Dust Lane

I just wanted a pure focused Tower Defense experience that feels native on a phone, the idea was a vertical solar array under constant dust and debris assault something with clear placement decisions rising pressure and a short complete session.

Dust Lane is a single player vertical Tower Defense prototype Enemies move down a lane toward your core, you place three distinct solar-powered towers (Bolt, Slow, and Laser) using scrap earned during waves Survive six escalating waves to win or lose when the core is destroyed The whole session is designed for portrait mobile play.

The prototype was built entirely with AI tools (primarily Grok) under strict constraints from day one:

• Single-player, fixed portrait only
• All game code in one readable, unminified index.html
• Three.js loaded locally from a - vendor/folder
• Zero external network requests

We followed a phased approach: foundation - core loop (scrap + waves + win/lose) - three distinct tower roles - mobile touch polish and Web Audio feedback.

Keeping the game fun while staying tightly focused was the hardest part. It was easy to want extra features, but the competition rewards a complete, working core experience over adding more systems. Making the touch controls and tower buttons feel good on a phone, and giving clear feedback without heavy effects, also took several rounds of tweaks.

• I am really proud of how I made a fully playable, rules-compliant prototype that fits the competition constraints exactly
• A clean pure Tower Defense loop with meaningful placement decisions
• Three towers that actually feel different in role
• Everything packaged correctly: single HTML file, local libraries, portrait-only, offline

I learned that constraints force better design, a tight complete core loop with clear decisions is more valuable than extra features and AI tools work extremely well when the design is locked first and every phase ends in something playable.

If selected the next step is rebuilding and expanding the prototype on Meta’s Early Access creation tools adding more tower synergies, environmental variety, and short campaign structure while keeping the vertical solar-dust fantasy and readable decision-making intact.

Built With

• html5
• javascript
• three.js