Here is one more very early screen shot for game 2. This shows the main play area of the game. I’m not showing the menus at the bottom because, that contains spoilers right now…
In this shot, you can see the main Assault Ship at the top center. This is home base and what you travel from world to world in. It’s the source of your packets and the only thing you start most missions with. It has no trouble flying around and hovering above the surface as shown. You can also see a couple of Collectors in this shot. I dug down a couple of shafts and put them at the bottom. The green area is the area they are collecting fractal space energy from. You can also see three beacons. They are providing wireless power (along with the Assault Ship) to most of the visible area. In the lower right and left of this screen shot you can see dimmer terrain. This terrain isn’t in range of any Beacon.
At the bottom of the center most shaft you can see a couple of red X’s. These cells have been targeted to be dug and you can see three “Excavation” packets in route to the first X. You can see a Blaster under construction back up on the surface. It isn’t necessary to build things on the surface, though. Most military units can be built anywhere not blocked by terrain. Most other units can be built in clear areas, but the ones that can’t be moved must be anchored into the surface. The Beacons and Collectors you see fall into this category.
On the right you can see a scroll bar. This lets you scroll the map up and down. In this screen shot you are only seeing about 20% of the total map! So that Creeper you see is just the easy stuff… Down in the depths you may find more intense Creeper, other surprises, and perhaps other menaces.
Speaking of the Creeper… on the left you can see that an emitter has filled up the chamber it is sitting in and the Creeper has just flooded over a ledge. It’s running down the ledge and will fill up that larger cavern. Unfortunately, this chamber is surrounded by hardened terrain that can’t be penetrated. So I’m going to have to dig down and approach that flooding chamber from below. I best get to it sooner rather than later….
So this is just a tiny portion of the core game elements. There will be other terrain types, a second resource, and right now I’m looking at 16 main structures/units. Everything is of course still open for change, but the major elements have started to come together. Stay tuned….
This may seem small, but not all of the beacon’s red bar (health or energy?) are full. Is there a reason why?
And can the Assult Ship be dammaged (I see it has a health bar)?Is the only way it could be by the Creeper rising up to it, or are there other ways…
This is because the Beacons themselves use energy and must be resupplied by packets from time to time. So imagine if you build a chain of distantly separated Beacons down through the terrain. Imagine that each is the maximum distance from the other. Now, the Creeper takes out a Beacon in the middle of that chain. This will create a powerless area in the middle of the chain and the Beacons below this area will not be able to receive any packets to replenish their power reserves. After about 30 seconds or so, they will go dark as well. Then you are really hosed….
The ship can be damaged and Creeper will certainly do it. But perhaps that isn’t the only way…. that’s all I’ll say for now.
This looks Awesome!! By the way, I have no clue what beacons are, are they like relays, or are they totally different from relays.
Is this underground now…?
As if we didn’t know that months ago?
I haven’t been reading the blog posts.
I’m going to miss all the networking stuff… 🙁
Don’t worry… between tunnels, pathfinding, beacons, micro-rifts, and obstacles there will be plenty of things for an aspiring network designer to worry about.
how long is a level gonna take at this size?
Missions could range anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour typically. I’d guess that 20-30 minutes will be the average mission length for an experienced player.
There will be save game support, so you can stop at any time and pick up the mission later.
On a more positive note, I’m looking at it, and it looks pretty interesting. Personally, I don’t like the look of the Blaster and especially the Assault Ship, but that’s just me. Beacon is good, Collector looks a little weird, but acceptably so. Repulsor was okay, couldn’t really tell much, Launcher looked suspiciously like a recolored SAM, but it’s still good.
Speaking of collectors, I notice that the collection radius isn’t as square as it was in CW- it’s almost a diamond. I sense that this could make my optimized collector farm a little more difficult to optimize. Squares stack up a lot better than diamonds, or anything else for that matter. It’d be nice if those edges were flattened like with the collection radius in Cw.
On a different note, I highly recommend you make sure your tunnel has some extra space at the bottom before you get into that cave. You know, to slow down the Creeper a little.
The graphics you see are likely not all final. I know the repulsor will be re-done and the others may be worked over as well. I am trying to keep a little biit of the high contrast ‘cartoon’ look to the units since that was part of CW and done on purpose.
The collector radius may shrink for a notch or two as well. They are actually ‘circles’ but this turns into a square at small sizes.
And yes, a good strategy I have already identified is to build an ‘expansion’ chamber if you have the space. This can let the Creeper expand into a larger volume and you can deal with it easier in some situations (Boyles law anyone 🙂
Sadly, I don’t know of Boyle’s law.
I do know about the inert gas law (I=prt, unknown capitalization), which, if I remember correctly, says that an expanding gas will cool down. But this is liquid.
And yeah, I figured that those collection radiuses (radii?) were supposed to be roughly circular. I think it may have had something to do with the collector taking up multiple terrain cells, though. This collector takes up only one block of terrain.
And if these are not the final graphics, then that is good.
If I may ask, how exactly are you simulating gravity? I can think of several ways to do this. Are you simulating heat flow across a surface that would be moving down in the background, modifying vertical conductivity, and if not, what exactly? That creeperfall looks nice, though, so whatever it is you’re doing, it seems to be working.
Here’s one intuitive way to think about it for yourself. Load up Creeper World (Game 1) and create yourself a map with the map editor. Make a set of steps like the steps on a government building. Make the top most steps out of the highest terrain and go all the way down to the lowest terrain. Make the steps the full width of the map. Place an emitter at the top of the steps and set it to emit a pulse of Creeper and then not do it again for the maximum delay.
What you will see is the Creeper pool gets emitted and then it runs down the steps and pools up at the bottom. This acts the way that you would expect it to, but you’ve never heard me say anything about gravity in Creeper World game 1.
Now image that the entire map always had an invisible set of steps in the background. At the top of the map would be the highest steps and at the bottom would be the lowest steps. (Still imagine that this is a top down game). If this were true, then Creeper would always flow down the map unless is was thick enough to flow up onto a higher step.
From a simulation point of view, the Creeper in both game 1 and game 2 is modeled using cellular automata. In both, an underlying structure is used to modify how thick the Creeper needs to be before it can flow into a cell. In game one, this forms the terrain levels. In game two, it forms the “invisible steps”. That said, the invisible steps reduce to a simple arithmetic bias when calculating creeper flow. But the analogy still holds…
Do you have some idea when the game might be finished?
Later this year is all I can reasonably say. I’ve made great progress, but there are still a number of things to finish.
I am committed to a very high quality product, though, so I won’t rush things through to completion.
I’m probably over-thinking this and underestimating the CW community’s inventiveness, but in CW people made a lot of maps that was only tangentially related to surface maps – pictures, maps, stories, whatever.
Do you think that perhaps the fact that this is all vertical might inhibit that?
I’m not too worried about what people will be able to come up with. There is another 90% of the game that I haven’t revealed yet that includes underground goodies, different terrain types, friendly Creeper, a mysterious new enemy, and a few other things that add significant variety to possible maps.
The game is based underground. But if you think about it its just like Cw1 except on a different angle
I like everything I see and read! I could ask a lot of questions, but I’ve decided to just wait and see what you’ll be writing in your future blogs.
One thing I’d like to ask however is something related to what Karsten also mentioned: could you please make the textures of the various terrain types customizable? They look great, but I’d love to make maps that look different than underground mining shafts, so it would be nice if I can apply other themes as well.
I’ve not done this yet, but I do plan to include this functionality in the release.
Thanks a lot! 🙂
I notice that the collectors only work on ground that is still solid, which is quite interesting. Good of you to come up with a reason to not mine out the entire cave…
Also, I would imagine that fighting up a creeper waterfall would prove to be quite difficult…
Now, a question: In CW1, the density of creeper was mostly just how high/deep it went, and now that we’re in a side view, it seems a bit odd that there would still be that density factor. I know that the creeper is coded mostly the same this time (I think…I couldn’t quite understand what you were saying up there), but how will the density of the creeper act in CW2?
So the Creeper isn’t exactly a liquid, or a gas…. it’s something sort of in between with at least one interesting twist through into the equations. This is on purpose since I wanted the Creeper to have a mostly intuitive feel, but still be a little bit mysterious.
In this regard, density is just pure ‘thickness’ of the Creeper. If you make a vertical shaft and fill it with a little Creeper, the Creeper will settle down into the bottom of the shaft and be thickest at the bottom and thinnest at the top. It’s a non-linear squish effect that you observe. If you add Creeper to this squished pile, it will grow taller.
Other than this, the best way to get a feel for the Creeper is to just play with it (the enemy Creeper and your own friendly Creeper). This will be part of the ‘discovery’ element to game play.
so you could say creeper is a gas that is heavier than normal air?
Are there still the bars for collection, depletion and deficit?
Collection for sure. Depletion and deficit are likely. Deficit was probably the most confusing element in game 1, so I have been brainstorming about how to show this concept differently… or not show it at all.
You could simply have it so no energy = no packets, but that’d be pretty dramatic.
Yeah, you certainly need something along these lines.
Indeed. I can imagine ‘deficit’ was a little confusing to starting players, but I have my eye on these gauges every few seconds when I play. I really couldn’t live (ehm, play ;)) without the depletion gauge, especially when I’ve applied upgrades like +15% fire rate and +20% building speed, because I can’t just add up the number of weapons firing and the number of units being built.
maybe have a packet speed percentage taken off and show that instead of deficit?
Just make a tutorial map and explain everything in that map.
Everyone would have to play it to learn what everything is.
But don’t give away everything, leave some stuff for us to find out that hard way.
it was very interesting to read knucklecracker.com
I want to quote your post in my blog. It can?
And you et an account on Twitter?
Hey, Can the creeper also dig?
Probably….
I have not implemented it yet, but “soft terrain” will probably make it into the game. This would be terrain that is slowly destroyed when the Creeper touches it.
There may also be other things that can dig…..
Wait, what? Are there going to be autonomous digging robots or something? xd
Cool.
Will the Assult Ship have a maximum energy output like Odin City?
I see that military units like repulsers and blasters do not need ground below them while units like beacons and collectors need to be anchored down onto ground. Is there a type of ground (yet) that units like collectors and beacons cannot anchor down onto wether it is because it is to soft or to hard?
Right now, the Assault Ship does have a maximum packet per second production rate. I will probably keep it, but the final value has not been determined.
Yes, right now there are 4 main terrain types: Regular, medium, tough, and indestructible. Indestructible terrain can’t be dug through and it also won’t allow a structure to anchor into it. At least these are the rules right now… they are subject to tweaking as development continues.
There are also terrain modifiers in addition to the 4 types. For instance there is a “susceptible to Creeper” modifier that indicates that the Creeper will eventually destroy that terrain type should it touch it.
Well then why are a collector and beacon anchored onto supposedly indestructible terrain?
The main reason is because that rule wasn’t implemented when I took that screen shot. That said, indestructible terrain doesn’t look like it did in that screen shot anymore.
What if we dig under some ground, will it float?
Or will it fall down and destroy anything under it like a cave-in?
I’ve not implemented anything that “falls” other then Creeper currently. I’ve yet to decide if I will…. It’s one of those things that sounds like a good idea, but in my preliminary testing it was a little more frustrating than fun. But, that was just a preliminary test, so I may experiment with it some more.
So currently, terrain is anchored “behind” so it appears to float. This lets you dig tunnels one under the other.
Alright, Sounds like you think of nearly everything.
Considering it’s an assault ship if something were to happen, that the creeper got to the surface it the ship attack the creeper?
In some maps the Creeper will definitely got the the surface or even be at the surface at the start of the map. I’m flirting with a few different weapon ideas for the assault ship. So it may have no weapons, standard weapons, or something special. Not yet decided.
I’d have to go with weapons. Even a carrier ship has guns.
I hope it does have weapons, then you can dig a huge tunnel down and assault with the ship.
then the whole trouble of winning ground from the creeper that is the main objective of creeper world be kinda gone
how fast does the creeper that went over the ridge go down? i mean, kinda rushy since there is nothing or does it sorta stick to the wall at the back?
The Creeper has a certain viscosity to it. It’s more like a slime that will hang over ledges a bit. It’s actually funny to cut off the Creeper supply from a CreeperFall and watch how the Creeper going over the edge will stop and then snap back up like a big blob of goo hanging over of the edge of a table.
Hmm – at first I thought that undiggable rock was actually some sort of cracked earth – perhaps porous enough for creeper to flow through, while still providing a barrier for buildings/projectiles. That could be interesting, actually, especially if the porous rock could also be undiggable – it would let you have creeper emitters that can only be destroyed by friendly creeper, for one thing…
That’s not a half bad idea…..
You might like to look into/consider the type of rock-busting operations that oil/gas companies use – “fracking” the rock by pumping high-pressure water (in this case friendly creeper?) into rock that creeper can flow through? That then breaks it up so other operations can be executed on the rock formations, like excavation or energy recovery.
I just read a Scientific American article about this…
It’s an interesting idea for how to dig through some terrain. It would add another use for friendly creeper…. Hmmm.
wow, i just realised that a month back from the post date of this blog you were still searching for a possible replacement for adobe air and now you have a big part of the game done.
Yeah, you can count on him to make huge progress in a little amount of time.
When this post first came out, I thought he was only 10% complete or something like that. Now he is like…well, who knows what!
next thing to tell about: friendly creeper! i mean, really, you talk about it evrywhere but we don’t know anything about it besides from the part where it is creeper, and it fights other creeper. i’m not even sure if friendly creeper would kill your buildings!
I’ll do a whole blog post about friendly creeper soon. As for if it kills your own things; it does not. Your own units can swim around in it. Flooding your own chambers with good creeper can be a good way to ‘shield’ your structures (for a while anyway).
just as i hoped =P
Friendly Creeper good, blog post very good.
Twi is so anxious he’s typing in third person for some reason.
Hi Virgil
This looks very interesting, but it raises a couple of questions in my mind:
1) One important aspect of CW1 is the players ability to build a complex working infrastructure, your “base”. Which is very appealing to me as a gamer. I simply love building a city, tweaking and optimizing its performance, and watching it doing its work, when nothing else is going on. Let us call this “the tower defense aspect”.
When I look at your screenshots of CW2, I get the feeling, that this aspect is more or less gone. Is that true?
2) As you know, I love making custom maps for CW1… In CW2, it looks like the map IS the terrain, which is made up of removable game-tiles… wouldn’t that make the custom-map-creator more or less a game of drag-n-drop, effectively degrading the background-image to just an image.
As far as I can tell, the background image will only show thru the map, when a specific tile has been digged.
Are you planning to release a map-generator, and are you aware of possible “shortcomings” of this game design in that department?
I also like the “building” aspect of the game. In CW1, this consisted mostly of the collectors and relays. You would build them out and it was cool to watch the packets take appropriate paths to reach your units. In a way, the packets were a kind of “unit” and it was neat to watch them head to the front lines of the fight.
You will also experience something similar in game 2. The packets will move through your network of tunnels and caves and find their way to your base. Many of your structures also require energy to continue to operate so packets will be heading to them. You will have collectors, reactors, beacons, creeper factories, ore makers, research stations, etc. In the mix will be micro-rifts, shields and a bunch of weapon systems. With packets moving along their preferred pathways your base will feel very alive and animated.
As for the graphics the ground tiles will be one thing that varies a bit from world to world. There is also the background image that is used above the surface. It serves as the back drop for the world you are on.
The map editor allows you to pre-build caves and tunnels and choose different types of terrain for the map. If there are any shortcomings it is that this type of game is a little harder to “auto-generate” maps for. In CW1 I wrote an algorithm that would allow you to create billions of different maps through some fancy math. This is a bit harder to do for CW2 since the tunnels and caves need to involve a little more thought…. but this isn’t going to stop me from trying to come up with some fractal based auto-generating map solution 🙂
You should make it so that collectors send out raw energy to the assault ship before you can use it.
It’d be neat.
This just keeps on getting better and better!
Just a couple of things (heh):
1. Maybe its just because I’ve been playing CW1 for a long time and have gotten used to it but I seem to like the graphics of the 1st one better. The blasters and the home base ‘assault ship’ just look a bit… I don’t know weird? It just looks like you have tried to make the graphics a bit more detailed but it just doesn’t look right, I guess I prefer the simpler graphics. Though I’m not trying to by mean or anything, it does look great!
2. With the tunnels, when you first start a map the scroll bar will be just sitting there to tempt you into looking what’s beneath (am I right? :P). But possibly to enhance game play, do you think you could make it so you can only see down so far until you need to build more units further down to ‘reveal’ more of the map further down? Sort of like a ‘fog of war’ kinda thing.
3. When you dig further and further down will the ground be any harder to dig through (use more energy) thus making it seem more compact. While I am on the topic of ground, will the creeper be able to eat away at the ground? Or is it just there for you to remove manually?
4. Finally when you dig out the ground beneath you like really far down or something, will there ever be some kind of earthquake were the ground will cave in on your units? Though I guess this will cause some problems later on, that would be a cool element, where if you dig down to far or just dig away too much of the ground it can become unstable and you have to build these kind of supports?? With this you could time it right to close off some massively open areas which the creeper could flow through that you don’t want it to. That would really add a lot of strategy to the game.
Woah ok, that’s all (for now 😉 ) Thanks in advance!
-1 The graphics will vary here and there before the release… so don’t get too attached to anything.
-2 I have a fog of war that blacks out the map to start with. You have to explore to uncover the map. This adds to the game play but makes custom maps a bit harder to show thumbnails for!
-3 I haven’t decided if the ground gets automatically harder to dig as you go further down. There are different terrain types that vary in ‘hardness’ so I may just leave it at that. And yes, there will be terrain that the Creeper will destroy.
-4 As for collapsing tunnels and stuff like that…. still have not decided on this either. It will take experimentation to see if it fits the game.
1. Cool can’t wait
2. FoW is aways best for something like this its good to see your going to implement it
3. I guess as long as there is some kind of variety of ‘hardness’ everyones happy 🙂
4. yeah, it will take some research into of its the best idea, but its still pretty cool, maybe just on harder levels?
Also will CW2 have new music? if you could find some nice tunes as you did in CW1 that would be cool
Yes, there will be some new tunes in CW2.
i still kinda hate that background above the play area where the assault ship hovers… it just doesn’t seem to fit in
I have a number of different backgrounds. Something has to be there, though, and almost anything looks better than just a black or white backdrop.
1. will htere be a minimap for this game that could show the battles goin on.. cause at how zoomed in the screen is it would cause dif. for people who attack multiple creeper spots at once
2.if there is couild it zoom in on a miniscreen so u can view and control multiple things at once
if so it would be cool
There may be some indicator for what is going on off screen. Note that there is only vertical scrolling. You don’t have to scroll right and left.
will u ever do a screenshot in the blog for the “new enemy” uve been hinting at for like the past few months or is it gonna be another hidden thing that we have to find and learn to kill?