Currently I have these three things implemented/planned as ways to extend the core ‘creeper game’ concept:
- Resources: CW had one very important resource: Energy. In game 2 I am considering a second resource. Specifically, you would need certain amounts of this resource in order to build certain units and you would also need this resource to produce ‘friendly’ creeper. This resource would only come from fixed locations on the map. So you would have to fight your way (sometimes) to get access to more of this resource.
- Terrain: Terrain modification (as I have previously mentioned) is key in game 2. Packets no longer need pathways to move around on. However, they do need tunnels and caverns to move through. This means that digging out the earth is required to get places. Specifically, you are trying to reach creeper emitters buried deep in the ground. So you have to go spelunking to get to them. This introduces an interesting choice for the player. The more you dig the more places you can reach and the more room you have to build things. However, in the process you eliminate the ground…. which is the source that your collectors gather energy from. I’ve yet to decide if if this is a good or bad thing for game play…. more later.
- Upgrades: I really like the idea of a point based upgrade system. You get upgrade points by digging up certain artifacts but you can also get points by building ‘research pods’ that produce points over time. This affects your early game strategy. In CW you basically only have to decide what energy to invest in building vs weaponry. In game 2 you will have to decide between building/digging/weaponry/technology investment.
Wow, I can’t wait for CW2! It sounds amazing! You have made a fan boy out of me!
Matthew
Well I can’t wait!
I hope everything is going good, and being good to you Virgil.
Sounds promissing! Does this also mean the game has become a real 3D game now, or does ‘digging’ mean showing something else at the surface?
And is there a way of knowing where to dig, or is it going to be implemented as a kind of Fog of War?
When you say collectors will collected less energy because of digging, is that because of altered elevation levels (like in CW), or because there is no ground at all? (There must be something underneath you’d say….) When reactors are still available they could solve that problem, right? Or is that going to change as well?
Maybe more questions than you can answer right now, but I was just wondering.
*gives Virgil an e-hug* Yeah, I know I’m crazy. I will now eat your soul.
Seriously, I’m Twi from the forums. I really like the new resource, I myself thought that there should be some areas with more resources than others to add strategy (which is why I came up with Energy Rich terrain for plain old energy).
The terrain modification system seems like a fairly interesting prospect. I’d keep up with it.
The upgrade system gets two thumbs up.
Hmm, nice seems to be a much bigger game now, a lot more choice in research which is always nice. I love the idea of terrain modification really adds a whole new ‘level’ to the game. (no pun intended, unless its a good/funny pun then in that case the pun is intended).
Though I don’t see how that is going to work.. is there going to be full 3D graphics, or is it sort of a 2D/3D mesh kinda thing… where you can see each level separately. Guess I will have to wait to find out!
hehe: spelunking, I love that word 😛
Is that second resource stone or something? And I lke deciding between different upgrades (I think I use technology much). I go download it!!!
I’m not sure what I’ll call it yet… maybe a special kind of ore, or a deposit that is left by the Creeper itself. But in any case, there will be ‘deposits’ of it. Sometimes the deposits may contain a virtually unlimited amount of resource, other times they may contain just a little.
Do you mean something like this; http://www.dragongamez.com/starrebellion.htm
combinated with energy? (if the game wil not work check out kongregate.com, but it have not all levels)
Yeah, sorta… kinda….
Basically, a second fixed physical resource. Like metal in Total Annihilation. There are places on the map the produce this resource once you reach them an build a structure near them. You would need this resource to build _some_ things and you would really need it to produce friendly creeper.
Yay, good idea.
I like both games (and even that from post 31) so CW2 wil be AWESOME!
I’ll blog more about this in a future post over the next few weeks, but in short game 2 is a side perspective, not a top perspective. You can also scroll vertically (with mouse wheel or keys or on screen controls). This leads to some very interesting and “deep” maps. And yes, gravity plays a roll (at least in controlling the creeper).
Sounds good.
I am a bit confused about how a side perspective will work. How will you represent layers of creeper? And will most of the game be underground now?
The creeper still has a thickness, and is influenced by gravity. In confined spaces (like chambers completely surrounded by the ground) the creeper can be really ‘thick’ and at a high pressure. Digging into this chamber can unleash quite the eruption. There are also different types of ground (cells that decay when the creeper touches them, cell that can’t be dug through, etc)
It’s all difficult to comprehend until I post some screen shots of the core game in action…. I”ll do this over the next month in a major blog post if all goes well.
Actually, I get what you mean. Totally.
I think I’m going to miss packet routing. It was a very core part of what I liked in the original game.
Packet routing is still present. The packets have to find their way through what you have dug to the target structure. They also try to avoid the creeper along the way. So digging not only allows you to collect things and to get places, but it also forms the ‘roads’ that packets move through.
Sounds nice! So does that mean if the creeper hits (or touches) the packets they disappear and the city sends out another, or???
If digging takes away the ground from which collectors draw energy, reactors may need to be seriously nerfed, and turtling might be made a lot tougher.
Vertical side-scroller is a term I’ve never heard used to describe a strategy game… I approve. I must admit, some of these features are interesting to think about.
Indeed…. this perspective applied to the defense/RTS genre may be fairly unique. Everything from ‘Dig Dug’, to ‘H.E.R.O’, to ‘Miner Dig Deep’ use a side/vertical perspective and environment. But using this perspective for a creeper style RTS game should be pretty ‘fresh’.
Ah, I understand now virgil. I’m interested to see how this turns out. You really are innovative with game ideas. Keep up the good work.
Are you ever going to give us a preview of these new ideas before the game comes out? 😛
Absolutely…. when the time is right, you’ll know. 🙂
Awsomeness! I totaly get what you are going for and I only have 2 questions. I can see the vertical thing working, but how will we place turrets in caves when this is side ways? And will there still be spores? If not ill miss them
I have planned on having a spore like enemy (ethereals) that can move through solid ground. This will provide an orthogonal threat just like spores in CW or just like flying units in some tower defense games.
Weapons can fly/levitate. I’ve not settled on the fine grain rules yet, but I may make it so that they must be built on a surface and that they can’t fire unless they can anchor to some surrounding earth (like above or two the side).
Once it is mostly settled, I’ll include details in a blog post along with screen shots….. right now I just need a few weeks to pull everything together.
What exactly will be the main hub of the network now?
OC is probably irrelevant now considering it is no longer the last bastion of humanity.
So the (rough) story is that it’s a couple decades in the future and mankind has developed the tech to finally destroy the creeper emitters for good. But there were literally tens of thousands of worlds in the once great and bountiful human empire. All of these worlds need to be reclaimed so humanity’s empire can be re-founded. Hundreds of assault ships are built and dispatched to these worlds. The story will follow one of these ships and it’s young captain. Naturally this ship will turn out to have a special destiny as greater truths are revealed.
This means that instead of Odin City, you will have an assault lander that begins each mission. This will be the source of ‘everything’ when a mission starts. You probably want to find some place to land it so you may have to eliminate some surface creeper on some missions to do this. After that (the surface is secure) then you need to start heading down….
So….if collectors only work above ground…then will reactors work below ground?
On a different note, how are you going to win the missions? It sounds like you have to get special units to the emitters and destroy them.
Right now (this could change), collectors can be built anywhere as long as they are adjacent to some piece of ground. They collect energy from a circular radius… but only from un-dug ground. So if you dig all over the place, you eliminate lots of ground that could be used to provide power. On the other hand, you could build reactors in that open space…. but it takes energy to dig and energy to make those reactors. So, it’s a trade off.
As for mission completion, yes… most missions will require you to totally dominate the creeper. Destroy all creeper that is on the map and on missions that have emitters, you have to take them out as well.
One Word: Screenshots! times infinite
hello, i saw the training simulator and was hooked, you should keep the game play sort of the same, I love the idea of stopping the creeper once and for all, but you should not have to find resources, and the “friendly creeper” is a good idea, but it should be made over time instead of by using materials. here’s the question, describe why you want these changes made? P.S. awesome story plot, just make it more like the original. i am going to get the full “original” game friday the 11th
you can say what you want, but i see everything as good fun. Also, you say you don’t want anything changed but at the time of your post you didn’t even have the game yet
TRUE, BUT IF YOU NOTICED, I PLayed the simulator 1st, and now i beat the story, but you should still make good creeper over time, maybe some recources to build emitter to sustain the creeper, my method is to use blasters to cap emitters in the back and let the creeper wither and die on its own, with the help of a drone bomber, p.s. daniel and anonymous r the same person
Hello again, i forgot to give you my thought on the point based upgrade system, you really are just beating a dead horse i have seen too many games get ruined by a system like that. take my advice, don’t be a copier of the crappy. you should not even have an upgrade system. most of the best games don’t have one. it forces you to think outside the box. prove me wrong if i am, but
you need to listen to your fans that love your game so much that they went the distance to make the sequel better
The best game on Kongregate have it.
do you mean “upgrade complete”, DISS!
btw the upgrades should be a side attraction that helps you when things look bleak
Maybe when you “totaly dominate the creeper, the cithy sends out packets that destroy the emmiter, like remote controlled explosives
On a somewhat different note, will you be able to ‘undig’ the terrain?
Like, say, when you suddenly dig into a cave full of high-pressure Creeper and don’t have enough weapons to stop it, you might want to do something like that.
Current plans are to allow you to build “lattice”. So if you get a little too happy and dig too much, you can put back some stuff. Also, some levels will already have an extensive ‘cave’ network and you might want to build some lattice infrastructure to hang your weapons off of.
As for if the lattice is at all resistant to the creeper…. maybe not… maybe. Have not decided that yet.
If you open up a chamber of compressed Creeper and then realize you have seriously underestimated… you likely won’t have a chance to plug it. Packets can’t move through creeper so you will have to try to stop it further back up the line. Or you might could try and dig out a relief chamber and then bore through a relief well. This could prevent the creeper from flooding back up to all of the infrastructure you have probably built above it.
That was the other idea I thought of for handling such situations, but you’d think you’d have to have some time to make that work. I was thinking more along the lines of the ‘quick and dirty’ method.
On the other hand, depending on how long digging takes, it could work in an emergency. I would do it if I had the time.You know, dig down under the chamber of Creeper and then open a hole in the bottom to drain some of it away.Of course, you’d have to find the bottom of the Creeper.
On a different note, unit idea: Ground-penetrating radar. Reveals composition of terrain in circular radius around it(empty, X rock, Y rock or Z rock). May or may not reveal Creeper.
The idea is that otherwise, you can’t see a chamber or what’s in it till you have a tunnel to it from the surface. So basically, you don’t even know it’s there till you bump into it. Radar gives you, at the very least, where to look.
Also, I made a suggestion: Hydroelectric power. Put that Creeper to work! ^_^ I’d appreciate it if you go check it out. It would seem to work much, much better with CW2, given that Creeper will be more liquid-y and it’ll be a vertical side-scroller.
Also, I just had an idea.
Collectors should probably be solar collectors or some such, otherwise they’d work underground. Unless you can come up with some reason for them not to.
so… you can actually create a big hole with a mortar close to it? that’d make for exellent defence possibilities!
How exactly will we be able to dig? Will we have a mobile unit or a stationary unit that we have to keep relocating?
Nope… nothing that tedious. I have experimented with ‘digger’ units, but it’s kinda a pain to move them around. What I have right now is a system where you just click (or click drag) the terrain you want to start excavating. ‘Digger’ packets get dispatched and head towards any terrain they can reach. Upon impact, they do a little damage to the target terrain. After a few have arrived, that section of terrain will go away.
If there are research pods that give you points over time, are the upgrades limitless given enough time? They might become rather useless later on if there is a cap (Although it would be reasonable for it to become ineffective to have a small number because the cost of the upgrades increase as you buy more of them.)
A thought just struck me (aside from the one that it is harder finding one’s position here in the blog than on the forum).
If this is going to be a digging game, might it be appropriate to find hidden resources? That way a mapmaker can hide away some resources (energy, units) and if the player finds it it acts like a nice little bonus at perhaps a critical time in the game?
Absolutely…. there will be numerous notable things stuck around in the ground. Some will matter for the mission at hand, others will matter over time… and others are just regular old collectible items.
So if a map maker is able to ‘hide’ things underground, isn’t everybody going to study this map in the Map Editor and reduce the aspect of exploring?
I think this can be solved in the following way: the map creator only defines the amounts of the various resources that should be available on/in the map, and optionally the grow value / time delay before they become available. The exactly location is determined by the program, based on a map hash (like the unique ID for CW), so it’s always the same location for the same map, but even the author doesn’t know where exactly everything is located before the map has been played. This will also prevent a map maker to have an advantage for their own map.
An other question, about customization: will it again be possible to apply different colors, backgrounds and maybe even different icons to the various structures and resources of custom maps? I can see myself creating a map that would require you to dig into a pie to collect the chocolate while the evil cream is trying to kill you. Or a surgeon trying to find antibodies in a human body, while trying to stop the bleeding…. 😉
Icons will probably be sprites (and hard to replace by a map maker), but then it would be nice if you could give these structures a different name to make them fit into the story.
Colors and some other options… I don’t know about a custom set of icons. That may be something I decide late or even add after the initial release.
now one question: will there, as asked much for patch/CW2 on the forums, be a second packet dispenser?
yes/no/not sure/ not gonna reveal (yet)?
Somewhere between not sure and not gonna reveal. Lets just say I have planned for it in the code, but it may or may not be integrated into the game. It has numerous problems (like which one does a packet originate from) but it may still be integrated into the game in more interesting scenarios that I probably won’t reveal till after the game is released.
How is it possible that you can simulate the Creeper’s flow only looking at 2 neighbors? I was shocked when I read that in CW you only checked for 4 (and not the up/down/right/left cells but the “lower-right half cells”!); in fact, when I was playing I thought that you were using something like this http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ACellularAutomatonBasedHeatEquation/ ; but… only 2 or 4?! How can be fair for all the cells?
I suppose you are not using a “classic CA” or you thought about the problem in a totally different way than I did!
I wondered if someone would ask me about this 🙂
So from the perspective of cellular automata I compared against 8 cells in CW and only 4 in game 2. I referred to this as 4 and 2 in most blog post, though. The reason is that I scan the array from upper left to bottom right. As I do this scan I only compare against the cell on the ‘right’ and the ‘bottom’. There is no reason to look ‘left’ and ‘up’ since that is the direction I came from. To do this I have to tweak the math a little bit and compare against original values when I do each comparison. I may do a full blog post about the topic at some point…
Suffice it to say that you are not crazy and I do use CA to simulate the creeper flow. At least that accounts for 90% of the behavior. There are a few other little tidbits that are added to the mix to make it a little more fluid like and also a worthy opponent.
Oh, right! So you are using a CA and using the 8 cells (in CW) but you are keeping some of the values while you scan the vector so you don’t have to rescan again (because it is really slow in Adobe Air). Nice optimization! I suppose that in order to to that you have to keep the entire last line scanned and the last cell (x) in “fast variables”…
You got me puzzled! Thanks for the explanation!
will there be a speed up function?
we will probably have speed towers like in the original cw.
virgil,
Let me say that this is a fantastic game. I am in awe that there is something new under the sun and very appreciative of the fact.
I look forward to the second edition.
I just have one request… please limit the technology upgrades. In 99% of the games that I have played, technology rules. If you can survive the first few minutes/turns, then invest everything in technology, you automatically win. While it may be technically accurate, it’s boring.
I would suggest that the technology be very expensive and/or time consuming.
Finally, I’d like to (with your permission) write the story based on the game. You can see some samples of my work on my blog above (click on the stories category).
Thanks
Yes, technology and upgrades are overused in games IMHO. In CW the upgrades are fairly limited and not always useful. In other words, a more modest approach to upgrades and their effects. This is because I put so much thought and balance into the core game play, the upgrades server just as a little “spice” to otherwise solid game play (at least I think so).
In game 2, I want to continue this trend. There will be more tech items, but this is because there will be more items to apply the tech to. But I will always keep modesty in mind when I do the final balancing….
As for a story, are you talking about writing a novella based on CW? If so, just email me ‘support at knucklecracker’ with your proposal.