Silicon Gate: Circuit Defense

A tower defense game on a computer motherboard, where every tower is a real electronic part and works the way the real one does.

Glitches, surges and worms crawl down the copper toward your CPU. You stop them with resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors and inductors. A resistor slows things down and burns them, because real resistors turn extra current into heat. A capacitor charges up and lets it all go at once. A diode shoves enemies back the way they came. It's a circuit game and a tower defense game at the same time, and it plays with no Wi-Fi.

ANY TWO PARTS MAKE A CIRCUIT
Tap a part, then tap a tower already on the board. You see what it will turn into before anything happens. Drop a Capacitor on a Resistor and you get an RC Timer: a slow charge, then a huge blast that sets things on fire. Eight parts make twenty-eight circuits, from an LED that lights enemies up to a Boost Converter whose beam keeps getting stronger. Nothing is wasted. Anything goes with anything, and adding more to a tower only makes it stronger.

TAP ANY TOWER TO SEE WHAT IT DOES
The game slows way down for a few seconds so you can read the card. It shows what the tower does, its level, its power and what the real part does. The Circuits book fills in as you find them.

ENEMIES YOU CAN READ BY HOW THEY MOVE
Surges speed up when they're hurt. Glitches jump ahead. Worms split. Ripples flip a shield on and off. Each zone ends with a boss: Brownout slows your towers, and Zero-Day knocks out your closest tower every 15 seconds.

KEEP IT COOL
Zone 5 is a graphics card, and it runs hot. Parts heat up as they work, and the heat spreads to the parts next to them. A hot part slows down, and too hot shuts it off for a few seconds. Pack your towers onto the GPU die and they hit harder, or spread them out by the fans and they stay cool. The Thermistor works the other way round: the hotter it gets, the harder it hits.

TURN IT UP WHEN YOU'RE READY
Run any level at 1x up to 5x on the overclock dial. Earn three stars a level and spend them on eight upgrade tracks, one per part. A circuit gets the upgrades of both parts that made it. Thirty levels across five zones, plus a Daily Board that's the same for everyone, with one try that counts.

HOW IT PAYS FOR ITSELF
Free to play, with ads. One ad after every second level you clear, never during a level and never after you lose one. One payment turns the ads off for good, and Restore brings it back on a new iPhone or iPad signed in to the same Apple Account. No subscription, no coins, no energy meter. No account, and your progress stays on your iPhone or iPad.

Made by Pettigrew Lab, a small family studio. Questions: pettigrewlabllc@gmail.com