One often requested unit in Creeper World has been a shield, a fan, or some kind of mechanism that would push the Creeper around. In Game 1, this was sort of difficult to pull off since the field of play wasn’t originally designed to handle this.
For Game 2, this changes. I planned from the beginning to accommodate various forces that could act on the Creeper. One of these is gravity. Since Game 2 is a side view game, gravity should be a key factor in the way that the Creeper moves about the map.
Once I had all of the Creeper flow equations modified to accommodate gravity, it was a relatively simple matter to allow an additional force that can push in different directions and also only be in effect on certain regions of the map. From this was born the “Repulsor” unit. This unit doesn’t destroy once milliliter of Creeper, but it can be the difference between life and death in certain situations. Take the following two before and after pictures as an example.
Here you can see a Repulsor with its beam pointing straight to the left. The beam is hitting some solid terrain. The picture on the right shows where I have dug through this terrain. The Creeper isn’t flowing out into the tunnel to the right, though. Instead, it is being pushed back against the far wall by the Repulsor beam!
Repulsors also work with your own friendly Creeper (not shown in this picture). In fact, Repulsors can be a great way to move pools of your own Creeper from one place to another. So if you happen to produce a big reservoir of your own Creeper and then need to move it up and over a ledge, a few Repulsors can make that happen.
I’ve still got to properly balance the beam strength, distance, and energy consumption of this unit, but I wanted to go ahead and give a preview of how it will primarily operate. It’s a cool little unit and I’ve wasted hours just setting up little Creeper fountain displays, “heat exchanger” flow circuits, and playing a “save the good Creeper” mini game…
Cooool.
On a different note, what is this bottom unit? Is it this Beacon thing you spoke of?
Yep, that’s a beacon. Not very expensive to build, but they are necessary. They use energy at a slow but steady rate so packets are dispatched to them. They in turn “light up” surrounding terrain and provide the power that packets need to move around.
Fun!
Very nice! More and more possibilities for different strategies…. I love that! I have the impression that maps will be solved in many different ways and new approaches will be found all the time, so maps will be played more often.
It also seems this game is getting rather mature already!
One question about the side view: now with gravity doing it’s job the vertical movement of creeper of course becomes much more important, but on a flat terrain (above or under ground) the creeper will still flow horizontally. How will I be able to get a good overview of these horizontal movements (and especially it’s speed)?
There will be a “Creeper Density” indicator that shows how thick the Creeper is under the mouse pointer. But, even with this, the player will still require some experience to understand how the Creeper flows and reacts. Players will have an opportunity to “get to know” their enemy through a generous story campaign.
So am I correct that one (full) screenshot is only one vertical layer of the map? If I remember well you planned to use the mouse wheel to scroll through the various layers; will this still be the case?
Right now, maps are 32 wide by 100 tall (in terms of terrain cells). Each terrain cell is 24×24 pixels. Creeper cells are 8×8 pixels. So there are 9 creeper cells per terrain cell. This means that the Creeper array is 96×300.
You can scroll the map up and down using a scroll bar, arrow keys, or mouse wheel. Right now the view port is 32 terrain cells wide by 22 terrain cells tall. This means only vertical scrolling is needed to access the full 100 terrain cell map height.
Ah! I had the impression this game would become 3 dimensional (separated in layers), but now I get it. Thanks! 🙂
Now, how powerful are the repulsers going to be? I remember you saying that there will be caverns of hyper-compressed Creeper. So would a repulser be able to hold something like that back? And if not, could you have two repulsers next to each other, pointing the same way and working together to hold back the Creeper?
Repulsors will be “moderately” powerful. They will be able to hold back some Creeper completely. Other Creeper they will only be able to slow down. If there is a chamber filled with some really super dense Creeper, even Repulsors won’t be able to completely contain it.
Right now, Repulsor’s don’t “stack”. So pointing two in the same direction doesn’t double their effectiveness. The code supports stacking, but I’ve decided against this (at least so far… I could change my mind). The reason for not allowing stacking is that I don’t want Repulsors to become too powerful. They are a useful unit, but if it becomes too easy to always hold back almost all Creeper, then that will become the sole strategy that is required.
But, I’ve yet to do final balancing so this could still change.
But you yourself said the objective is to destroy the Creeper, not just hold it off.
Repulsors destroy absolutely zero Creeper.
I just want to prevent every strategy from being “build one blaster and N Repulsors”. If Repulsors are too awesome then you can contain any amount of Creeper and pick it away from safety with just one or two weapons.
Of course another way I could limit this would be to make active Repulsors fairly energy expensive to operate…
Well, they do have the major disadvantage of shooting in exactly one direction. If you have enough zigzags with undiggable rocks and don’t allow repulsor beams to pass through units (not sure if they do or don’t at the moment, no way to tell), you could limit their effectiveness.
But on the other hand, they have to be worth the cost and the limitations. I honestly am not sure how to balance it.
Useful Unit.
Used in Cooperation with the friendly Creeper it could eventually decide if you win or lose…