Speed Limit: 0-60 in Two Years (Part 2)
At around 2018 when Alex and I were wrapping up our first game, All You Can Eat, making Speed Limit the next easy, short project, seemed like a perfectly reasonable idea. The multi genre concept made a comeback, as did the idea of a game with ever faster vehicles. Looking back to where the ideas came from, it was clear this was going to be a 90s action movie. I didn’t want Speed Limit to be a reference vehicle for actual 90s movies however, I’ve played and enjoyed some games that did that too, and they were fine. No, this was going to be its own thing.
And one of these things was going to be playing with the aspect ratio. Even though we all now use 16:9 screens, there is still something that screams ‘movie’ when you have black bars on top and bottom. So, we used those black bars to both create this cinematic feeling and to give the illusion of depth by placing certain foreground items in front of those black bars, like the ramps in the train stage and bullet casings in the motorcycle stage.
Run!
Because we wanted you to start from a stand still, yet still have this sensation of speed when you start the game, the first stage just had to be a train. A train, in which “something so fantastic happens to the protagonist that we simply had to make a game about it”. For the gameplay we looked heavily at Metal Slug, one of the finer examples of shooters, both visually and in shear, enjoyable gameplay.
I didn’t want Speed Limit to be a reference vehicle for actual 90s movies however, I’ve played and enjoyed some games that did that too, and they were fine. No, this was going to be its own thing.
We tailored the first level to roughly the same length of their first stage, but our baddies are a lot more dangerous. If you don’t believe me, try playing Metal Slug 1 again, and see how many enemies actually attack you on the first level. We were shocked too! The conga line of soldiers was an idea that came out of the prototype stage 1, when people would move either very cautiously or sometimes not at all, so we gave them something to run from. So, the levels are all designed to reward you for either going fast, or doing things with a little more skill.
Mind the Gap
Two perhaps most notable inspirations for this level came from the 2013 movie Wolverine, and the styling behind Mirror’s Edge. This was the first stage that we actually worked on, because it seemed like it would be the easiest to prototype and to ‘understand’ in terms of mechanics. There are so many levels, and so many games where the boss is a helicopter you have to shoot down. We had a design rule for the first two stages: whatever is off-plane from the action, doesn’t get affected. Therefore, you never see any bystanders get hurt (or care about what’s going on for that matter), and you can’t shoot down the helicopter. And that’s also why you *can* shoot the baddies rappelling down from it.
The problem with working on a game like this is that you know something new is around the corner, and so getting to the end of this level was very exciting for us, because the quick and seamless transition between gameplays was a big part of our pitch. Without the transitions, everyone’s perception was that Speed Limit was a collection of different games entirely. Incidentally, we couldn’t find a publisher before this element was completed. Every transition was different, and every time we had to resort to reinventing how we go about things; even going so far as animating a 3D plane for our Artist Jurica to draw over, to interpret its shape in pixel form better.
Gunnit & Autodämmerung
The car stage takes a lot of inspirations from, obviously GTA, but also Spy hunter, and this one great Flash game Free way Fury. I think our lead programmer
Vanja Karanović outdid himself with getting the right balance between realistic and believable-but-also-fun physics for the vehicles here.
Full Throttle
I was a big fan of the 1996 Road Rash. Despite its flaws overall, I found the motorcycle stage of Bart’s Virtual Nightmare to be fun too, at least back in the day. At one point we were looking closer to Road Rash for gameplay mechanics, but it ended up being a stretch of how it would fit with the rest of the game. Having our character fight by kicking and/or punching seemed like giving him too much competency.
Also, riders get up and walk it off after being knocked off the bike in Road Rash, and we just couldn’t have crashing be so benign. So we ‘settled’ for a good, input friendly, feel of the motorcycle you’d just like to drive, enough danger from oncoming traffic, and then have enemies just spice things up. Shooters and racing games done from this perspective usually, I feel, give a very poor sense of distance. One game that stood out when doing research for this stage though was Black Viper for the Amiga.
Not having had an Amiga myself, I never heard of it before, but to me it seemed to come closest to a good perspective and easily judged distance. Our newest programmer at the time,
Karlo Koščal stood up to that challenge, apart from jumping in mid-production, and the result to me feels like the best of the 2D behind-the-rider gameplays.
Turn of the Tide & Aviary
I never actually played the Return of the Jedi for the Atari, but I found the isometric perspective refreshing for a shooter. We could, arguably, have just as easily made the helicopter levels a top down shooter, but this is not a game that threads old ground. Even though we had this level back in our prototype stage when I thought we could pull off a perspective in the distance, the difference is so vast it could easily be mistaken for a different game. The helicopter started off as a mix between the one from Blue Thunder and the Apache, but I’m glad it ended up being the much more creative brain child of our artist Jurica Cvetko.
Vertigo
Out of all the stages, the plane level had the perhaps farthest leap from its original inspiration. Part 2 of the Moose hunters stage in Mickey Mania had this amazing 3D (or 3D looking) effect, magically rendered on the old 16-bit Sega Mega drive. Also, anime often used hyper angled shots to relatively cheaply convey the sensation of speed, specially in the old days, before the extensive use of 3D. The result in the prototype however was somewhat underwhelming, so I’m really glad Jan Juračić came up with this barrel rolling idea out of the blue, pun certainly intended.
One thing I’m particularly fond of in this stage is the level of completely unnecessary realism. Everything moves very fast and you’re unlikely to catch it just by playing, but all the control surfaces on the planes react as they would in real life. So brakes, ailerons, lifts, rudders all move when they’re supposed to. Also, the damage is, like in the car level, location based. There is a structural frame layer drawn below the aircraft’s skin for each enemy, and you can see it as you peel away the top layer with bullets.