-1 Hero

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  Minus one hero gameplay

Inspiration

Every tower defense game asks you to be the hero; we wanted the other side of the door. You are the dungeon's last Guardian, and every hero you stop is one fewer in the world, hence the name.

What it does

A single-player, portrait, twelve-night lane defence: Warriors, lane-hopping Rogues and healing Priests come down three lanes toward your treasure, and your finger is the Guardian, the one tower that moves. Between nights you buy upgrades for the Guardian, the spikes trench and the roadside Towers; during a night you pay to light them, and coin piles rolling down a lane are a small risk-and-reward decision every few seconds.

How we built it

Three.js draws the world and a DOM layer draws the pixel HUD, but the game itself is a pure, seeded, fixed-step JavaScript simulation that runs under Node with no browser. That let us balance with headless bots playing the full game hundreds of times per sweep, and everything ships as one readable HTML file with procedural textures, small glTF models and WebAudio sound, under a megabyte and with no network.

Challenges we ran into

Most of the fourteen playtest patches came from a phone in hand: hint text over the Towers, invisible far heroes, buttons too small and then too big. The hardest bugs were a hit flash that swapped texture maps at runtime and turned heroes white, and a balance collapse when the trench became lightable mid-night and the bots bankrupted themselves lighting it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A deterministic sim that turned balancing from opinion into measured win rates and loss histograms. A control scheme with one rule, the finger is the Guardian, and a codebase that stayed honest under fast iteration with forty-plus tests, browser checks that measure frame time, and a build log that lets any session pick up where the last one stopped.

What we learned

Put the whole game in a pure module and tests, bots and replays become cheap. A round-end rule has two halves: never start a reward that cannot finish, and let the player act on one that has started. And where a reward first appears matters more than how often it appears.

What's next for -1 Hero

The ideas held back to keep the prototype tight: more hero behaviours, a late-game pressure pass, and richer sound.

Built With

• javascript
• markdown
• three.js