Warrenhold

About Warrenhold

The idea. Most tower defense games hand you the next wave. Warrenhold makes you choose it. You are the goblin keeper of a hoard at the bottom of a tunnel, and every round you pick which of three doors the raiders break in through: the easy one that pays little, the iron gate that pays well but comes with a curse, or the mossy door that is usually a gift. The game began as my design for the previous Meta Horizon Creator Competition: Game Design, where it won Most Innovative; this prototype is that design cut down to one tunnel and one sitting, and made playable.

How it was built. Prompt by prompt with Claude, in small passes: the core loop first, then progression, then feedback, then the onboarding. Everything is plain HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript in a single index.html, with no libraries and nothing loaded from the internet. The art and the title logo were made with Adobe Firefly, cut into sprite sheets by scripts; the sound effects are synthesized in Web Audio, and the dungeon ambience is a Firefly recording. A headless browser played every build hundreds of times so balance changes could be measured rather than guessed.

What I learned. Play the build after every prompt. "Done" is a hypothesis until a stranger can pick the game up with nobody explaining it, which is why the goblin keeper teaches the game himself, one pointing hand at a time.

Challenges. Portrait is a narrow stage for a tower defense: the perspective tunnel, the evolve ring and the tray all took several attempts before they read at a glance on a phone. Difficulty was the other fight: getting eight gates to escalate without a wall in the middle meant measuring every wave, and the last changes were made on the final day after playing it on a real phone.