Quick summary
THORNHOLD is a tower defense game set on a floating isle, running in a browser tab. One long road switches back across it, past fourteen build pads, to the keep, and fifteen named waves walk them — husks, fast skitters, armoured juggernauts, wisps that fly over the cannon fire — until the Gate Breaker brings the first stone Colossus and the last wave brings two. You hold the line with four towers, each upgraded through three tiers: the Archer Spire for fast single shots, the Cannon Bastion for slow splash, the Arcane Obelisk whose bolts pierce and finally chain, and the Frost Totem that slows whatever it touches. Gold comes from kills and from calling a wave early; twenty lives is all the keep has.
Who this template is for
THORNHOLD is a 3D tower defense game that runs in a browser tab: a floating isle, one road to the keep, and fifteen waves to break. It is for people who want a complete, balanced strategy loop on the web, not a rotating diorama.
- Studios and agencies who want a genuinely playable set piece in the portfolio — a full campaign from the first scouts to the last boss, not a looping demo
- Developers studying how a tower defense fits together — pathing, targeting, splash and chain damage, slows, wave scheduling and an economy — in plain ES modules on Three.js
- Brands who want a branded level or a themed set of towers that opens from a link, with nothing to install and nothing to license
What problem this template solves
Most “browser game” offerings are either heavy engine exports or toy demos that fall apart the moment you look under the hood. This build is neither.
- Engine exports ship megabytes of runtime before the first frame ever draws
- Toy demos skip the hard parts — real collision, game states, difficulty curves and persistence
- Builders who want to learn from a finished game almost never get to see the instructions that produced it
What you get with this template
You get a complete tower defense: a sculpted floating isle with one long road and fourteen build pads, four towers with three upgrade tiers each, five enemy types, fifteen named waves with two boss fights, and a full HUD.
- Four towers that play differently — fast archer shots that reach the air, slow cannon splash that cannot, arcane bolts that pierce and chain at their top tier, and a frost totem that slows the line — each upgraded through three tiers or sold back for part of its cost
- Fifteen named waves of husks, skitters, armoured juggernauts and flying wisps, a stone Colossus on wave ten and two of them on wave fifteen, with an early-call bonus that pays gold for every second you skip
- A broadcast-style HUD: gold, lives and the wave counter, the next wave’s name and size, the Hold’s health bar, a boss bar, a build ring on every pad and a stat card for every tower
Page sections overview
| Section | Purpose |
|---|---|
| A Difficulty Curve That Holds | Waves scale so a lazy defence loses and a planned one wins with lives to spare |
| Four Towers, Four Jobs | Single target, splash, pierce-and-chain and slow, each with a reason to exist |
| A Boss You Can Read | The Colossus is built, lit and shaded to read as stone at a glance |
| Art Tuned Blind | Every look change shipped only after winning a blind side-by-side |
| Runs Everywhere It Can | 60 fps on high-density screens, phones in landscape, a keyboard for everything |
Design & branding system
The art direction is a faceted storybook isle in full sun: a lit sand road, a meadow under it, and towers you can tell apart from across the map.
- Every model is built in code — the isle, the trees, the towers and the creatures — and every sound is synthesised in WebAudio, so the build ships with no image or audio files at all
- A custom lighting pass: a warm sun, cool shadows with a tight penumbra, bloom on the magic and FXAA on the edges, graded so the road is the lightest ground in the frame
- Effects designed to read at a glance — the arcane bolt as a discharge, the cannon shell in flight, kill captions and damage numbers that fan off the health bars instead of stacking
Mobile & speed optimization
The game targets desktop first — keyboard and mouse are the primary controls — while staying light enough to load instantly anywhere.
- No engine runtime and no asset downloads, so the whole game arrives in a handful of requests
- A capped frame delta keeps the simulation stable even when the browser tab stutters or loses focus
- The page stays lean: no frameworks, no trackers, nothing between the visitor and the game loop
How this template helps you convert
A playable game holds attention longer than any showreel. The page around it is structured to turn that attention into a next step.
- Visitors play immediately — no signup, download or install stands between them and the first round
- The finished build is fully inspectable, which turns curious players into builders who want the prompt behind it
- The one-time prompt unlock offers a concrete, low-friction next step while the session is still hot
Other information about this template
THORNHOLD is built to be played, not just watched. A few notes before you build on it.
- Best with a mouse: click a glowing pad to build, drag to orbit the isle and scroll to zoom. Phones and tablets play in landscape
- A full campaign is fifteen waves; nothing is saved between visits except the mute setting
- Everything ships as static files — ES modules, a vendored Three.js, no bundler, no build step, no server
- All of it is original: an invented isle, towers and creatures, art built in code, and nothing licensed from any other game
How it works
ES modules on a vendored Three.js — no engine, no bundler, no build step, and no binary assets at all: the isle, the towers, the creatures and the sky are modelled and painted in code, and every sound is synthesised in WebAudio. A custom lighting and post pass (bloom, FXAA and a hand-tuned grade) carries the faceted look, and the renderer scales its own resolution to hold 60 fps on high-density screens. The art was tuned round by round against blind side-by-side judging of captured frames, and the screenshots on this page come out of the same build.
Screenshots
Captured from the live build — the title screen and real play, level by level.
