Packet Patrol

The problem

The best web games of the dial-up years let the limit of the medium become the rule of the game. Tower defence suited the mouse-driven web well, but a tower defence game set in a modem needed a reason to feel like one, not just a coat of beige paint.

The rule that solved it

The design started as a joke: towers that spend bandwidth. The line holds 10 units. A router or a firewall draws 2, a proxy 3, a scanner 4. Build past the limit and every tower fires slower, down to a fifth of full speed. So the most natural move in the genre, building more, becomes a trap. You can buy more line, and that choice becomes part of the plan.

The rivals are the pests everyone remembers from the period: pop-ups, spam, viruses and trojans crawling along the cable toward your modem, which has 20 health. Trojans carry armour that soaks up small hits, so the scanner, which pierces armour, earns its high bandwidth cost.

What we left out

What we left out was the loss you never saw coming. The note on the game says it was tuned until a careful player can almost always see a loss approaching. The pests are drawn small, so that a crowd of them stays readable on screen. A tower sold in its first four seconds refunds in full, which forgives a misplaced click.

Try this

Build towers until the line is just under its limit, then add one more and watch every tower slow at once. That single moment is the whole design. Then play a wave where you call it early with SEND WAVE: calling early pays up to 25 KB, and each cleared wave pays 10 plus 2 for every wave number, so speed is rewarded only if your defences can take it. A proxy’s splash suits crowds of spam.

The maker’s note

Towers that spend bandwidth were the joke that turned into the design: build too much and your own defenses slow down. The enemies are the pop-ups and chain letters everyone remembers, drawn small enough that a crowd of them stays readable. We tuned it until a careful player can almost always see the loss coming.

This is the note printed on the game’s own page. The Early Web Hall explains the idea it borrows, under three design ideas we borrowed.