Looks like it's coming along nicely - Great work on the C64 look.

mighty nice there man.

Time for another couple of screenshots. Can't show a video really as there isn't much road defined yet. Until I got graphics I was happy with I hadn't made a start. I've gone through my own efforts (abysmal) and god knows how many other tilesets before I happened upon a random tweet I'd replied to back in 2015.

The player car, some of the enemy cars and the tileset that's making up the road are now using graphics designed by Davide Fichera who has made loads of C64 games over the years. He did a mock up picture using sprites and tiles for a racing game he was going to develop for the C64 but never got round to it. He has kindly given permission for me to use/adapt them to purpose for my game as long as I never use them for a genuine C64 game myself.

I've learnt a lot more about C64 sprites in the last couple of weeks to keep up the authenticity criteria for the game. Anyone who knows the C64 hardware will know that the multicolour mode for sprites will automatically go into double pixel mode so, while the sprites stay the same size, you only have 21 pixel width to work with as well as some colour restrictions that have already been discussed. The mock up screen I'm also showing below shows sprites that don't appear to be possible on a proper C64 because they aren't double pixel in width and yet do have multiple colours. This is because each one uses two sprites. A multicolour top component which is double pixel in width and the fine detail outlining is in black single pixels. Really clever stuff. I don't really need to do the same thing in my game so I've just overlaid both elements into one sprite but wanted to point this out in case it looked like I was taking a short cut.

Those buildings on the right side of the screen are some of my own work and also some images that are were free to use. Not that they are really that recognisable because I've discovered that Multisprite (covered in the competition thread) has the ability to load in any image you want and it will convert it into a 320 * 200 image using only the colours that are available for your chosen machine. And it works really well too, if any of you fancy trying it. Hopefully no chance of me screwing up a couple of images due to my old methods of manually recolouring anything that I've been tinkering with without putting the C64 palette into the editor first. I've already bitched about how i've had to keep doing that each time I relaunch it so won't go over that again.

The road design is going to take a huge amount of time so I'm likely to just have a rough attempt so I can think through having a stage system and get the other elements like cars in before I finish it. There's a hell of a lot of work needed still for this game so I'm glad I don't need to think too much about more graphics stuff and can concentrate on getting on with the code.

I'm not going to run with the boat sections that Spy Hunter had but I am now considering adding a bumping buggies element into the game where you can jump sections of water in your car and destroy things you land on. Undecided on that at the moment though.

But no computer in the 80's could ever use more than 16 colours on-screen.

Cough! My Amiga 500 I bought in 1988 could !

Frickin Laser Beams!   



And bombs! And explosions! 

Now it's looking like a RD2 game 

(Please ignore the dodgy colours at the start of the GIF, not sure why GifCam is playing up there...)