Jammer/1mandivision is working on a new racer being part of the Forum64 & Protovision Game Competition 2017. According to his post in the Protovision sub-board of the Forum64 board, in which he wrote the following:
“Hi!
Despite much of a struggle with my upcoming racer, fighting bugs and glitches, I decided to publish few very raw materials from the title to let you know it’s not dead 😉
Game in general aims at recreating Lotus feeling and mechanics on C64 and includes some quite bold features (and equaly bold glitches because of those :P). Of course it’s rather streamlined, considered the platform. Each race consists of 5 drivers who rival for the best rank. There’s no planned race against time with checkpoints (at least not for the compo). Biggest obstacle are multiplexed sprites and waveform samples together – deadly combination that doesn’t make things easy. Due to little time before deadline, game is most probably going to leave unfinished (with only one level to beat for example) and glitched like hell. If there’s a chance of extending deadline to the end of May, I’ll cry out sheer happiness xD
Ready features:
– Game features split screen with camera work, curves, AI, core game physics and controls updated in 50fps. Other features are updated according to free CPU time.
– Audio features simultaneous 2 channel music and sampled engine sounds for both players, mixed together in 4khz quality. Second car can be controlled either by player or by computer.
– 3 difficulty levels + each AI driver differs in skill (it’s basically effectiveness in shifting gears but it works)
– Unlike majority of C64 racers, El Loco features camera chasing our vehicle
– Gearbox is 6-manual. You shift gears with up/down + fire. Be warned that 1st gear is not automatically set after you’re greenlit in the beginning 😉
– Engine uses quite unusual solution which are sprite based roadsides. Planned as cpu friendly, it allows for very fluid curves but also gives me tons of troubles 😀 Road chars are crudely updated beneath sprite layer (it still looks awful there but I’m going to work sth out)Planned features:
– Multiple levels with various racing conditions and decorations. Some standard options like clear, night, fog, snow etc. Unfortunately level data and art are almost non existent yet due to majority of time consumed by game engine.
– Several race modes. Two planned for compo are Single Race and Ranked Series. The latter is running all levels one by one with points collected for ranks.
– Selection between ambient sound and music next to engine’s roar. Music might be both per level basis or random.
– Uphills/downhills are obviously in need but heavily debated as a feature. Engine allows for raising/lowering char horizon but there are heavy visual limitations because of sprites used. Sprites are used for cars, roadsides and background art (here clouds). Engine won’t allow for raising/lowering car sprites that easily.
– Level data is read from disk before each race. Game uses loader system by Mr Wegi which is lightning fast, even with depacking data. As I’ve read, loader might be SD2IEC friendly but I have totally no idea how it works in reality.I’ll post more materials soon, stay tuned! :)”
