by building and upgrading towers that shoot at, damage and kill the enemy creeps before they are able to reach their objective. Unlike many other tower defense games, the path of the creeps themselves is not set; instead, the towers built determine the path of the creeps, who take the shortest path they can find to the exit. The game does not allow the player to make an exit completely inaccessible, but key strategies revolve around guiding creeps into lengthy, meandering corridors. The creeps come in waves at set intervals. Each wave of creeps has different characteristics, such as immunity to certain towers, extra resistance to certain towers, and the abilities to spawn new creeps, move faster than normal, or fly over the towers instead of following the maze. For each wave, the game rotates among the types of creeps. Several times during gameplay, boss waves will appear. These waves consists of just one or two large creeps each, that take many hits to defeat. The player begins with a set number of lives, and loses one for each creep that survives to reach its goal (the edge of the grid opposite its entry-point, on most courses). The game will end early in defeat if the player's lives reach zero, and it provides no way to regenerate lost lives. The game can be played in three difficulty levels: easy, medium, and hard. In addition, there are several challenge modes available for those seeking more from the game. Challenges range from "The 100", where the player must defeat 100 levels of successively difficult creeps, to "3K Fixed", where the player has to build a fixed set of towers (including the upgrades) with just 3000 gold. There are also various fun modes different in gameplay than the other, harder ones. The voice when a player is asked to enter a score for the high score table is sampled from Ivor the Engine.

Paul Preece got the inspiration for Desktop Tower Defense in 2006. He noticed a lack of tower defense games that allowed proper "mazing" (controlling movement of enemy forces by placing towers in their path). Preece did not immediately start work on Desktop Tower Defense because he considered Flash to be too difficult to learn. It was only after an acquaintance created Flash Element Tower Defense that Paul started work on the game. Starting from the "Autumn Tower Defense" map created for the real-time strategy game Warcraft III, Paul Preece created a simple tower defense game that could be played using only a browser. Because of his lack of skill with computer graphics, he named the game's site HandDrawnGames.com Originally, the game was promoted through the web service StumbleUpon, getting further boosts from popular bloggers such as Michael Arrington. It eventually found its way onto several Flash game sites such as Kongregate. The game's popularity was further increased by exposure on the internet pop-culture websites Digg and I-am-bored.com. It is now available on MySpace Games, and as part of the MindJolt collection on Facebook. In December 2020, Adobe ended support for the Flash Player plugin, which prevented the original version of the game from running in standard web browsers. To maintain playability, the game was updated to HTML5, allowing it to function on modern browsers and mobile devices. This version is currently hosted on web gaming platforms such as CrazyGames.

In early 2010, a sequel, Desktop Defender, was made available on Facebook as an application.