Desktop Tower Defense Creates Startup
Duncan Riley
35 comments »
Paul Preece, the designer of the wildly addictive Desktop Tower Defense has quit his day job and is teaming up with David Litsky; the designer of FlashElementTD to develop online games full time.
Desktop Tower Defense currently ranks at just over 6,000 on Alexa. According to a report at Gigaom the game had 4 million unique visitors on 20 million page views in April.
Michael Arrington has written previously about the addictive nature of the simple yet compelling game. It has spurred competitions, hacks and a large loyal following.
Preece and Litsky have set up a blog to document the new company. At the time of writing the front page included a sneak peak at the new towers to be included in the next version of Desktop Tower Defense.
(via Kottke)
what was he doing full time before he made this move?
Not sure, he just refers to quitting his “day job” and that he’s now writing games for a living so at a guess something not in the gaming industry
Good on him! This is one of those stories where I can feel really supportive for the protagonist.. he made something cool, put it out there, and now he’s reaping the rewards. It’s ridiculously hard to get hits in gaming, so it’ll be interesting to track his progress and their blog is going to become a must-read for those interested in the field.
dang i read somewhere what he did before but can’t recall. i remember something about this being more a fluke and taking sometime to catch on.
Nooooo!!
Goddamnit, I have work to do. If this guy is allowed to keep making games, we’re all screwed.
P.S.: I finally won “Spawns Only” with a perfect 20.
He was a VB programmer.
good for them! Best of luck!
good page!!!
It’s David Scott, not Litsky
i’m addicted to this game!
I love this game. So much in fact that I donated money as a thank you for the game. I wish him luck on his adventure!
So when the iPhone comes out, does this mean I can play DTD anywhere?! Or are there already a host of other smartphones that allow this?
He got lucky by reusing a very old concept (Warcraft anyone?), seems like a risky move to make.
@Sam
Everyone always says that this is a direct rip of Warcraft TD. I used to play Warcraft3 a bunch back in the day, and played a few TDs with friends. They bored the hell out of me. And even today, the other online Flash-TD games are pretty boring, in my opinion. Some might have better graphics, but they have no flow.
Preece’s game, on the other hand, got me immediately hooked, and clearly many others as well. Whether through skill or luck, he achieved what every game designer strives for: Great Gameplay. This is actually extremely elusive.
So others have built games using the same concept, but Preece nailed it just right. This is the same pattern you find in all successful products or companies.
BTW, for all the other DesktopTD players out there: doesn’t this game remind you of Tetris? It kinds hypnotizes you while playing, and if you go too long or play right before going to sleep, your brain will keep on playing all night.
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory it too good.
#12: I hope that Adobe finds a way to support Flash in mobile phone browsers~!
#14: Yeah, this game keeps playing all night - possible other strategies, how will the creeps behave if I stick a tower here 1st then there 2nd.
Please god, someone stop this man. My productivity can’t take much more of his games!
Gal
these games remind me of the greatness of NES, the games were so simple yet challenging that you would sit there trying and trying to get one bit further than you were an hour ago… i love it
I think KDICE is a much superior game. The multiplayer part makes it far superior.
I have had memorable games in Kdice and have never seen anything equal.
DTD looks more sophisticated but at the end it is just a single player and gets boring pretty fast
That’s a great story. Just another good one for this great thing called the world wide web.
All we need is DTD on the Nintendo DS, with WiFi and Co-op modes and then the whole family can have no life as well…
We have an OK Cool score group for embarrassing each other in public - http://www.ok-cool.com/posts/r.....cool-group - It would be good if other blogs did the same so that we can have blog vs blog - lol…
i’m hooked. viva great game design!
Thank you for the credit, but I am not the designer of FlashElementTD.
David
VB Coder. That explains it.
My buddy and I were wondering how this talented of a dude could put up with the Flash programming environment to create such a kickass game.
It’s tough to go back (or over to the darkside) of Flash when you’re used to working in such elegant frameworks as RoR, OOP php, etc.
A multyplayer version is coming out soon, in the version after this. My highscore is 8120!!
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