v0.1.0

Tower Storm is a Multiplayer Tower Defense game development kit. Making it easy to create your own TD Game or just Maps / Towers / Minions / Gameplay / Abilities that you can play with friends, with little to no programming required.

It's inspired by the TD maps in Warcraft 3 / Starcraft with their amazing depth and variety. But those games are old, not cross platform, hard to modify, and take a while to setup and get running. So Tower Storm aims to solve those issues and bring more creativity and fun back to the genre.

Tower Storm is completely browser based and making your own modifications is as simple as changing some lines in a JSON file. Then to play your mod with friends just run the game and send them a link.

If you just want to check the game out you can play it at http://game.towerstorm.com

You can either clone this project on Cloud9 or clone these files to a server or your computer and run from there.

• nodejs >= v4
• npm >= v2

• ./init.sh - This sets up the RethinkDB database, currently Debian/Ubuntu only.
• NODE_ENV=development npm install
• npm install --global gulp-cli@1.3 webpack@2.4
• gulp dist
• webpack
• npm start

• Make your application public by click on Share in the top right and ticking the public box beside application. This must be done so bots can connect correctly.
• Click Preview -> Preview running application from the top navigation bar

• Add the line 127.0.0.1 ts.devel to your /etc/hosts file.
• Go to ts.devel:8080 in your browser.

You'll need to do the following steps to setup a production server for towerstorm (commands work for Ubuntu, other OS's may be different). This is pretty similar to development above because this doesn't have a proper build process yet.

• Switch to your root acount - sudo -i
• Install git - apt-get install git
• Create a towerstorm user - useradd -m towerstorm
• Add towerstorm user to syslog group so they can write to /var/log - usermod -a -G syslog towerstorm
• Setup environment variables mentioned in section below in the file /etc/environment
• Make port 80 forward to port 8080 - sudo iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 8080
• Add the above line to your /etc/rc.local file to make it apply on system boot
• Switch to the towerstorm user - su - towerstorm
• Install node v4.x and npm v2 (I recommend using nvm)
• Git clone Towerstorm - git clone https://github.com/towerstorm/game.git
• cd game
• ./init.sh
• npm install
• npm install --global gulp-cli webpack
• gulp dist
• webpack
• npm run prod

Logs will be written to /var/log/towerstorm.log

Yes this is super hacky.

• sudo pkill node
• npm run prod

These are all optional

• HOSTNAME - The hostname or url of your server, defaults to ts.devel if it's not set which is only useful for development.
• COOKIE_SECRET - Secret key used for encrypting login cookies
• DD_API_KEY - For sending your server metrics to Datadog
• DD_APP_KEY - For sending your server metrics to Datadog

If you just want to modify the gameplay or create your own minions/towers/maps etc you only need to pay attention to 2 folders:

• /config - This folder contains JSON files describing things in the game world. You'll notice there are subfolders of minions, towers and maps, you can put new creations in there and they'll automatically be loaded by the game.
• /frontend/assets - This is where graphics go for minions/towers/maps.

All of the minion/tower/bullet config is stored in the ./config folder. When you modify these files you only need to refresh the page to see them in action.

When modifying any code in the /game folder you need to run webpack to recompile it:

webpack

When modifying any code in the /frontend folder you need to run gulp to rebuild it:

# To build CoffeeScript changes:
gulp frontend  

# To build Less changes:
gulp styles

When modifying code in /botmanager, /database, /gameserver, /logger or /lobby you need to restart the nodejs server to reload it (press ctrl + c to kill then run npm start again)

0.1.0 - First release

While Tower Storm is in alpha (before 1.0 release) a minor release (0.1.3 -> 0.2) signifies a breaking change and your mods may stop working, a patch release (0.1.1 -> 0.1.2) is a backwards compatible release.

If you're running on Cloud9 make sure you've made your application public via clicking on Share in the top right and ticking the box beside Application. This needs to be done because bots currently use the public app to authenticate themselves.

I started on Tower Storm back in 2013 because I wanted a Tower Defense game that was:

1. Multiplayer
2. Easy to play, with no software required
3. More in depth than anything out there.

This turned out to be a far bigger project than I had anticipated and after 3 years of part time development I gave up on the project.

But of course that desire for an in depth multiplayer tower defense game never went away and still no company has made it happen. So I decided to take the source code for Tower Storm, clean it up and open source it as basically a Tower Defense dev kit that anyone can use to build their own awesome TD games.

This way everyone can create and play the game they always wanted and I don't have to build this all by myself.

Most of the UI assets in Tower Storm were purchased, and these licenses are for a single closed source product only, so I had to change all the UI prior to open sourcing. I want to improve it over time, but wanted to get this game out there first.

As above most of the sound / music in Tower Storm was purchased and so couldn't be open sourced. I'd like to re-implement SFX and music in the future.

When I first started building the frontend in 2013 Angular 1 was the new hotness. I'd like to refactor it to use React but that's a big process and this works for now.

• In depth documentation on modding
• Move all game information out of config and into /mods folder so that modifications are namespaced and easily distributable
• Re-organize tests and get them all working again
• Convert code from coffeescript to es6
• Add user accounts / friends back in (the backend code is there, just need frontend recreated)