Light-Bikes

The title screen

This is the only game I ever got round to completing! Its a clone of light cycles, from the film Tron. Up to four players can take part in each game, any of which can be controlled by the keyboard or the computer. The first two players can also be controlled by joysticks.

If you havent seen the film or played similar games, its very simple. The players enter the playing arena from opposite directions, creating a line or wall behind them as they move. They cannot stop, only turn direction, and the aim is to trap the opponents so they hit a line and die.

A game in action.

I extended this idea slightly, by placing lazer guns at random intervals and places during play. A gun only gives one shot, but allows the player to shoot their way through a wall. Players can collect unlimited guns, but they can only shoot forward. This made for some sneaky escapes from desparate situations.

The AI in this game is fairly simple. As its possible to make an AI that is unbeatable, I had to dumb it down a bit. If the AI bike senses a wall ahead, it turns in the direction where there is more room (it only looks down the row/column of pixels, so this isnt all that accurate). I could control how clever the AI was by modifiying the distance the blocking wall was before the AI turned away - I think its set to about 4 pixels in the final game. Using these rules, the AI players would end up travelling in ever decreasing spirals, eventually killing themselves. So I made them change direction at random intervals, which livened up things a little bit.

The main menu, where you can select what will control each bike.

There was a small bug in the game that I managed to explain away instead of fix: when a player explodes, sometimes holes appear in any lines nearby. I decided these holes could be caused by shrapnel, as they could potentially make the game more exciting by making escape routs. The bug was actually caused by my inept use of sprites for the explosion!

I had intended for a .MOD file to be playing in the background on the title screen / high score sequence, but for some reason I couldnt get it to work in the compiled version. The music was echoing.mod - see the download section.

More Screenshots

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  The high score table.

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  The end game screen.

Download

Instructions

Download the disk image, place in your A drive, and turn on the computer.

Once the game has loaded, press space to get to the main menu. From here, you can press:

F1 to start the game with the current options
F2 - F5: cycle through keyboard, computer AI control or no entry for players 1 - 4. Players 1 & 2 also have a joystick option
F6: Redefine keys for any players currently configured with the keyboard

Within the game: The players all start opposite each other - player 1 on the left hand wall, player 2 on the right, player 3 on the top, player 4 on the bottom. All players will be travelling towards each other. Avoid the lines created by the other players, while trying to trap them with your own.

Pick up guns by running over the white dots when they appear. You can use them to shoot your way through walls. You can carry as many guns as you can collect, but each gun only works once.