CreepTD

CreepTD is a Java-based multiplayer browser game of the tower defense respectively tower wars game genre initially created in 2008 under the name CreepSmash as a project of ten students at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (University of Applied Sciences) that has been remade from scratch in 2011/12 in a community effort.
CreepTD is available in English, German, Dutch and Finnish (February 2012) while servers are located in germany. The game is free to play, says not to require any personal information like an email address, does not contain ads currently and therefore depends to a high degree on donations and contributions by its community. It calls itself "The Mother of all TD games" referring to its early roots and the fact that its developers aim to combine a variety of common game modes in one game.
Gameplay
The game is played solo against the A.I. or with a maximum of four players in either competitive or cooperative game modes. Especially the variety of real multiplayer game modes differenciates the game from other tower defense browser games available.<ref name="NPCC" /> As is customary for tower defense games the player has to prevent a set of moving enemies (the creeps) from reaching the exit of their own game board. To do so a player needs to build towers alongside the static path throughout the game board that attack and finally kill the creeps. If the player does not manage to kill a creep, he loses a life. A special thing about the game is that, depending on the game mode, players are also required to send creeps to their opponents' game boards as known from the tower wars game genre. Sending creeps will cost a defined amount of credits and increase the income a player receives per round (one round lasts 15 seconds) by 10-7% depending on the creep's type and strength. This adds an important exponential factor to the way the game is played and essentially defines the concept of the game: Defend as cheap and clever as absolutely necessary to be able to send as much respectively farther advanced creeps as possible, at best sent in the most smart way depending on the opponents' defense pattern.
Game modes
There are seven game modes and about 100 community-created maps included in the game. Most of them are inspired by other popular tower defense maps and games such as a reworked version of the map "Wintermaul" that is commonly known under tower defense players from Warcraft 3, others are unique in CreepTD. Regarding the game developers CreepTD aims at providing and extending the most common game modes usually found in tower defense games in a single game.<ref name="DEV"/> Players also have the option to spectate other players' games with a maximum of 100 clients per game. Game modes available in CreepTD are:
All vs. All
The default game mode "All vs. All" is a pure implementation of tower wars. Players keep sending creeps to all the other players' game boards and build towers on their own board to prevent creeps from escaping. The winner is the last survivor, what logically means that all other players have left their 20 lives earlier. If a creep escapes, it is transfered to the initial game board again. Sometimes it is an option to let a creep pass through, but this will allow other players to append one or more strong creeps to the previously escaped one through smart timing.
Send to random
This also tower wars style game mode plays like "All vs. All" but with the player receiving a creep being randomly choosen. Because of its random factor, this mode is usually not played in tournaments but because of its slower pace usually played by beginners. If a creep escapes it is again randomly transfered to another player's (but the sender's) game board.
2vs2
The "2vs" game mode is an adaption of "All vs. All" with the exception that both the top players send creeps to both bottom players and vice versa. This mode highly depends on both players playing well because it becomes nearly impossible to win when the team mate is game over already. A team also has to figure out if it's better to use a similar or a totally different approach for attacking and defending.
2vs2 Coop
In CreepTD 1.0 the "2vs2 Coop" game mode has been initially released.<ref name="10AN" /> In this game mode two players share a common game board but both players have their own income to raise through sending creeps.
Survivor
The "Survivor" game mode is a pure tower defense mode that does not require a player to send creeps. Players are limited to defending against creeps sent by the A.I. using a set of random but weighted strategy patterns. The winner is the player who reached the highest income round. This game mode is quite similar to those known from most flash based tower defense browser games.
Survivor Coop
This game mode has also been released with the 1.0 update and is based on a common game board for all players as commonly known from Warcraft 3 tower defense. On "Wintermaul" like known from WC3 for example, creeps enter the board at six different starting points and all team mates have to figure out the optimal way to defend their lives against incoming creeps. Like in the "Survivor" game mode there is no possibility to actually win a game but it's all about the maximum round reached through team play. Maximum rounds are recorded in an all-time highscore table.
Sandbox
A simple testing area with dummy lifes and money designed for puzzling out the best attack and defense strategies that is sometimes also used to set up fun patterns like pixel-art-like tower combinations.
Origins
CreepTD respectively CreepSmash has been initially created in 2008 as a project of ten students at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart (University of Applied Sciences) under the lead of Dr. Prof. Gerhard Wanner and released under the GPL.<ref name="HFT" /> In its initial version CreepSmash contained the game modes "Normal" (also called "Send to next", deprecated), "Random send" and "All vs. All" as well as about 40 maps.<ref name="LGW" /> Unfortunately, the initial project team abandoned further development when the university project ended so that the game was long known to insiders only. In 2011 a new team around the computer science student and freelance programmer Daniel Wirtz from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (University of Applied Sciences) took over development and steadily released new and also internationalized versions of the game.
Later on the game has been rewritten entirely to fit the needs of both browser and desktop gaming nowadays.<ref name="CSFB" /><ref name="CTDFB" /> All versions from version 1.0 on, which has been released on January 26th with a special release teaser<ref name="TSR" />, have been released under the custom "CreepTD Freeware/Donationware License" instead of the GPL, mostly to prevent players willing to cheat from analyzing the source code, especially the anti-cheating code used in the CreepTD server.<ref name="DEV" />
Development
Game development hugely depends on content created by the community while the game client and server theirselfes are programmed by a single developer.<ref name="MAPBB" /> It is based on the Client-server model<ref name="HFT" /> and also includes anti-cheating mechanisms to protect it agains cheating methods like usage of memory editors or packet interception which are quite commonly used to gain an advantage in all kinds of browser games.
Reception
CreepTD is one of the most played tower defense browser games and included and/or featured at some of the biggest tower defense portals like playertowerdefense.com (rated 4.3/5) or the largest German tower defense portal towerdefensehq.de (top 2 right after Bloons TD).<ref name="PTDG"/><ref name="TDHQ"/> It is also ranked as multiplayer/overall "top 1" at thegameslist.com.<ref name="TGL"/>

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