tower-defense
Build a tower defense: enemies pathing along lanes, wave spawning, towers that auto-target and fire, an economy, and lives. Use for a tower-defense/wave-defense game, or balancing waves and economy.
npx skills add gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills --skill tower-defense --agent claude-code
Same command for any agent — swap --agent for codex, cursor, copilot.
Weekly change comes from our own snapshots, not the repository page — it measures attention, not adoption.
# Tower Defense A playbook for tower defense — enemy pathing, wave spawning, tower targeting, and the economy that ties them together. This is a **compositional** skill: it orchestrates pathing, AI, and UI into a TD loop. It does not re-teach pathfinding; it defines the systems and the balance levers (DPS vs. HP vs. income) that decide whether a TD is tense or trivial. ## When to use - Use when building a game where the player **places towers** that automatically attack **waves of enemies** following a path, spends earned currency to expand/upgrade, and loses if too many enemies leak through. - Use when designing wave composition/pacing, tower targeting priorities, or the gold economy. **When _not_ to use:** the player directly controls a shooter → `fps-shooter`. Free-form base building with needs → `survival-crafting`. For the pathfinding algorithm itself, use `game-ai`. ## Core loop **Prepare (place/upgrade towers with current gold) → start the wave → enemies path toward the goal while towers auto-fire → earn gold from kills → survive the wave → repeat against a harder one.** The tension is a planning puzzle: is my current DPS enough for what's coming, and can I afford the answer
- When to use
- Core loop
- Must-have systems
- Design knobs
- Patterns
- 1. Wave spawner (timed, data-driven)
- 2. Tower targeting (filter to range, then pick by priority)
- 3. "Can this lane hold?" sanity check (DPS vs. HP)
- Pitfalls / failure modes
- Composition (build it from these skills)
- References
What does the tower-defense skill do?
Build a tower defense: enemies pathing along lanes, wave spawning, towers that auto-target and fire, an economy, and lives. Use for a tower-defense/wave-defense game, or balancing waves and economy.
How do I install it?
Run `npx skills add gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills --skill tower-defense --agent claude-code` — it drops the skill into your project so the agent can pick it up. Swap the --agent value for codex, cursor or copilot if you use one of those.
Where does this skill come from?
From gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills, a repository with 406 stars. We read it straight from the repository tree rather than a submitted listing, so what you see here is what is actually published.
Is a popular skill a good skill?
Not necessarily. Stars measure attention, not adoption — a repository can trend for a week and be abandoned. That is why we show the weekly change from our own snapshots next to the total, instead of a single flattering number.