What if there were a way to take that nasty old Creeper and make it your pet? Destroying the ever expanding Creeper is plenty-o-fun, but what if you could manufacture your own Creeper and send a little payback towards those emitters?
Well, that’s the plan for game 2:
Now this is just a quick game shot with no real care for level design or play-pattern. But you can see I’ve manufactured some good Creeper (the gray Creeper). I built up a little stock-pile and then dug through a single terrain tile and dumped it onto a chamber full of the evil Creeper. There is some nice sizzling as the evil Creeper remains equally evil but is becoming smaller in volume. It’s a nice sight watching that stuff get destroyed and replaced by benign Creeper that does my bidding.
The blue squares are shields that let units and packets pass but not Creeper (friendly or evil). Don’t worry about the shield graphics, that’s just stand-in developer art till I draw something better. I put the shields there so I could confine my own Creeper. I could also have used Repulsors to push it around.
Note that to make good Creeper I have to spend Ore…. and I’m just about out of it in this screen shot. In fact, the reason I have tunnels dug all over the place is because I was collecting Ore from deposits that were scattered around.
Anyway, just wanted to do a quick shot and let folks start dreaming of redemption…. Creeper Redemption.
Yay! Friendly Creeper!
Also, I see tons of things I’m curious about.
I assume the unfamiliar units in the friendly Creeper are generators thereof, but what’s that unit I see on the very top and to the left of the pic?
And I also see two unfamiiar terrain types.
The upper left unit is a reactor. It makes energy like in CW1. The two unfamiliar units in the good creeper are indeed Creeper Maker Factories. They can be turned on and off and will consume ore and produce Creeper when turned on.
The terrain types are mostly me just messing around with different graphics. Expect that they may change around a bit more. In general there is easy, medium, hard, and impossible terrain.
Hm…
The solid block seems like a good indestructable terrain. The cracked rock terrain tile seems like it’d be a porous rock that lets Creeper move through it, like has been suggested. Speaking of porous stuff…
Water. It seems like it’d be an interesting and very realistic feature, as there’s certainly plenty of water underground, but I can’t figure out for the life of me what it would do. You probably couldn’t use normal weapons in it, to be sure…
Of course, it would probably float on top of Creeper, cuz, you know, Creeper is denser. Kinda like water and oil, only water is oil and Creeper is water. Also because having some sort of way of mixing them seems overly complicated to me.
The Creeper destroys all organic life, thus, water cannot exist alongside Creeper.
So to speak, the soil must be unfertile.
…Organic means carbon, you know.
Water= hydrogen and oxygen.
Water=/= organic.
Just pointing that out.
Unless, of course, it splits the water molecules and causes explosions. 😀
Sorry about the double post, but I just realized something.
These Creeper generators probably shouldn’t be stationary. Unless you put them at the very top of your tunnel system and let them flood it, and use shields or repulsors to direct the Creepr to specific locations, which would most likely use a lot of energy, these things seem like something you would want to be able to move.
Whether to let the Creeper Maker’s be movable or not is still being decided. I’ll have to play with each. Right now they are fixed structures…. but it might be more fun to have them movable. But, I’ll have to play with it since being movable means you will almost always fly them to where you need them…. and this eliminates the thought it takes to otherwise control the friendly creeper with shields and repulsors.
Ooh, that is a reflex I am going to have to fix. Not only having Creeper next to you, but on you, and you do not want to attack it. I will have to work on that. ; )
As for the shields, they have health bars. How long can they resist bad Creeper, and do they get damaged by good Creeper?
I see collectors have been rounded a bit more than from last picture. Do reactors give about the same amount of energy as in CW1?
And do good and bad Creeper act like fire and water? As in will they snuff each other out when they make contact?
Bad Creeper will damage shields and eventually destroy them. The timing (right now) is similar to the wall decay rate in CW1.
Reactors do give you a pretty ‘big’ punch, but cost a bit to build. So they are a better long term investment, but not a short term one. Since you are already digging tunnels it is usually wiser to drop collectors around at least to start with…. just like in CW1.
Good and bad Creeper are completely incompatible. They hate each other and you get some good sizzle when they meet. They annihilate each other like matter and anti-matter do.
AWESOME!!!!
I will make a level giving you access to tons of ore with only friendly creeper sites! REDEMPTION!
Also, can you try and get drones back in game 2?
I loved the little guys and I can’t get enough of them.
Maybe Kamikaze drones? 😀
Something similar to them may appear… perhaps something like a manually targeted “conversion” missile…. I’ll let everyone think about what a “conversion” missile might do…
Sadly, the answer to me is quite obvious: It turns bad Creeper into good Creeper.
i’m not sure how many ore we will have in a level, but i already know i am gonna have fun with this
Right now I have 5 different ore deposits. Each has more than the other. So “red” ore packs like 200 ore in a single deposit and “yellow” ore only packs 6. Of course it only takes 3 packets to dig out yellow ore and it takes 100 to dig up red ore.
All subject to balancing and tweaking, but the general idea seems to be working.
…THIS IS AWESOME!!!
By the Way, I have been wondering about this a long time, why do the emitter have a health bar? Does that mean they can be killed?
yup, it was in one of the first blogs: humanity is now fighting to get the creeper of their planets
So considering if there is gravity and it’s underground, does that mean all creeper generally flows down? or does the creeper stick to the wall? And does the creeper change color on each planet?
It generally flows down… but it’s designed to not just drop off cliffs and fall perfectly straight down. It will spread a bit and stick to walls and hang over ledges a bit. It’s basically just a real mess and gets all over the place if you don’t watch out.
My fav strategy right now is to save up a pool of good creeper and then dump it onto a pool of evil Creeper all at once. This can clean up a mess pretty quickly.
Question: What are the packets? Red seems to be ammo, but what are the white packets? It’d make sense for them to be ore, but then why are some of them coming from the surface? So many questions!
There are currently three packet types:
Green: Construction packets
Red: Resupply packets (ammo for the weapons)
White: Deconstruction packets (for digging).
They all come from the Assault Ship but they don’t always have to travel as far as you might think…. thanks to Micro-Rifts that can create wormhole style portals on the map.
I totally predicted that. 😀
From one of your previous comments here, I take it that ore is only available in fixed amounts. This seems rather over-restrictive to me, making me feel that I would never, ever use friendly creeper unless there is absolutely no other choice.
Perhaps you could have a unit that uses large amounts of energy and creates ore?
Such a structure is already in the plans…
Of course I have an alternative method of collecting ore in mind as well that I might try out. This alternate model requires you to build “refineries” on top of special places on the map. Doing so will produce ore at a fixed rate.
This model could work out better… I’ll just have to see.
Is there any other new units (other than modified ones i.e. Blaster, Collector, Mortar [Launcher], Reactor,etc.)?
There are a “bunch” of new structures and weapons. Some are still experimental, so I’m not sure what the final set will be. Some of them will remain a surprise until the game is released.
maybe you should make it so that you can only build those friendly emiters on the craters of destroyed evil emmiters?
or have some sort of way that you can salvage emmiter ruins to make the friendly emmiters more efficient…
Evil emitter destruction is actually a more difficult problem that you would think. I’ve been experimenting with the best way to allow the player to actually “blow up” an emitter. Regular weapons might be one choice, but that would mean that a launcher could take out an emitter before all of the surrounding Creeper was destroyed. So right now I have though about requiring the player to build a big and special “bomb” next to the emitter and detonate it. This would require the player to defend a piece of real estate right next to and emitter for 30 seconds or so (and have enough energy) to build the bomb.
Is it all that possible to lose now? To me, it just seems like you are hunting down the Creeper. In game 1, the creeper was hunting you. There was always the danger of slipping up and then having it flood half your buildings.
How easy is it to lose now?
On some maps, it is exceedingly difficult to “lose”. Losing being defined as losing your assault ship. On other maps, it isn’t that hard since the Creeper can erupt and quickly fill the whole map. On other maps there are “other” ways you can lose… more will be revealed later.
Hmmm…
From the previous post with a screen shot of the game, it seemed the assault ship is up in the air? If so, then the creeper has to “erupt” and somehow stack up to reach up into the air? Or shoot “missiles” or creeper blobs up to attack the assault ship?
Is there an option to conduct a surface war or is the battle essentially over if the creeper covers the surface, since there would be no option to gather energy from the soil?
If I understand the game concept correctly, there is also the issue of exhausting one’s energy supplies (perhaps inadvertently by overeager tunneling) and thus losing simply from lack of energy, or is this a case where the creeper will then rise to the surface and destroy the hovering assault ship?
In another scenario, what happens if one simply refuses to take on the underground creeper ans simply hovers over the planet indefinitely? Will the creeper eventually break out and attack?
So many questions… sorry.
The assault ship (for most normal missions anyway) begins at the top of the map and hovers above the surface of the world. To be destroyed the Creeper would have to erupt, stack up, and eventually fill the whole top part of the map. Most people would never let it get that far, though, since it would be obvious it is a losing battle before that happened.
So I am working on a few other “threats” to the assault ship that will appear in in missions. But in any case, there will be some missions where losing the assault ship just won’t realistically happen. Now I think that this is ok, it is kinda like a CW1 mission where the Creeper will never flood up high enough to destroy the city,
In terms of game design, CW2 is designed to have a very large success/failure “middle”. By this I mean that in most missions if you just sit there and do nothing, failure doesn’t come quickly. On the other hand if you play, but play poorly success doesn’t come quickly either. Take for example an old game like asteroids. It has a narrow “middle”. If you sit still and do nothing you die pretty quickly. If you play poorly you die pretty quickly. If you play so-so you get to play for 5 minutes then you die.
As for a surface war, yes… some missions will start with some Creeper on the surface. Not all maps will have a completely level surface. Image a little plateau for the Assault Ship with a big lake below it. In this case you can assault the lake from above, of you can dig down through the plateau and drain the lake from below (and free up some surface real estate). Or you can ignore the lake for a while if it isn’t growing…. and deal with other threats first…. all game play choices for the player.
Energy wise, CW2 is similar to CW1. If you start digging and building and firing weapons like crazy, everything still happens… just at a reduced rate. You will find weapons starved, and digging to be really slow. This can interfere with your strategy and cause to to lose underground terrain or units pretty quickly if you let it get out of control.
This seems like the opposite of what Tucana was.
I approve, since I really didn’t like Tucana.
you could also make it that the ship requires energy to float and doesn’t have reactors on itself, no energy, the ship comes crashing down to earth
What’s the research thing? Is there a second menu on the bottom for building?
Upgrades in the game come from building up “research”. I may end up calling it something other than “research”, but basically you have to build up points that you can spend. This is similar to CW1, except you will be able to get “research/upgrade” points in a couple different ways in game 2.
what about collection\depletion\deficit bars?
They will probably be shown… maybe as little bars near the Energy display. I’ve put these at the top in CW2 (at least so far).
will u ever give a bigger hint on the “new enemy” uve been hinting about the past few months
It’s very tied to the story in CW2, so I don’t want to say too much.
Whens your next post gonna be?
I need to know more!
I just can’t wait! I’ve posted two maps over two days!
I’ve never done that before!
Patience grasshopper…. patience….
I remember something a few posts back about something called an “etherial”
and how it could travel through solid ground
could these damage the assault ship?
Yeah, there’s an enemy that can sort if drift through solid terrain… very troubling and takes a special weapon to deal with them. I’ll probably have them target the Assault Ship sometimes as well.
and what about the “micro-rifts”
I’ll probably put up a new blog post about micro-rifts later today.
I know you are probably not thinking about this, but can (or will) there be a map editor? I think not because it is just too much work. And assuming form the scroll bar there is a ton of land in between.
There will be an editor. It is being developed in parallel with the game. In fact, the editor is how I will do all of the story levels in the game.
Wait…does this mean…
Could this be…
Are we gonna be able to use triggers and such? So we can do things like Loki from CW1?
It’s possible…. I will do whatever seems right for the story as I create and tweak the missions…. and I have a goal (a soft goal anyway) of doing everything from the editor. So whatever I do in the story you should be able to do in the editor.
VERY nice!
Hey, can creeper destroy packets?
Yep….. and it isn’t a good thing when this happens. Packets in game 2 are launched from the Assault Ship with a programed path towards their target. Since these packets are “free flying” they don’t have an opportunity to recalculate their course mid flight. In game 1, they could and they would do so at each node along the way. So the price paid for having packets that can fly on their own is that they have to be given their course at their launch.
So…. if you have a bunch of packets en route to a destination but a bunch of Creeper breaks through and floods tunnels along their path… well you will get a bunch of packets popping like pop corn when they strike the Creeper.
Note that friendly creeper doesn’t harm packets.
Wow, That would suck…
It’s a good thing you did make packets destroyable.
But could the “New” enemy harvest them?
Going back on topic…
I like the idea of “Good Creeper.” i can already come up with ways to completely defend yourself with it, such as flooding tunnels you have with good creeper and block with shields and all.