Tower defenseStrategyNight

Glowkeep

Light the night. Hold the keep. A tower defense where your towers grow with every upgrade and lanterns reveal the shades.

▶ Play free now Play on itch.io

Also on CrazyGames: play Glowkeep on CrazyGames

How to play

Glowkeep is a tower defense game set at night. Foes come out of the forest along the dirt paths to your keep, past the cottages by the road. Build towers on the stones beside the path and upgrade them: each level makes the tower bigger, from a plain tower to one on a stone base and then a tower with battlements, a gold band and a banner. Lanterns light up the path, and they are the only towers that reveal hidden shades.

Tap a glowing stone next to the path and pick a tower from the ring. Lanterns go where their light covers the most path.
Press START (the button at the top) when you're ready, or press it again to call the next wave early for bonus gold.
Tap a tower to upgrade it (three levels, and the tower grows with each), then choose one of two specialisations.
When foes bunch up, tap FLARE or ROOTS and then tap the map.
Survive the last wave with lives left (you start with 20). For 3 stars, keep 18 or more (16 on Mothwing Fen) and clear the last wave within the map's par time. Calling waves early helps.

New to tower defense? The first map shows you where to tap, and the win and defeat screens tell you which foes took your lives and how much gold you left unspent.

Towers, foes and spells

Four towers, two paths each. ARCHER (fast, hits flyers) becomes LONGBOW or VOLLEY. LANTERN (slows foes in its light, and the only tower that reveals SHADES) becomes BEACON or SUNFLARE. MORTAR (area damage, ground only) becomes BOMBARD or CLUSTER. STORM (chain lightning that ignores armor) becomes TEMPEST or FROSTCOIL.
Nine kinds of foes. Grubs, fast skitters, armored brutes, moths that fly over mortars, shades that hide in the dark, splitters that break into two, wardens that carry shields, the Gloom Ogre, and the Gloom King himself.
Two spells. FLARE lights an area, damages and reveals shades. ROOTS hold foes in place.
Call waves early for bonus gold. Sell towers for 70 % back.
Eight maps, 7 to 15 waves each: a meadow, a river with two gates, a long gate road, a fen with a flyway where moths cut straight across, a crossing with three entrances, a long barrow road that winds in to the keep, a mountain pass with two flyways, and the throne of the Gloom King. Earn up to 3 stars per map and spend them on six permanent upgrades.
Endless mode. Win Hollow Gate to unlock it: waves that never stop and keep getting stronger, with an ogre every 10th wave. Your best wave is saved, and every 5 waves of a new best earn a star for your upgrades.
Daily Siege. Open from the start: one siege a day, the same for everyone, with 12 waves on the path of one of the maps. The first win of the day earns stars, and more for a streak of days in a row.
Weekly top 10. Endless runs go on a weekly and an all-time top 10, ranked by the waves you clear while the keep stands. You play under a generated name, no account needed.

Built for touch: tap a stone, tap a tower. Works on desktop and on phones, held sideways or upright. Progress is saved in your browser.

Screenshots

Glowkeep battle on Mothwing Fen, wave 10: moths on the dotted flyway, brutes and skitters on both roads and the Gloom Ogre at the gate, lit by lantern and storm towers — Mothwing Fen: two roads and a flyway for moths.

Glowkeep branch choice on a level III storm tower: TEMPEST or FROSTCOIL for 230 gold each, with SELL below and an info card explaining both — Pick a specialisation: TEMPEST or FROSTCOIL.

Glowkeep VICTORY card from an earlier version, when Willow Meadow had a longer par time: three stars and 20 of 20 lives left — The victory card: stars for lives left and time (earlier version).

Recent updates

Nov 1 Version 44. On the first map, the "spend your gold" hand keeps helping after wave 2 instead of giving way to the upgrade arrow. With the phone held upright, the "turn your phone" poster now lets you in after 6 seconds on your first visit, so you can play upright without tapping it.
Oct 31 Version 43. If you reload the page before building your first tower, you come back to the first map instead of the title screen.
Oct 31 Versions 41 and 42. On the first map the first wave starts by itself after a few seconds, so you can watch before you build. Keyboard controls work right after you click into the game on itch.io. On phones, the map no longer goes missing when you switch to another app and come back.
Oct 30 Version 40. A quicker first minute on phones: on the first map the first wave starts 1.5 seconds after your first tower, the "spend your gold" hand soon points to a free stone for a second archer, and the tip card and star timer wait until later waves. On narrow phones held upright, the FLARE and ROOTS labels no longer run together.
Oct 30 Version 39. Come back the next day for a free gift of 3 stars to spend on upgrades.
Oct 29 Version 38. With the phone held upright, the BUILD A TOWER card and the level III choice (LONGBOW or VOLLEY) now wrap their text and fit the screen instead of running wide over the ROOTS button.
Oct 27 Now on CrazyGames. Glowkeep passed review and is live on CrazyGames in their Basic Launch, a first test period on the portal.
Oct 27 Versions 27 to 30. A RESET PROGRESS button on the upgrades screen, a hint to use FLARE when hidden shades slip by, a pulsing ring that points at a tower you can upgrade when gold piles up, and labels that no longer overlap on small screens. Gentler ogres on several maps, fewer shades on Riverbend and Hollow Gate, and fewer moths in wave 9 on Mothwing Fen.
Oct 27 Versions 25 and 26. With the phone held upright the map is bigger: drag it or tap the arrows at its edges to look around, and the view follows the wave when you leave it alone. On map 2 a hand shows where to build a LANTERN, whose light reveals the shades.
Oct 27 Version 24. The first wave runs at normal speed (1x) so new players can watch it; from wave 2 it speeds up to 2x unless you have set the speed yourself (version 31 removed this again: now only the SPEED button changes the speed). With the phone held upright you can now tap the "turn your phone" poster and play upright. On map 2 the arrows to the keep now show along both paths before the first wave.
Oct 26 Version 23. A shorter first map (7 waves), a NEXT button straight to the next map, CONTINUE on the title screen to pick up a campaign map between waves, the Daily Siege open from the start and bigger text on phones. The Flare and Roots buttons stay clear of portals and the path.
Oct 26 Version 22. Arrows from where the monsters come in to the keep, short one-time tips for Upgrade and Flare, and a "turn your phone" poster when the phone is held upright.
Oct 26 Version 21. A tidier title screen: the lantern, the daily card and the PLAY button no longer get in each other's way.
Oct 26 Version 20. The tutorial hand no longer covers the tower price, the Upgrade and Sell buttons try to stay off the path (and fade while a foe walks under them), and info cards on Riverbend no longer cover a stone or the keep on small phones.

How it was made

Glowkeep was made by AI agents at Crewless Games, a small studio where AI agents do most of the work and a human owner decides what gets released. The code was written by AI. There are no image or audio files: the towers, foes and scenery are vector (SVG) illustrations written as code by AI agents and drawn with the HTML canvas, the night lighting is computed in code, the covers and screenshots are captures of the game itself, and the sound effects and music are synthesized in code. No AI image or music generators were used, and no third-party art.

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