AUTODUEL. porting a popular old game concept over to modern PC.

[peteym5]

I had this project on the back burner for aalmost 10 years now. I am looking to do a "Autoduel" Clone, a game that was originally on the Atari 8-bit and Atari ST computers, along with Commodore 64, IBM DOS PC, Amiga, Apple II. I kept putting it aside to work with other projects and only partly finished it, its been collecting cyber-dust on my hard drive. If you remember the game, it happened in a post-apocalyptic era where there is little law enforcement, breakdown of government type thing. You start with nothing, barrow a car. compete in duels with armored cars that have machine guns, rockets, flame throwers, etc. Games on the 8-bit systems had very basic/simple graphics. It had external arena activities going on with traveling between cities for deliveries, building your custom car, cloning, gambling and going on special missions. If you remember the game, look forward to hearing your thoughts.

 

Version I was looking to do on the PC was going to use Direct3D, some extra stuff in it, but would like to have elements of the original game with arena competitions, making deliveries, secret missions, custom car shops, etc. My personal additions would be a different arena for every city (autoduel used the same arena layout for all the cities). Different terrains. Different type of competitions like duels, battle races, jousts, drag races, etc. would like something different in some of the cities. More vehicle types, weapons, and accessories.

 

Looking for assistence with development might be helpful, but prefer people who are fans of Cars Wars and Autoduel. Know there was a similar game that was partly like this called highway 78/81 which did not have all the elements of "Autoduel" and looking to keep my game intriguing, a good role playing game element. The battling will just be a part of it. There is a strong possibility of mmorpg and personal play port. Maybe do both in one game.

 

Update, Once again it is being considered game for production. As you know I do get involved with other projects. I was working on a variant under a different name to avoid legal problems. To use the Car Wars or Audoduel would require authorization from Steve Jackson.

 

See: http://www.sjgames.com/carwars/ for details. I was going to based mine loosely around the original Autoduel 2D game, I am looking to use elements of a racing/driving game and add lot more stuff to it. With me being tied up with other projects right now it won't happen unless I know there are lots of people who demand to have such a game. I recently discovered some resources that will make development of this thing take less time that I originally anticipated.

 

Some of the technical information: I had the project started in Visual Basic with the Revolution3D engine. I got alittle frustrated with it and wasn't meeting up with my expectations. Now with new software, I am looking at making something that is what one can expect on a modern PC. I abandoned it was all the issues I had with Revolution 3D (buggy, long wait for upgrades, lack of backwards compatibility from prior versions.) I am going to porting it to over and completing the work in Dark Basic.

Edited March 14, 2009 by peteym5

[cimerians]

Very cool....I used to love this game on my C64. Sadly I havent played it since the 80's so I may need to fire up my c64 or emulator and play it again.

 

It was a great game overshadowed by Origins Ultima, kind of like Moebius. If thats the one your talking about.

 

Nice website, I never tried Steve Jacksons game, I'm sure its fun. The only other games other than D&D I tried were Robotech, Cyberpunk and Paranoia.