FLASHBACK: 'Creeper World' by Knuckle Cracker (2009)

FLASHBACK is a series of articles that look at notable Flash games and their legacy in an often overlooked and forgotten era of independent games.

Few games embody a genuinely new idea; even fewer have the chance to execute it well right from the start. Creeper World is a game that conceived a very new and interesting subversion on the tower defense game, with games like Bloons Tower Defence long having predominated the Flash scene of the time. The original iteration of Creeper World was accompanied by Creeper World: Training Sim, a free Flash release that showcased its key mechanics, precisely hitting the mark for a Flash game that was accessible, challenging, and addictive.

In the far future of 13,271, humankind has long reached its apotheosis and colonised thousands of worlds. But without warning, the Creeper appeared: a thick goo that slowly descends across the universe, without thought or purpose. Consuming entire planets and billions of lives in its path, the Creeper turns most of civilisation into dust. However, all is not yet lost, as on the planet Hope, the last remnants of humankind have defied the Creeper, building a floating city as a refuge, moving nomadically to forever avert the Creeper's destructive advance.

Creeper World is a strategy game all about fighting off the Creeper, which slowly expands and rises across the topography of each level. To combat it, players construct nodes from a base to collect enough resources to build weapons that ward off the encroaching tide. When the player has constructed nodes connecting to all of the rifts that extend further back into Creeper territory, a portal is opened for the base to make an escape to another world, and the level is complete.

There's quite a few types of nodes players can construct on the grid, each of which require a connection to the base. Firstly, collectors can be placed to generate energy, which is needed to construct new nodes. Offensive nodes, including blasters and mortars, also require a constant churn of energy to continually repel the Creeper. Relays do nothing, but can be connected further apart, critical to gain territory and access the rifts. There's also nodes that increase the amount of collected energy players can store, and the speed that energy is distributed. Each of these and more are slowly unlocked and introduced as the player progresses.

Creeper World uses the conventions of the tower defense genre, but employs a much more interesting and open-ended approach. Compared to the linear and wave-based concept of enemies in tower defense games, the Creeper indefinitely expands across and up the environments. There's a vertical dimension too representing elevation, which affects the flow of the Creeper's advance. Building nodes is not limited by location, and they can be moved. There is only the strategy of ensuring they are connected and are best placed to fight the Creeper threat, which is not wave-based, but a constant and relenting onslaught of the elements.

It's all very involved for a Flash title. There's an economics of efficiency at play in Creeper World, with bars specifying the rate at which energy is collected, used, and at a deficit to completely power weapons. Much like the Creeper, soon too do you begin to maximise the use of space to figure out best how to avoid the Creeper, which rises into hitherto safe areas if ignored. Compared to tower defence games, which express the strategy of space in very superficial, linear ways, Creeper World becomes a fascinating game of using the level's geography to turn the literal tide.

Creeper World was the first game published by a one-man independent developer by the name of Knuckle Cracker, who stated they came up with the concept when experimenting with fog of war mechanics for another title. They estimated that Creeper World took a year to create, prototyping the concept for a month before development took off. The game has received sustained attention from its creator, who has spent the years after continuing to refine its concept and mechanics. The 2011 title Creeper World 2 experimented with a simpler side-scrolling approach to the concept, before returning to streamline the original concept with Creeper World 3 in 2014, and even a three-dimensional Creeper World 4 in 2020.

The Flash demo of Creeper World can be played online or on Flashpoint, with the full games in the Creeper World series available to purchase on the Knuckle Cracker website or Steam.