Honestly love seeing this series carry on, creeper world does something most tower defence style games don't do well, logistics and redeployment. Can't wait for the next one
Mindustry is also a great tower defense with ability to manage units. You can even control units and turrets individually, kind of like possessing them. It also a factory game in which your turrets need ammo, but it's not just survival, you can find maps with enemy bases to destroy, or fight other players. But my favorite part of the game is managing your base with limited space you have, it's especially fun with multiple players in your team, so players can choice if they want to do automation, building defenses or attacking at any given time
@@Defetyre Can confirm, Mindustry is great Not as chill though, knucracker games are great while listening to podcasts, in Mindustry your attention is required more often and the logistics require some serious planning, knucracker games have nice logistics but you can just do everything ad-hoc, not as much in Mindustry
Knucracker I’ve always loved your creeper World Series ever since I found the first one! My old pc couldn’t run much back then, but your game proved to be addicting even though it’s not graphic intensive!
I love how he picks new game styles to carry on the story. That damned creeper. Just can’t get rid of it. I mean seriously from 2d side scrolling to 3D to particle fleet to really 3D to sand physics. I also love how in each style he still get wave physics in somehow. I really hope these game series keep him living comfortably. He deserves it.
I think maybe for leaving a map and loading it back it should be enough that your flagship consumes all your other ships, stops shooting and charges up for a while before leaving ... all the time it's doing that the creeper is simulated normally. I think that's enough time given to creeper to make most people avoid trying to cheese the leaving mechanic.
I'd even suggest doing this and then speeding through another x minutes of simulated time (3 or 5 or whatever) after the ship leaves, which at the scales of the map shown here should be enough to thoroughly reflood a decent portion of the map.
@@gobs379 Problem there is how long it takes to simulate x minutes of time. If it's half of x in real time for example then you might be stuck there for 2 minutes unable to leave just to simulate 4 minutes of creeper. That's what needs to be avoided.
Another question, what engine do you use? If it is not EU, do you think shifting to it will make game more easy to create / productive / optimized / ...?
@@fantom-spektr Don't know what this one's in, but 3 and 4 are in Unity, you can see this looking in the file directory and there's Unity libraries and files present.
Alright, this is looking amazing. I've been a huge fan of the CW series and this will be an amazing addition. Also 'Emiter Critter' is my new head cannon. 👍
I'm really glad all these years later you're still finding interesting ways to develop this series. Would never have imagined I'd be following along with the development of another new title in 2023 when I was a youngin playing Creeper World Training Sim on kongregate or armorgames all those years ago
You found a niche and continue making it interesting and fun. Every game has been a blast to play. You seem to enjoy making them too and I think that is a win win. I have never considered adding particle physics to the creeper so this will be a fun one.
I like the idea that when you reload a level you "left" for a while, the map could simply punish you by running without your ships as fast as possible (2x? 4x?) for a minute or two.
@@paradox11111111 No no, only if they've left a map unexplored to go progress somewhere else. It was in response to the discussion of how players can collect exp/ixp from a level, but leave some objectives undone and come back later. The game can't keep processing every level in parallel, so I was suggesting that they use a delay to simulate an "unattended" world if you return
@@jamesn0va my impression from the video is that exp/ixp is gathered from objectives (like little floaty totem things you have to collect??) in the level, which wouldn't respawn. I don't think there's anything abusable about giving the creep time to regrow from whatever you left unattended.
When would it be released? I'm already so much excited from last videooo. And I've jsut completed CW2 last week. I had last level not cleared for few years, as I abandoned it.
I really hope you can move ships in this similar to particle fleet!! The QoL of being able to click once, then click and drag in any direction to angle the ship was amazing. Same with the scroll wheel rotation :)
Any idea when we could try it for the first time? I would love to try even just what I see in this video no matter how buggy or if its only one map. Very excited for this game :)
I would LOVE a particle fleet style damage system to the towers!!! It would be an incredible way of merging the 2 gameplay styles. I would love a return of the hammer ship :)
I'm in awe of and in love with the way the particles flow around. The decision to have ships move by converting to particles and flowing to a destination, and how they pool up at a bottleneck, *chef's kiss* inspired
Having the entire campain function as a creper world level where worlds can be fortified and retaken by the player and the creeper would be a really cool way to make it more of a threat. You could have worlds and systems corupted by creeper that build up attack waves to send to a world and have a defence battle where you dont have a mothership and have to make due with only what you built on the planet.
Regarding the time passing while you're gone idea, my first thought was that it might leave the map in an unplayable state, ie. all the area you could place ships in is already overrun with creeper. But, I do agree that it would be cool if you can find a good solution.
I think what might be interesting and sufficiently balanced is when you leave a world when you come back the creeper and other fluids are simply settled to a state of rest. That would give a sense of absence because things did change, but not significantly increase the over all threat. There should be fast ways to do that. Once you just find each particles settle point ignoring pressure and then sort each pool highest pressure to lowest location. once play starts then its starts decompressing and flowing where physics takes it.
By memory Creeper World 2 had science buildings that gave science points. Wonder if that'll be implemented here Can't wait to start playing this one I like how you brought up that you couldn't recreate all those tweaks and had a really important optimization for different color Creeper/Anti-Creeper. That's a loooong awaited question as to why I couldn't change the color of either in Creeper World 4
It would be cool if there were multiple levels of degradable terrain, perhaps terrain that would degrade slowly, quickly, at a "normal" pace, and then perhaps some that appears as normal terrain, until some certain trigger occurred, then said terrain would become dissolvable by the creeper, perhaps by contact with the creeper, or from a certain time being passed. Another Idea I have is perhaps modular ships, for instance taking a missile cruiser and changing out all of missiles for cannons, or point defense, or Machine Guns, ext. And perhaps you could upgrade ships after a certain point of either use or xp as well, more guns, more energy storage for a ship, perhaps better versions of its current weapons or a weak reactor that makes energy. I do like this idea though! It is quite a cool expansion of the other 2d gravity like creeper world. And on the subject of crimson creeper, maybe there could be more kinds of creeper, faster, weaker creeper, and slower, stronger creeper. Whether you use any of these ideas, thank you for your games! They have been quite a lot of fun throughout my childhood, as I grew up playing them! So thank you and the rest of the development team for all of the work they put into the Creeper world series :D
Ah, this definitely seems like a really interesting variationo on the older games. The limited ships allows us something valuable to reach for and be rewarded with, and also prevents us from solving maps simply by building an obscenely huge army of turrets and mortars after stabilizing our economy. :P
There were pixel shader based animations before the compute shaders.. It should be possible to run some simplified pixel growth just by rendering from texture to texture quite fast when "loading" you can even let it run on screen for some ingame reason.
Amazing how even old people can still innovate and show creativity. Lovely job you guys keep doing! ❤ I have played pretty much every creeper world game so far and I'm definetly going to check this one out too :)
I need this. My soul will decay without Creeper World! I'm torn! I understand quality takes time, but at the same time, I just wanna rush the shit out of you! You truly make incredible games!
I feel like worlds should not save on close... There should be a check if the simulation is "running" and it should continue to do so... The problem is how do decide if it is running or not... Example, the light blue stuff at 25m is moving, should that count as "you can save and leave" or not... Also the creeper pressure is rising, should that count? Or should only the falling creeper count? Maybe that would be the optimal condition for it, if there is "flowing creeper" you can't save and leave...
It's nearly 1 am, I'm drunk, I need to work in a few hours and I'm watching a dev vlog of two guys chilling and playing some creeper world -redacted- after I played creeper world 4. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong... But I really enjoyed your video :)
I would make the flow of creeper while away from a world simple. Just take a snapshot of the current terrain, if the period of time is 10 or more minutes fill the map with creeper, any dissolvable terrain is dissolved to. I mean it's an easy assumption if you can't leave behind infrastructure to deal with the advancement. Very little computation would be required.
This is perfect! You took everything I loved about particle emergence, which was the versatile ships, and the more streamlined way of using lathes, and applied it to creeper world. I’m really excited for this new installment when it releases!
I think it would be very cool to have way more creeper [very] slowly decay different types of land! So the map is ALWAYS transforming instead of pools of creeper just sitting there. It would discourage turtling without punishing the player too much :)
it would be interestign if there was a type of anti-creeper that was also hostile to the player ships. could be some interesting tactical decisions about what caves you join together and what you set your guns target priority to.
Suggestion: You are already likely going to be tracking the area coverage of Creeper, so you could have it where you can only warp out with it saved if the area coverage is constant for a period of time. Otherwise the map resets everything but XP gaining options.
I will pay 60+ dollars, even just for a demo version, the game reminds me of of an upgraded version of the the concepts in creeper world 2(My favorite one!) and I cannot wait to play it.
When you say we can save a world and come back later when we have more artifacts, do you mean we can go back to, for example, world 3, with the towers that are unlocked in world 7? Or, do you mean artifacts as like a permanent ugrade we can spec into, like a skill tree? Example: "All towers will now permanently fire 3% faster" artifact
Look great as usual, I'm excited. I love the idea of being able to leave the world after doing some small thing, then coming back when I'm better equipped. Will we have the ability to draw on resources from other worlds while on a specific world? That would be nice if we could. Like if we have a lot of power generation on other worlds, some ability to send the power to this world, or at least maybe some sort of large tanker/battery ship we could send with the fleet to give you a head start...
An answer for leaving a mission and having it progress while you are away would be to add more generators on return, so the chamber had 5 generators when you left, add a set percent on return, like a 20% increase per say (Could spawn randomly or in the set area). Then its harder but still probably do-able.
I hope another iteration of this series takes on the planetary annihilation type of interface, defending on all axes in a 3d projection, i truly love the innovative approach and the collective iterations which lead scenarios and problems and creat a compelling game narrative. Thanks for your hard work!
I don't know if this was already said but I find it very odd how the pixels of structures get larger when moving, I know you made them smaller so they don't look like interactive blocks so just scale them down and center them as moving sprite instead of using a full block that gets sized down again
I've been interested in pixel physic simulation in Unity and this looks extremely interesting. I have to ask if we can get a closer look at how exactly the pixels are simulated! Is every pixel it's own game object, or how are you handling the huge amount of pixels? Are compute shaders involved at all?
'Pixels' are handled using a NativeArray and the unity Jobs system (burst compiled). The display of the pixels is done with 128x128 Texture2D squares that are updated using the latest Unity API's for shoving texture changes to the GPU. So, no compute shaders required. The game needs access to the 'pixel' data for game rules and there are lots of other jobs that do things related to the pixels. And naturally, GameObjects per pixels isn't the way to go. For the units, GameObjects are fine. But even in that case the units still hold Texture2Ds that they manipulate and update for display purposes.
The dematerializing of the ships is an interesting approach to deal with movement around complex organic shapes. Have you experimented with different... dematerialized piece sizes for different ships? So for example some ships have hardware on them that can only transport in 2X2, 3X3, 4X4, etc. And this would make transport of such a ship more clogged up, therefore you need to think about it. Then you have potential for half active ships, the guns get there but the engines don't so jumping away is harder, that kind of thing.
any kind of pathfinding algorithm could be used to simulate the flow of creeper cheaply and quickly. You just calculate the expected creeper with the pathfinder algorithm, memorizing how much each cell should gain at the end of the "simulation". If you can leave weapons behind, there's no easy way to account for that without simulating it - perhaps you could take the cheap way out and mark tiles in the range of the weapons as "defended X", where X would be an amount of time that those tiles could not be bypassed, and those tiles would radiate out "creeper destruction" to work against the creeper creation created via the pathfinding algorithm by flagging those same tiles with a negative number. Sum it up at the end, then do some quick simulating (perhaps use higher gravity for a short while, then gradually turn it back to normal?) so the creeper settles properly. Just let it run a number of steps according to how much away time you want to simulate. Would require a bit of fiddling and trying it out to work out the numbers, but reasonably fast I think? Could be an okay end result, and a hell of a lot cheaper than simulating it for hours :D
It would be devastatingly difficult to see a full-3d creeper world, not like top-down or semi-3d, full-3d like minecraft. Imagine yourself in a cave trying to nullify an emitter, and in the wall where there's decayable land, more creeper pours in and you gotta retreat. Too many resources needed to make this a reality I guess.
So, is this like the next installment of the Series --the game that comes after Creeper World 4? I've had it saved on my Steam account for years and there's never no word on it. Is this coming in 2024??
Random thought, really late to the party, but an interesting solution to leaving and coming back might be if you could track in the background the number of missions started and have an abandoned map note it's own number in the save. Then when you return, the density of all creeper is multiplied by some variable determined by how many missions you've started since you left. Load back in, bam sudden flood of creeper of increased density. Leave for 1 mission, not a significant set back. Abandon the first map and return after beating the game? Enough creeper to risk the mothership itself.
An idea for simulating the creeper when a user leaves and re-enters a level, what if when the players hits save and exit on the level, the game simulates 30 or 60 seconds of the game quickly in the background (im assuming its possible to simulate the game at like x20 speed or another high number) and if during that 30-60 seconds of simulated gameplay no ships or units take damage from creeper then the game saves in the state it was when the player exits and it loads to that same state that the player left it in however if any ships would have taken damage damage or been destroyed during that simulated time, then you could give the player a choice, with a warning along the lines of "Commander our units might not be powerful enough to hold the creeper until we return, are you shure you want to leave? with the gameplay choice then being 1: continue playing the level to try and get things to a stable point where your ships and units are holding back the creeper or 2: save and exit accepting that the level could be in a changed state when the player returns. as for actually simulating that change, mabey you could flag a level as being unstable on a save and then when a player loads an unstable level, display a message along the lines of "Commander here is the battle log of while you were away" and then have the game run for 5 or 10 seconds at x4 speed BUT lock the player out from takin any actions during that 5-10 seconds, that way the creeper would advance a small amount, damaging and destroying any ships placed a little to far forward ect then you could give the controll back to the player like normal ready for them to try and salvage what has happened. you could also move when this 5-10 seconds of running gameplay with player control disabled to before the level is exited in the first place, mabey displaying a message along the lines of "commander are you sure you want to leave with our troops where they are, here is what our simulations predict will happen" and then do that simulation. Edit: another idea just after you briefly mentioned hardened/crimson creeper from creeper world 4, what about a kind of reactive creeper, a type of creeper that is much much harder to "kill" than regular creeper that reacts to the players attcks, lets say its called "counter creeper". it could work something like a counter creeper maker emits x amount of counter creeper per pulse normally, but if the counter creeper maker detects any counter creeper being destroyed within 10-20 pixels of itself then the counter creeper maker boosts how much counter creeper it produces by 2 or 3 times. with the idea being you could place some very valuable rewards behind a patch of this counter creeper with a counter creeper maker, and it could be this area on the map that has some great rewards of IXE but will be a challenge to retrieve, and since the counter creeper kind of stays dormant until it detects the player attacking creeper near it you could fairly safely tune the numbers to make this counter creeper really quite difficult, since if it was too difficult the player would have the options of just not "angering" the counter creeper by ignoring the optional rewards it protects
Looking how the creeper keeps building pressure being confined, and the question if nullifiers should be able to nullify through terrain. Maybe terrain colors need to have hardness to them. Then as creeper keeps building pressure, it can start releasing the pressure by corroding softer materials. If not pressure keeps growing and harder and harder materials start to be compromised. And then similarly nullifier has some penetration value which it can used to bypass terrain, possibly upgradeable number. So players can use softer materials to their advantage, with the risk of creeper getting critical pressure to start corroding through it before nullifier is perpared.
To simulate the game at a faster speed... Rather than using system clock or any real time clock for that matter, use how many upgrades the player acquired between leaving and returning and cap how much time it'll simulate.
Whoa, this is such a cool take on the old formula used for the other games, it reminds me of the good ol creeper world 2 My one and only concern is the quality on the finished visuals in the future, for my tastes they're perfectly fine but I just want to see this series really take off and I worry the average consumer would be turned off by retro graphics ;-;
I cant express how excited i am to see the game moving back into the CW2 map style. I used to daydream on paper and play a similar game when i was a kid. There would be army men in underground bunker systems and id use water to flush them out.
As someone who doesn't usually enjoy games like this, this looked very fun! Very innovative and it looks like it provides interesting yet intuitive problems to solve.
15:19 Start with a down-flow to release pressure, using a single digger to finish cutting the hole to actually engage the battle plan, once all the pressure has gone elsewhere and filled the rest of the tunnels again, you dig in from above and descend on the creeper makers from above. your enemy is a fluid, use trench warfare to divert flow
I like to think about creeper world as if it's starship troopers, but we're just the super high up in the ranks and we just see battalions as machines(turrets) and the enemy as a wave
The most impressive thing I've seen in creeper world series is that, in edition 2, I can accumulate liquid and lead it on to the enemy's top and see the enemy get destroyed. It was so satisfying.
In your description you should add a brief description of the game and some info on who you are, because I clicked on the video had no idea what I was watching 😂
When leaving a map that still has creeper, you could make the ships all return to a designated exit point first to give the simulation some run time on retreat.
I really love cw 3,4 and particle fleet. I'm getting so excited for this! Have you considered having a permeable ground material? I think that would be a unique challenge, because it could be resistant to some damage, and block terping. Additionally, maybe a heat mechanic? That dynamically changes how much the creeper flows/expands? (Can you imagine giant hunks of frozen creeper falling at you?
also, creeper "Vapor", which is super heated (so, if it's heated by a weapon, or sitting on lava) that can expand into voids, does less damage, but maybe makes opening some caverns bubble out a ton of creeper
