I rebuilt GemTD — the legendary WC3/Dota custom map — as a native iPhone/iPad game. Free beta is open.
If you played Warcraft III or Dota customs back in the day, you might remember Gem TD — the maze TD where you don't choose your towers or your maze: every round you place 5 random gems, keep one, and the rest turn to stone and become your walls. Bad luck isn't wasted — it's bricks. You carve the longest, cruelest road you can, then hold it for 50 waves.
I loved that game enough that I spent the last year rebuilding it from scratch, natively for iPhone and iPad. Not a port, not a web wrapper — Swift + SceneKit, built for the hardware.
What's in it:
- The real Gem TD loop — 5 random gems a round, keep one, the rest become maze. Every craft recipe is faithful to the original values (I extracted them from the actual game files rather than guessing).
- 71 craftable towers & traps — the classic gem-combine recipes plus the Pedal tree: walkable pressure-plate traps that root, stun, and panic whatever steps on them.
- 67 hand-built creeps across 50 waves — flyers that ignore your walls, invisible stalkers, evasion,spell immunity, and bosses that punish leaks hard.
- No ads, no energy timers, no IAP nonsense. Single-player, works offline, just the game.
The beta is free on TestFlight (iOS 17+): https://gemmazetd.com
There's also a full browsable codex of every gem, tower, trap and creep if you want to judge the depth before installing: https://gemmazetd.com/codex.html
I'm a solo dev actively shipping builds weekly, and beta feedback genuinely steers what I build next the last few updates (trap mechanics, performance work, balance) came directly from tester reports.
If you try it, I'd love to hear where your maze died.
Happy to answer anything about the game or how it's built.