Tower of Time

Tower of Time

Tower of Time is a browser-based tower-defense game with a twist: when the wave goes wrong, you can rewind time and try again with new information. Built by Maciej Trebacz for a game jam, it is one of the most transparent vibe-coded projects on the web — roughly 95% of the code was AI-written, and the full set of prompts used to build it has been published publicly alongside the source.

Gameplay

Like classic tower-defense titles, you place turrets along a path and defend a base from waves of enemies. The signature mechanic is the rewind: if a wave overwhelms your defenses or you misplace a tower, you can reverse the clock and replay that segment, keeping the knowledge of what is coming next. This turns each wave into a small puzzle of optimization — a place where a single tower at the right tile can flip the fight — rather than a punishing one-shot test of intuition. The pacing rewards experimentation and undermines the usual tower-defense fail state of having to restart an entire run.

The game runs entirely in the browser, with snappy controls and a clean, readable visual style that keeps the action legible even when several rewinds are stacked together.

Vibe-coded origin

Trebacz built Tower of Time using Claude Sonnet 4 as the primary coding partner, explicitly named in the project's README and the accompanying Show HN post. The GitHub repository is literally titled "Vibe coded Tower Defense type of game made for a game jam" — there is no ambiguity about the development approach. By publishing the prompts alongside the code, the project doubles as a teaching artifact for anyone curious about how to drive an AI assistant through a non-trivial game build.

Stack and openness

The game is built on a TypeScript browser stack and is open source, making it one of the more inspectable examples of a complete vibe-coded game. The combination of working game, public prompts, and full source has made Tower of Time a frequent reference point in HN discussions about whether AI-written code can produce something genuinely fun, not just functional.