Top down racer

[jhhoward]

I've added a very basic wiki page in the "work-in-progress" section:

http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title=Joyrider

Thanks! I've requested a wiki account so I can fill in some details.

I've attached a new version of the game to this post. Here's an overview of the game:

Game Modes
There are several game modes available:

Story : Features three missions with specific objectives
Free roam : Freely explore the city at your own leisure
Survival (Arcade) : With the full force of the police after you, survive as long as you can!
Pursuit (Arcade) : Play as the police and chase down the suspect, ramming them off the road.
Pursuit (2 Player): Player 1 plays as the police, whilst Player 2 tries to escape

Controls : There are two control schemes available for playing with:
Standard:
<Dpad> : Steer car left or right
<A> : Accelerate
<B> : Brake

Alternate / Casual:
<Dpad> : Steer the car North, East, South or West
<X> : Drive in direction of dpad input

<Start> : Pause game / view map

All feedback appreciated!

[D3thAdd3r]

I played through the story mode and it's pretty good. I ran into a bug on "collector" where I came up to the first stop full speed on the sidewalk and the guy never came out of the car so I just had to restart(somehow ran my driver over?). I tried reproducing it and I can't so not a big deal. The new pursuit mode is fun and I look forward to trying the 2 player version when I find another player handy. I miss the title screen graphics but I understand bytes becoming precious. Probably most guys would call this done, what are the future plans on this?

[jhhoward]

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad you enjoyed it. I haven't seen that bug before and I couldn't reproduce it either, so not sure what the problem was.

Yes, it was a shame I had to take the title screen graphics out, but I was too limited on PROGMEM space to squeeze it in. I was thinking about adding extra missions or modes, but there are already quite a few ways to play, and the program memory is almost completely full. The 'survival' mode is my favourite as it's fun to see how long I can last without being driven off the road

I'm calling this version 'done' and I've submitted it as my entry for UCC2014. After the competition has officially ended, I'll get round to posting the source up on my github account so those who are interested can have a poke around with what I've done. I don't really have much free time at the moment to make any more improvements before the November deadline, but if I do find any glaring bugs then I'll try to patch them up!

[Jubatian]

Hope no problem posting in this old topic.

I just discovered this game, and it seems being quite a feat! I didn't try it out wholly yet (still only emulator, sitting in the kitchen where I have net but much less everything else), but what I had seen so far is quite promising. A little GTA clone in just 60K! The action going on is quite dense, I like the small features, the people moving in and out, very smooth and responsive, definitely needs a proper controller for the best game experience. I guess it uses normal 8 bits per pixel RAM tiles, yet it feels like there is much more going on than what should be possible within that constraint (RAM tile count limit). The map is also pretty huge, some decent trickery should be going on there to pull that off of a few dozen Kbytes.

I liked the old top-down GTA back in the days, that was also quite a feat back then, a huge metropolis crammed in the limitations of a 4.86.

There are a few new developments recently, Mode 13 and such (I also proposed a method for a potentially faster 6 cycles / pixel 4 bits per pixel mode, it feels like that maybe its 128 ROM tile limit would be enough for this type of game), maybe these would worth looking at, hoping for something even denser of this genre.

But of course this thing is already impressively good as it is. There are so many things seemingly impossible happening there, also starting to noticing the cars, how their logic might be solved to make them appear in a plausible manner while seemingly there are so many cars and pedestrians on the map that even triple the memory wouldn't be enough to cover their states.

[jhhoward]

Glad to hear that you enjoyed the game and appreciate all the work I put into it!

It was certainly quite a challenge to squeeze all the features into such a small amount of program space / RAM. Another big challenge was getting everything to update within the vblank.

I put quite a few details about how I made the game in this thread: tricks like making the varied coloured sprites and the big open world. The source is all up on my github if you want to have a poke around at the code. It is mostly written in C and I think fairly easy to follow.

It would probably be possible to squeeze more into a game like this with a 4bpp mode as a huge amount of flash space is eaten up by sprites / tiles. One idea I had to make the world more rich was to have 'patches' of tiles overlaid in certain places: e.g. a building as the base pattern that is used in several places, but each with a 'patch' with its own sign.

Another option for world storage is to just stream data from the SD card but the AI would need to be tackled differently, since it makes some assumptions about the tiled pattern layout of the world.

[Jubatian]

Just an idea for the AI part, after reading the topic.

The AI operates on the macro-tiles, then simply leave them in the flash, only the macro-tiles. Just put a different world under them for example using your own level streaming techniques you described in its topic: you can then be creative in designing the map, you only have to stick to the schematic defined by the layout of your macro-tiles. For a GTA style game one nice large city is enough.

The SD card could also be a nice thing for assets not directly related to the intense action, for example you could stream in mission data as the player progresses (this would enable you to design more elaborate and longer lasting missions) or cutscenes (such as text and small interlude images, for example to detail the story of some gang wars if sticking to the GTA theme). Maybe even streaming MIDI style music is possible (at least I am thinking about such a possibility for a larger RPG).

Then use the space you got for enhancing game mechanics: if it aims to follow the style of GTA, then like add possibility to leave the car, and of course traffic lamps at the intersections where drivers need to stop, hopelessly vulnerable to be robbed of their cars like in the original game. Or I see it originally started as some racing game concept. Look in maybe the old DOS title, Death Rally, it offered some interesting concepts (weapons... Pole position? Who needs that, I am the only one still moving!)

Just random ideas.