SpyHunter4K

Contests 4K Game Competition - 2006
#1

A tribute to the arcade classic Spy Hunter. The goal is simple: Drive as far as you can. Earn extra points by shooting enemies or knocking them off the road. Be careful not to cause harm to civilians!

FEATURES INCLUDE

  • Based on original arcade game sprites!
  • Increasing difficulty levels
  • Extra life given every 10K points
  • Pixel-exact collision detection
  • In-Game Hi-Score

CONTROLS

  • ENTER to switch gears
  • LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys to drive
  • UP ARROW to accelerate
  • CTRL to fire
  • ESCAPE to exit

A COUPLE OF NOTES FOR GAMEPLAY

  • 250 points for killing Switch Blade
  • 500 points for killing Road Lord
  • Don’t forget hi gear (ENTER). It can provide you a means of escape in a tricky situation.
  • Once in hi gear, you don’t have to switch into low gear to slow down; just taking your foot (finger) off of the accelerator (UP ARROW) will slow you down but leave you in hi gear.
  • Comming to a complete stop or colliding into another car automatically switches you into low gear.
  • Bumping into a motorcycle will cause it to die immediately.
  • Enemies in front of you will speed away if you slow down to a point where you are not earning points.
  • You CAN knock Road Lord off the road! Persistence is key. Also, swiping him on the corner can provide a bigger hit and make it easier to knock him off.
  • The difficulty level is determined by the number of simultaneous cars on the screen, with an extra car being added very 10K points

HI-SCORE ROSTER

[tr]
[td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td]
[td]Place[/td]
[td]Score[/td]
[td]Player[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td]
[td]1st[/td]
[td]110780[/td]
[td]swpalmer[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td]
[td]2nd[/td]
[td]34890[/td]
[td]davidpfarrell[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td] [/td][td] [/td][td] [/td]
[td]3rd[/td]
[td][/td]
[td][/td]
[/tr]

Please take a minute to leave some feedback once you’ve played the game. If you don’t want to sign into the forums, you can email your feedback (see email address below)

I will keep the roster updated for the top 3 scores posted into the forums.

The game can seem difficult at first, but if you keep playing you will develop patterns of play that will help you get to 20-30K points.

Good Luck!

-Dave
SpyHunter4K (at) iNamik (dot) com

#2

Wow, just to get all that gfx into 4K is impressive. Then to have enough mem left to do spy hunter light is quite something. You even got the original steering feeling of spy hunter. But what is up with the vans ??? I can’t see any way of getting past them and there is no way of knocking them of the road either. Makes it quite annoying, or did I miss something?

Think I have to fire up mame to compare with original. You have ~30b left, don’t you want to make the road turn :wink:

#3

WOW. All those graphics and still able to make AI. As with Spyhunter on MAME I find it just too hard to play. Could only ply it int he arcade with a proper steering wheel.

#4

Greetings all,

Thank you for the replies.

Regarding the vans and knocking them around:

We spent hours tweaking the gameplay so that it was (hopefully) exciting enough to play but not impossible. The Road Lord (van) AI was specifically designed so that you COULD knock him off the road if you try hard enough.

Now we only had a chance to test the game on 4 different PCs before release, so there could be some kind of timing or JRE issue.

Also, because I’ve played the game about 1000 times during testing, i’ve developed some strategies for defeating the baddies. So there may be a higher “learning curve” than I’m aware of because of my overexposure to the game.

I would be very interested in knowing for sure if the Road Lord is truly unbeatable on your systems or if its a matter of getting enough play time in to be comfortable with the controls.

Also, it may be that our definitiions of too hard may be different. For me, ~35K points is as high as I can get, and that’s with SERIOUS concentration. My typical games go between 15K and 22K points. If you’re topping 13K then I’d say you’re a decent player.

Thanks again for the replies,

-Dave

#5

Did you try switching into hi gear (press ENTER) to pass?

Remember not to stay in hi gear too long as you will die if you hit any oncomming traffic.

You don’t have to switch into low gear to slow down; just taking your foot (finger) off of the accelerator (UP ARROW) will slow you down but leave you in hi gear.

Comming to a complete stop or colliding into another car automatically switches you into low gear.

-Dave

#6

Yep you are right, I probably just saw the keys and guessed how to use them :stuck_out_tongue: Very hard to use those keys (enter + cursor) on laptop, especially after 10.000 points where it seems to be a lot more badies. I’ll have to test it on a real kbd, maybe that will be a bit easier. Is it also a step up in difficulty at 10.000? Gradually increasing it would be best I think to let us newbies into the game.

#7

You are correct, the difficulty level is stepped up every 10K points. The number of simultanious cars is what constitutes the difficulty level.

You start the game with 2 simul. cars on the screen at any one time. This increases by 1 every 10K points.

The game is coded to max out at 9 simul. cars on the screen, but I consider it a theoretical limit as I’m not sure anyone can survive beyond 5, let alone 9 simul. cars on the screen.

-Dave

#8

Good stuff Dave and Chris. Great job on bringing back a classic from the days of riding my bike to the arcade.

Thanks!

#9

I’d really like to get some feedback on what kind of scores ppl are getting.

Here’s my most recent score (Taken 2 mins ago):

Score: 19625

Have any of you guys topped that? Lemme know and I’ll start the hi-score roster.

-Dave

#10

Yep… 34420

#11

Nice Job!! I have marked you at the 1st place position in the hi-score roster.

Thanks for replying!

-Dave

#12

New Hi Score : 34890

Keep 'em coming!

-Dave

#13

Ok… beat 110780 …

#14

Holy Cow!

bow I am not worthy! bow

Please share you l33t tactics with us!

#15

Is it just me or does this game not have any speed control? My 2 ghz computer runs it about 3x faster than my 850 mhz one. I can do ok on my slower computer, but it’s impossible to play on the faster one.

#16

Unfortunately, if you don’t have a good video card your 850mhz computer isn’t going to be fast enough to drive it at a full 30fps. That’s because the game draws each pixel individually. One of the sacrifices we had to make for size.

With that being said, I did play it on one computer at work that had problems limiting the frame rate. I installed the latest 1.4.2 JRE on the computer and it solved the problem. Perhaps you are having the same problem on your 2ghz computer. What version of the JRE are you running???

chris

#17

The trick is to not try.

You get points for traveling, not for running cars off the road. I could have gone further but I was getting bored and I saw that I couldn’t accumulate more lives. and I just needed the game to end so I could get a screen shot :slight_smile:

Once I had the max number of enemy cars on the screen I just bumped them to pack them together and then stayed behind them. You can literally coast there forever racking up the points :slight_smile:

So now you can see how lame my l33t score is :slight_smile:

#18

Hmm, I have to ask you:

Are you getting any baddies that drive up from the bottom of the screen while your driving? There’s a 3:8 chance that the baddie will come from the bottom.

I just modified my version to start at 9 cars and went for it … And when you get 3-4 switch blades coming from the bottom of the screen and you’ve got nowhere to run, death is imminent. Now you can try to hide behind civilians but once the switch blades open and kill the civilian, you stop earning points … I also found that I ran into motorcycles alot while trying to evade which again stopped earning points … And trying to shoot blades in front of you to make room often ends up killing nearby civilians (because ther are soo darn many) which again stops earning points.

I am maxing out at 7K points

My only assumption is : You are not giving yourself enough credit for your mad skillz

Got any more tactics you can share?

-Dave

#19

You only stop earning points temporarily of course… so you just let that happen until you have only a pack of bad guys in front of you. They will all be going the same speed so the situation will be stable until the next 10000 point mark.

#20

Umm Ti-4200 (reasonably good card?) with java 1.5.0_06. It doesn’t really seem that slow either (maybe a little). Its moreso the other computer is impossibly fast.