Pest Control TD

Inspiration

Most tower defense games stick to predictable high-fantasy castles or gritty sci-fi starbases. We wanted to build something with personality, kinetic slapstick, and Saturday morning cartoon nostalgia. Inspired by the tactile depth of Kingdom Rush and the physical comedy of vintage Sunday comics and classic Looney Tunes, Pest Control TD casts players as an overzealous suburban park groundskeeper. When a municipal fertilizer accident awakens giant mutant garden insects, routine bug spraying turns into an escalating battle to defend the town's Annual Mayoral Picnic spread.

What It Does

Built from the ground up for one-handed mobile portrait play, Pest Control TD delivers a complete strategy campaign:

• 5-Stage Progressive Campaign: Journey along the Park Trail Overworld Map through The Park Entrance, The Stagnant Duck Pond, The Overgrown Compost Heap, The Wildflower Botanical Gardens, and the Grand Picnic Pavilion.
• Tactical Arsenal: Deploy and upgrade 5 oversized household contraptions across 3 visual and functional tiers:
  • Spring Flyswatters: Rapid melee crushing with anti-air swat bonuses.
  • Salt Sentry Turrets: High-speed pneumatic rock-salt gatlings.
  • Aerosol Spray Cans: Lingering toxic cone AoE chemical mist.
  • Honey Glue Traps: Viscous road hazards that slow swarms and strip armor.
  • High-Voltage Bug Zappers: Multi-target chain-lightning reactors.
• Intelligent Swarm Threats: Fight ground worker ants, evasive airborne mosquitoes, heavily armored rhinoceros beetles, high-altitude yellowjacket wasps, and a multi-phase Queen Bug boss.
• Strategic Systems: Protect 10 delicate picnic treats to earn 3-star ratings, allocate bio-mutagen points across a 4-branch permanent armory tech tree, purchase emergency ACME field supplies, and toggle battle speed between 1X, 2X, and 3X.

How We Built It

The entire project was developed using an AI-native prompting methodology, logged chronologically across 27 build sessions:

• 3D Engine: Built in unminified HTML5 and Three.js. Rather than downloading heavy external asset packs, every tower, bug, and particle system is generated procedurally with math, custom geometries, and animation tweens.
• Sunday Comic Pop-Art Aesthetics: Resolution-independent inline vector SVG art featuring comic halftone Ben-Day dots, action bursts, and drop-shadow typography.
• Real-Time Web Audio Synthesizer: An in-engine Web Audio API synthesizer generates all sound effects and procedural 126 BPM ragtime walking-bass background music on the fly with zero disk overhead (0 KB audio files).

Challenges We Ran Into

• Zero-Network Self-Containment: Competition rules strictly disqualify builds that hit CDNs or external URLs. We ensured 100% offline autonomy by bundling Three.js locally in vendor/ and synthesizing all graphics and audio in real time.
• Extreme Optimization: While the jam allows up to 35 MB, our entire self-contained playable prototype compresses to just 0.21 MB (217 KB), loading instantaneously on any mobile browser.
• Mobile Portrait Ergonomics: Fine-tuned touch event bubbling and gesture guards to eliminate accidental menu dismissal and provide responsive one-tap radial tower selection.

Accomplishments We're Proud Of

• Crafting a cohesive cartoon universe where dialogue, audio squelches, and visual effects reinforce the slapstick picnic theme.
• Balancing an intricate armor, poison, anti-air, and chain-damage combat system that rewards tactical experimentation.
• Achieving a 100% clean automated test run with zero external network leaks, zero console warnings, and rock-solid 60 FPS performance.

What's Next for Pest Control TD

• Community Park Trail Editor: A grid-and-spline level creator letting players place sprinklers, ant mounds, and hazards to share custom community gauntlets.
• Asynchronous Co-Op Picnics: Collaborative defense modes where friends defend a shared picnic feast against endless community swarm waves.
• Groundskeeper Customization: Unlockable exterminator vans, custom comic visual skins, and seasonal park weather events.

Built With

• antigravity
• claude
• css3
• google-gemini
• html5
• javascript
• playwright
• svg
• three.js
• web-audio-api