tower-defense

tower-defense is a skill for Claude Code from gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills. It costs 46 tokens per session (1,629 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A game-building guide for tower-defense games, where players place towers that automatically attack enemies moving along paths. It covers enemy waves, targeting, upgrades, currency, and lives.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it for tower-defense and wave-defense games. It helps design enemy waves, tower targeting priorities, upgrades, gold income, and the rules for enemies reaching the goal.
Why use it?
It helps connect pathing, attacks, rewards, and difficulty so waves are challenging without being impossible or trivial.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the genres plugin — 9 skills shipped together , and of gamedev

Good fit Use it for tower-defense and wave-defense games. It helps design enemy waves, tower targeting priorities, upgrades, gold income, and the rules for enemies reaching the goal.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills --skill tower-defense
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install genres, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 9 skills.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for tower-defense

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for tower-defense

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills/tower-defense.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 46 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,629 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 8 Aug 2026
  • Snyk pass 8 Aug 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00046 $0.01629
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00814
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00326
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00163

Measured 12d ago against content hash 27f35ea5defd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

tower-defense scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/genres/tower-defense/SKILL.md · 122 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 122 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Tower Defense

A playbook for tower defense — enemy pathing, wave spawning, tower targeting, and the economy that ties them together. This is a compositional skill: it orchestrates pathing, AI, and UI into a TD loop. It does not re-teach pathfinding; it defines the systems and the balance levers (DPS vs. HP vs. income) that decide whether a TD is tense or trivial.

When to use

  • Use when building a game where the player places towers that automatically attack waves of enemies following a path, spends earned currency to expand/upgrade, and loses if too many enemies leak through.
  • Use when designing wave composition/pacing, tower targeting priorities, or the gold economy.

When not to use: the player directly controls a shooter → fps-shooter. Free-form base building with needs → survival-crafting. For the pathfinding algorithm itself, use game-ai.

Core loop

Prepare (place/upgrade towers with current gold) → start the wave → enemies path toward the goal while towers auto-fire → earn gold from kills → survive the wave → repeat against a harder one. The tension is a planning puzzle: is my current DPS enough for what's coming, and can I afford the answer?

Must-have systems

  1. Enemy path — waypoint lanes, or grid + pathfinding for maze TD (refs).
  2. Wave spawner — timed, scripted sequences of enemy types with per-wave scaling.
  3. Towers — range, fire rate, damage, projectile/hitscan, splash; placement validity.
  4. Targeting — per-tower priority (first/last/closest/strongest/weakest) (refs).
  5. Economy — gold from kills + wave bonuses; tower/upgrade costs; sell refund.
  6. Lives / leak — enemies reaching the goal cost lives; 0 = game over.
  7. Wave/prep UI — lives, gold, next-wave preview, start-next-wave control.

Design knobs

Knob Effect Notes
Enemy HP growth/wave upgrade pressure Geometric ~1.1–1.2× (refs).
Income vs. HP curves difficulty Player should almost afford each wave.
Tower DPS / range / cost tower identity Cheap+wide vs. expensive+tall.
Targeting priority optimal placement Changes play more than raw stats.
Enemy variety counters one-build wins Fast / armored / flying / swarm / boss.
Leak penalty stakes Cost lives and lost bounty.
Upgrade vs. build economy strategy depth Diminishing upgrade returns.
Wave pacing tension curve Spike → breather → spike, not monotonic.

Read the full file on GitHub · 122 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 122 lines · 46 tokens per session scan A 27f35ea5defd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

tower-defense is a skill published in the GitHub repository gamedev-skills/awesome-gamedev-agent-skills (952 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 46 tokens to every session and 1,629 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.