Crystal Hammer

⏱️Overview

This was my first 2 player car driving game. Well a car being here a 6×3 pixels solid color rectangle.
Done in that great 320×200 mode, with a static view of whole track on screen. I wrote it in Turbo Pascal 7.0 in 1996.

It was also very successful, I played it at the time with my elementary school colleges (even few visited).

💡Implementation

It had very basic 1 tone PC speaker sounds. And all moving graphics were blinking badly (no V-sync). I think I didn’t know how to change palette R,G,B colors yet, so it only had default 256 palette colors. But it did feature some pixel effects like leaving tire traces and palette rotation for water animation (and teleporters).

The later tracks were at night. A cool idea that wasn’t really that great due to that blinking. Cars had lamps (a triangle) that lit (changed colors) in front of them. One track was a total labyrinth in night and one even had a lighthouse with rotating light.

📊Features

It had 52 tracks, in just one scenery. But they featured plenty of attractions:

• Car damage
  It was simply decreasing car top speed. After some damage taken, a spanner icon (for your car only) would appear in a random place. If picked it would repair damage.
• Bridges
  Actually not easy to implement in a 2D game. I implemented them with special colors, reserved for detection and making car shift level (go dark under bridge) on bridge edges.
• Jumps
  Those gray to white areas, making cars jump (become uncontrollable) and land after some time, depending on car speed when entering.
• Areas with:
  • Water – Simply but nicely animating and making a splash sound when entering, slowing car.
  • Mud – Slowing cars down a lot.
  • Grease – Vigorously turning car in random directions (each frame), quite funny and with sound too.
  • Ice – Car wasn’t controllable on entering and was spinning in circle until it left ice.
• Teleporters
  Those pink-magenta blinking pixels. There could be pairs of them on track. When entered it would instantly place car in other place. They made some pretty funny and odd looking tracks possible. E.g. the track with 6 circles, you basically didn’t know where you’ll land.
• Moving barricades
  Closing and opening in a place on track requiring to be quick to pass or blocking road and making you wait until it opens again.
• Rubber road borders
  In red-pink color. I think the idea was to make some places not damage your car.

🔍Details

Since nearly all roads had borders, that was the main difficulty to slow down or quickly steer to not hit borders and take damage. Hitting a border stopped cars immediately in place (bad but easy to implement). This required cars to be steerable even without moving and around the edge not center.
I was detecting collisions (and areas) by reading a pixel from image. Hitting other car was possible and funny (it gained speed).