At 2 AM last night, I couldn’t sleep. So naturally, I did what any reasonable developer would do: I designed an entire video game about startup survival.
Welcome to StartupTD – a tower defense game where you defend your fledgling startup from waves of haters, bugs, competitor clones, and yes, even venture capitalists.
The Origin Story
A few days ago, the folks at PlanetScale generously gave me $500 in credits to build something fun. I posted in various communities asking what I should create. The suggestions ranged from typing games to clicker games to collaborative whiteboards.
Then, lying awake at 2 AM, it hit me: What if someone made a tower defense game about the actual hell of building a startup?
Every indie hacker knows the struggle. You’re coding at midnight, fighting bugs, dealing with competitor clones, managing churn, and hoping your server doesn’t crash when you hit the front page of Hacker News. It’s already a tower defense game – we’re just living it in real-time.
So, I decided to turn that chaos into an actual game.
The Concept
StartupTD is a browser-based tower defense game with a simple premise: survive as long as possible while your startup gets attacked by increasingly difficult waves of enemies.
Your currency? MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue).
Your goal? Don’t let the enemies destroy your Startup HQ.
The twist? Everything in the game is painfully, hilariously relatable to anyone who’s tried to build something on the internet.
The Enemies (AKA Every Founder’s Nightmare)
The enemy waves are where this game really shines. Each enemy type represents a real threat that startups face:
💬 Haters – The classic “this already exists” crowd. Low HP, but they come in swarms. Their special attack? Demoralizing tweets.
🐛 Bugs – Fast-moving menaces that bypass some of your defenses. When they hit, your production environment goes down. Sound familiar?
🏢 Big Tech Clones – High HP enemies that spawn smaller clones. They have an unlimited budget and can throw resources at the problem. Your scrappy startup doesn’t stand a chance… unless you build smart defenses.
💸 Churn – These don’t just damage your HQ – they actively steal your MRR. The more churn enemies that get through, the less currency you have to build defenses. It’s a death spiral, just like in real life.
🤖 AI Replacement – “ChatGPT can do this for free.” These enemies temporarily disable your towers because, well, why would anyone pay for your SaaS when AI exists?
📉 Market Downturn – Slow-moving but devastating. When active, they cut your MRR generation in half. Suddenly, all your carefully planned tower upgrades are out of reach.
🦅 VCs – They move at medium speed but hit hard with their special attack: “This won’t scale.” They reduce the effectiveness of all nearby towers because nothing you’ve built meets their metrics.
⚖️ Legal Threats – Very slow but extremely expensive to deal with. If one reaches your HQ, it’s basically game over. Cease and desist letters are no joke.
👑 YC-Backed Competitor (Final Boss) – 2000 HP, multiple phases, spawns minions, adaptive AI. They just raised $50 million, and they’re coming for your market share. Good luck.
Your Defenses (How to Fight Back)
The tower system is designed to mirror actual startup growth strategies:
Early Game Towers ($10-100 MRR):
- 🐦 Tweet Tower: Shoots tweets at haters. Generates passive MRR because good content = growth. Upgrades to “Viral Tweet” for 2x damage.
- 💪 Grindset Wall: Just a wall. High HP. Blocks the path. Sometimes you just need to grind through it.
- ☕ Coffee Station: Doesn’t attack, but speeds up all nearby towers by 25%. Caffeine is a performance enhancer.
Mid Game Towers ($100-1K MRR):
- 📝 Content Marketing Cannon: AOE damage to multiple enemies at once. Slow attack speed, but hits hard. SEO takes time, but it works.
- 🎨 Design Polish: 30% chance enemies miss your HQ entirely. Because good UX prevents churn.
- 👥 Community Shield: Your users literally defend you. They actively attack enemies within range.
- 💳 Payment Gateway: 20% chance to convert enemies into customers. They were gonna hate anyway, might as well monetize them.
Late Game Towers ($1K+ MRR):
- 🚀 Product Hunt Nuke: 500 damage to everything on screen. 60-second cooldown. Use wisely.
- 🏆 Brand Moat: Permanent +10% damage to all towers. Once you have a brand, competitors can’t touch you.
- ⚡ Feature Velocity: Extremely fast attack speed. Ship fast, break things, ship faster.
Special Tower:
- 💰 VC Funding: Gives you instant $10,000 MRR. But adds “Investor Pressure” debuff that reduces all tower effectiveness by 20%. Choose wisely.
The Game Loop
Each wave gets progressively harder. You earn MRR by defeating enemies and surviving waves. Between waves, you spend that MRR on new towers or upgrades.
The strategy emerges from the tower combinations. Do you focus on high-damage towers to kill enemies fast? Or do you build walls and slow towers to give yourself more time? Do you take VC funding for the instant cash injection, knowing it’ll cripple your long-term effectiveness?
Just like a real startup, there’s no single correct strategy. It depends on the threats you’re facing and the resources you have.
Why This Might Actually Work
Tower defense is a proven genre. Bloons TD, Kingdom Rush, and Plants vs Zombies – these games have millions of players because the core loop is incredibly addictive.
But here’s the kicker: I’m not competing with those games.
I’m building for a specific audience – indie hackers, developers, and startup founders who will immediately get the jokes. When they see “YC-backed competitor” as a boss enemy, they’ll laugh because they’ve lived that fear. When they place a Coffee Station tower, they’ll relate because they’re probably drinking coffee while playing.
The viral potential isn’t in being the best tower defense game ever made. It’s in being the most relatable game for a highly engaged, highly social community.
Every death screen is a potential tweet: “I defended my startup for 23 days and reached $4,750 MRR before a unicorn competitor crushed me 😭”
Every high score is a flex: “I survived 47 waves and built the ultimate defense.”
The game markets itself because the experience is the startup journey.
The Tech Stack
Since I’m stress-testing PlanetScale, here’s what I’m building with:
- Next.js 15 – Fast, familiar, works great for games
- Canvas API or Pixi.js – 2D rendering engine for smooth gameplay
- PlanetScale – Storing leaderboards, user scores, game stats
- Prisma – ORM for database operations
- Vercel – Deployment and hosting
- TailwindCSS – UI styling (menus, leaderboards, etc.)
The interesting challenge is handling real-time leaderboards with potentially thousands of concurrent players. This is where PlanetScale shines – I can write scores constantly without worrying about database locks or performance degradation.
Every game completion writes:
- Final score
- Wave reached
- MRR earned
- Enemies defeated
- Towers built
- Death reason (for the memes)
Then I’m querying that data for:
- Global leaderboards (all-time top 100)
- Daily leaderboards (resets every 24 hours)
- Weekly rankings
- Per-mode leaderboards (Classic, Hardcore, Endless)
If this thing goes viral and 10,000 people play simultaneously, PlanetScale needs to handle 10,000+ writes per minute plus constant read queries for leaderboard updates. That’s the real stress test.
The Viral Mechanics
Games go viral when they’re easy to share and have built-in social proof. Here’s what I’m building in:
Share Screens: After each game, you get a beautifully designed game-over screen with your stats. One-click sharing to Twitter with auto-generated text like: “I defended my startup for 23 days before being crushed by ‘ChatGPT can do this for free’ 😭 Can you beat my $4,750 MRR? https://hackernoon.com/im-building-a-tower-defense-game-where-vcs-are-the-enemy?source=rss”
Challenge Links: “I scored 8,247 points – can you beat it?” generates a custom link that shows your score as the benchmark.
Leaderboards: Real-time rankings that update live. Seeing your name climb from #847 to #234 is addictive.
Screenshot-Worthy Moments: The death reasons alone are meme material. “Defeated by: Legal threats,” “Crushed by: Market downturn,” “Overwhelmed by: Haters.”
What I’m Shipping
MVP (This Weekend):
- 10 tower types
- 10 enemy types
- Wave-based progression (20 waves + endless mode)
- Global and daily leaderboards
- Share functionality
- Mobile-responsive (because everyone’s procrastinating on their phone)
Free to play. No ads. No monetization.
I’m not trying to make money here. I’m trying to make something the indie hacker community genuinely enjoys, while also creating a case study on handling viral traffic with PlanetScale.
The Meta Game
Here’s what’s really interesting: this entire project is itself a startup simulation.
I’m building in public. I’m sharing the process. I’m making something people might actually want. I’m using the virality of the game to potentially drive traffic back to my other projects (like makers.page, my platform for indie makers).
If StartupTD blows up, great. If it doesn’t, I’ve still learned about game development, database scaling, and viral mechanics. Either outcome is valuable.
The game is a metaphor for itself.
Join the Waitlist
The interactive waitlist is live at [startuptd.com]. I’m shipping by the end of this weekend or early next week.
If you want to be notified when it launches, drop your email. If you have ideas for towers or enemies I should add, I’m all ears in the comments.
And if you’re a solo founder reading this at 2 AM because you can’t sleep due to startup stress… yeah, this game is for you. Let’s turn that anxiety into 60 FPS of tower defense chaos.
Follow the build:
- Website: startuptd.com
See you on the leaderboards. 🎮
