Decent TD: Real-Time Co-op Tower Defense You Send to Your Group Chat

Most tower-defense games treat multiplayer as an afterthought — you take turns, or you queue with strangers. Decent TD starts from the opposite premise: real-time cooperative defense with the friends you already have. No install, no accounts, no matchmaking. Share a link, drop into a room, and hold the line together.

The tagline says it best: "the tower defense game you send to your group chat."

What it is

Two to four players share a single 40×40 board and defend a central base against ten escalating waves. Everyone acts simultaneously — one player walls off a chokepoint while another stacks damage behind it and a third watches the gold. It is browser-based and session-based by design: each match is self-contained, satisfying in 15–30 minutes, with no grind and no pay-to-win.

You start with 800 gold, 20 lives, and an empty grid strewn with terrain. The build palette runs from a humble Wall (10g) up through Slow, Basic, Support, Splash, Sniper, and Laser towers. Because walls reshape the enemy path, the map is as much a puzzle as a shooting gallery — box the horde into a serpentine maze and let your towers chew through it.

Holding the line

Place your defenses during the prep window, then hit Send Next Wave when the team is ready. Enemies stream in from the edges and pathfind toward the base; your job is to make that walk as lethal as possible.

The whole scene is rendered in Three.js — low-poly towers, procedural terrain, and a live minimap — with Tone.js driving procedural sound. Real-time state is synchronized over WebSockets so every player sees the same board tick-for-tick.

Under the hood

• Frontend: Nuxt 4 + Vue 3, Pinia for state, Bootstrap 5 (dark)
• 3D: Three.js; Audio: Tone.js
• Realtime: WebSockets on Nitro
• Backend: Nitro server, PostgreSQL + Drizzle ORM
• Auth: guest-by-default, with Google / GitHub / Discord OAuth to save progress

Where it stands

Decent TD is in alpha — 5 tower types, 5 enemy varieties, solo and co-op both playable, roadmap ~81% complete. Guest play works today at td.exesiv.dev; OAuth-backed profiles and additional maps are next.

Grab three friends and go defend something.