Mage Tower Battle
Game
Mage Tower Battle is a 3D strategy game that runs in a desktop browser. You are the new archmage of a mage college. The last one was fired, and on his way out he pulled every book off the library shelves. Each day is a few minutes of preparation and then a battle you watch: every tower is attacked at once, and your students cast what you taught them, as well as you taught it.
The tower's room is laid out in two columns. On one side are the students' stations: the recruitment table, the podium and office hours. On the other are yours: the library, the spell laboratory and the map table. The invasion book stands between them. Walking, reading, interviewing and teaching all take time, so the order you visit the stations in matters.
At the library you shelve fallen books by their school to learn spell pieces. At the laboratory you join pieces into spells: modifiers change the next payload, and a trigger starts the rest of the spell when the payload hits, dies or ends. At the podium you teach by drawing each spell's glyphs, and how well you draw is how well a student learns. One student taught alone learns best. Each student added to a class adds a stroke to the drawing, narrows the line you must stay inside and gives everyone less. A student holds two to four spells, so who learns what is a choice. Walls, pools and sub-towers placed on the map hold their mana for as long as they stand. While you prepare, the game plays today's battle against your plan as it stands and shows what it would cost you.
Spells that start with Invade send summons at a rival. Damage to your tower lowers your score, and nothing raises it; the highest score after the last day wins. You can play against three computer rivals, play a short practice day, try four trials with medals, or play online with up to four players by room code.
It is a Builder project: a Rust core holds every rule in integer maths, with no clocks, a WebAssembly shim passes values to the page, and the page only draws what the core returns.
Playing it
Walk with WASD or the arrow keys. Stand at a station to use it: E does its main thing and Esc cancels. Drag books to their shelves at the library, drag pieces into the spell at the laboratory, and draw the glyphs with the mouse at the podium. When you are ready, start the battle. Drag a battle view to turn it, right-drag to move it, and use the mouse wheel to zoom. The ? beside each panel's title says how that station works.
Checked in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit.