Emberwatch

Shadows crawl a winding road toward your bonfire, and every coin you spend on a tower is a coin you can't spend on the next problem.

Date: 2026-11-11 Genre: tower defense Status: Playable build

Concept

You guard a bonfire at the end of a zigzag road. Each wave brings a different kind of trouble, so the layout that held wave 3 falls apart at wave 6. It plays like a short night shift: build, watch the line bend, patch the hole.

How to play

Keep the bonfire lit. Each shadow that reaches it costs 1 to 5 lives out of 20, and at zero the run ends. Pick a tower with the bottom buttons (or keys 1-4) and tap a free tile to build. Tap a built tower to select it, then Upgrade (U) or Sell (X). Space or the Send wave button calls the next wave early. P pauses, R restarts. On touch, everything is a tap.

Core mechanics

• Four towers with different jobs. Spark is cheap and fast but its small hits bounce off armor. Cannon splashes a cluster but can't touch flyers. Frost slows everything in range. Sniper reaches far and picks the toughest target.
• Overcharge. Every tower has a ring that fills over 9 seconds. Tapping a tower with a full ring gives it 2.5x fire rate for 3 seconds. Spend it when a pack bunches up, not the moment it's ready.
• Early calls. The next wave comes on an 18 second clock, and sending it sooner pays 2 coins per second left on that clock. An empty field also speeds the clock up.
• Five enemy kinds: imps, fast runners, armored brutes, flying wisps, and splitters that burst into three imps. A boss shows up every fifth wave.
• Upgrades go to level 3 and sell for 70% of what you put in, so a wrong guess can be undone at a loss.

Progression & scoring

A new enemy kind arrives at waves 2 (runners), 4 (brutes), 6 (wisps) and 8 (splitters), and each debut wave leans on the new kind. Enemy health grows about 10% per wave plus a small quadratic term, so wave 10 enemies carry roughly 2.2x the wave 1 health. Starting coins are 130, and kills pay 4 to 80 coins, rising 3% per wave. Score is 10 points per coin earned from kills, plus 5 points per early-call bonus coin. The best score is saved in the browser.

Look & feel

Dark indigo board with a warm, dusty road, and a flickering ember-orange bonfire as the only bright spot. Towers are gold, orange, teal and white shapes; enemies are violet and pink. Everything is drawn on a canvas with no image files. Sound is synthesized with WebAudio: a different blip for each tower, a low thud for leaks, and a two-note chime on build. Screen shake on leaks, white hit flashes, spark bursts and expanding rings on blasts and overcharges.

What makes it fun

• The overcharge ring makes you look at the whole board. Firing it early wastes a 9 second wait, and holding it too long means a brute walks past.
• Sending a wave early is a real bet: 30 coins now against enemies that overlap your defenses before they've cleared.
• Armor makes a choice out of what to buy. Sparks are great until the first brute shrugs off 6-damage hits, and then you have to pay for a Sniper.
• Flyers cut straight across the board and ignore the road, so the Cannon cluster you built around the corner covers nothing.