Agent Seeker
A PICO-8 Spy Hunter demake/remake/homage
Overview
Agent Seeker is a fast-paced, reflex-taxing game built in the style of the original Spy Hunter, one of the greatest video games ever created. [no citation needed]
Drive your heavily-customized luxury sports car down an endless roadway, protecting innocent motorists from a rogue's gallery of menacing enemy agents. Use machine guns, oil slicks, smoke screens, flamethrowers, and armor-piercing cannons to stop as many enemy agents as you can!
Controls
Arrow keys/D-Pad: Drive (l/r to steer, up for gas, down for brake)
Z key / O button: fire machine guns (front-facing, infinite ammunition)
X key / X button: activate secondary weapon (Catch drones to gain limited-use secondary weapons)
You
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[8x8] |
You are the Agent Seeker, one of our top undercover operatives. Your skill behind the wheel is peerless, and your car, the Z-1983 Interdictor, sports the most advanced active anti-vehicle countermeasures the agency has at our disposal. Your mission: eliminate any and all enemy agents on our nation's roadways!
Civilians
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[8x8] |
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[8x8] |
Ordinary, everyday motorists, enjoying a pleasant daily commute. Don't shoot civilians or run them off the road, or you'll lose your combo and not gain points for a few seconds! (If a civilian crashes through no fault of your own, you won't get penalized.)
Enemies
Destroy enemies to earn points and increase your combo multiplier. If you take too long between destroying enemies, you'll lose your combo!
Tire Slasher
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[8x8] |
Weak against weapons, but equipped with deadly tire spikes. Don't hit them from the sides!
Bulletproof Bruiser
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[8x8] |
Heavy and well-armored, these brutes will shrug off machine-gun fire and try to run you off the road. Return the favor!
Spikelayer
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[8x8] |
Souped-up box trucks that get ahead of you and drop tire spike strips. They're tough but not bulletproof!
Secondary Weapons / Drones
Throughout the game, you'll have the opportunity to gain drone-delivered secondary weapon systems. These powerful weapons vastly increase your car's firepower, but have limited ammunition. Catching drones can be a challenge!
Oil Slick
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with green highlights to gain an oil slick. Oil slicks are applied directly to the road behind you. Any car that touches an oil slick will skid out of control and crash!
Smokescreen
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with blue highlights to gain a smokescreen. Smokescreens will temporarily blind drivers in a wide cone behind your car, which will often cause them to veer off the road and crash!
Flamethrower
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with pink highlights to gain a flamethrower. Flamethrowers will blast a gout of flame out both sides of your car, incinerating anything too close. The flamethrower works against everything, but is highly effective when dealing with Tire Slashers!
Armor-Piercing Cannon
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with orange highlights to gain armor-piercing cannons. The AP Cannon replaces your car's machine guns with high-caliber anti-vehicle cannons. While their rate of fire is lower than your standard machine guns, a single round can take out anything it hits!
Development
Hi, everyone! Say hello to Agent Seeker!
I'm finally to a version one of this started-as-a-personal-jam project, a fun demake of the old Spy Hunter arcade game. I built the original version on a self-inflicted SFO-DCA plane jam, but I had so much fun making what I could on the plane ride that I decided I had to flesh it out some more, and here we are.
I can't even begin to imagine how many quarters I poured into the original Spy Hunter (thank you, George Gomez!) Hopefully, I've captured the fun and challenge of the original without losing too much of that PICO-8 charm.
Have fun, Agent Seeker!
Updates
Version 1.02: Balance and shine!
Graphics: Added more trees, rocks, and color depth to background
Balance: increased the chances of having an enemy appear when no other cars are on the road (help to keep those combos alive!)
Bug: fixed a very minor issue where trees were drawing out-of-order
Bug: fixed the byline on the published PNG cart
Version 1.01: A Little Change In Scene
- Added cool transition screens!
- Also updated the license so you can play around with it and see my horrible, sloppy code!
- That's it!
Version 1.0: Agent Seeker, you are go!
- Updated music: now 27% better than before
- Improved adaptive music algorithm: more responsive, fewer weird hiccoughs
- Improved ambiance: added trees and overpasses
- Added flair: your car goes psychedelic once you hit 15 combo
- Updated title graphic: now 36% better than before
- Gameplay balance: Tire Slashers will no longer deploy their slashers when they're under the effect of a smokescreen
- Minor annoyance fixed: Once the player crashes, the score penalty is removed promptly to show end-of-game score
- Performance bug fixed: new tire skids were continuing to be created ad infinitum on the game over screen. Fixed that madness.
- Added polish: improved skid algorithm
- Added polish: fixed drone approach algorithm
- Fancy gadgetry: your car's glovebox now contains a powerful spring-loaded boxing glove, designed to quickly and effectively incapacitate a hostile passenger. Should you ever need to use it, simply press the leftmost button hidden under the cap of your gearshift. It's a real knockout, agent!
WIP.5: Adding polish!
- Rad new title screen added
- Improved "burning" effect
- Extended top-tier music
- Some small copy edits
- Added highly advanced system capable of pinpointing your exact position, to within a few meters, anywhere on the globe. Research calls it their "Worldwide Telemetry Feature". It's available in your car's secret dashboard (which, sorry again, is inside the car, very small, and hard to see)
WIP.4: Balance and flow!
- Added speedometer (choose metric or standard units in the pause menu!)
- Reduced minimum score for first enemy from 50 to 30
- Fixed bug where spike strips could have negative speed (weird)
- Added to top speed of car to better reflect it's extreme spy nature (causes some tearing in the scenery, but what can ya do)
- Fixed bug where resupply drones would keep coming after player crash
- Fixed bug where alt fire would rapidly drain cannon ammo without firing cannon
- Added champagne bottle chiller to center console of player car. Again, hard to see
WIP.3: challenge and cleanup!
- Major update: Added HARD MODE (score 100k points to unlock!) Tougher AI, tougher course, more points, higher combo chain max, and more!
- Improved AI
- Improved music tracking/looping algorithms
- Improved crash tracking, made running enemies off the road more forgiving
- Adjusted color on spike strips dropped by Spiker enemies to make them look less like flames
- Added a martini glass holder to the player's car. It's very, very small and a little tough to see ;)
- Lotsa little bugs and adjustments
Love the idea! I do have a few comments/nitpicks
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I didn't encounter a single car (enemy or civilian) until my score was up to 55, which felt like a long time, and then they came zooming in from behind me and were off screen again before I knew what was up. That might not have been as bad except that all the enemy cars were the bulletproof ones, so they were unshootable and too fast to drive off the road.
- The jump from steering to OMGSTEERING felt really rapid. Like I'd tap left or right to steer, but if I happened to hold one of those a hair too long, it was like I turbo-boosted myself right into a crash.
Hope you keep working on this, I do love Spy Hunter!
Thank you, @2bitchuck!
- I'm going to get traffic started a little sooner–right now, the RNG doesn't kick in for enemy generation until 50 points, so if you're driving slowly, that's...a bit.
- On that note, I'd love feedback on how to create a "you should probably be driving faster" prompt for the player. This game was designed to be played in high second gear/low third gear, and going too slow makes it harder to play.
- The jump from steering to OMGSTEERING is rapid and intentional; like I said in the overview above, this is designed to be a reflex-taxing game. When it's done and perfect (ha), I want players to simultaneously ride a knife's edge but still feel like deaths weren't unfair or inevitable–that if they'd made a different split-second decision, they'd have come through OK.
- There's an element of practice and learning when to take a chance on running enemies off the road vs. when trying to do so runs too much of a risk to your own car. That said, I'd like to further balance this; right now, there's not enough incentive to run cars off the road instead of shooting them or using a special weapon. Running cars off the road is intended to be one of the core mechanics of the game, but it's the most challenging one to reliably pull off, and still carries the worst risk-on-return.
I remember a lot of the side-scrolling beat 'em up games had a flashing "GO -->" prompt on the right side of the screen when you'd dawdle too long, maybe something like that at the top of your screen?
All right, @2bitchuck, I think I have a good solution to the going-too-slow issue: I've added a speedometer! It shows you how fast you're going, and it blinks at you if you're going too slow or too fast (or way, way too fast).
This should give players a good visual cue as to "am I going fast enough?" If the speedometer says you're doing 15 miles per hour, that'll be a clue that maaaaybe you could speed up a bit. :D
Yeah, that worked very well. I don't know if you changed the car generation too, but the whole thing felt much better in this version - more cars sooner, more variety and I got a couple of the drones this time which I hadn't previously seen at all. It's very fun!
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