ABOUT THIS GAME
"It's become a game of chess, by wheel and trigger."
Auto Fire is a reinterpretation of the great auto combat games of the 1980's. It combines the tactical combat planning, dynamic world-generation, and player advancement of Roguelikes with outlaw landscapes, sexy cars and the ongoing quest for fame. Refine your vehicle, take on missions and build a name for yourself in a world where the only way to thrive is to drive.
- Engage in classic car combat
- Plan each move with turn-based tactics
- Explore a unique generated world
- Salvage loot and build your arsenal
- Acquire and load out sexy cars
- Haul cargo through dangerous territory
- Fight rivals in the Combat Arena
- Play the media and build your fame
Back in Black
Auto Fire is still rocking, still rolling, still improving
Whoa. Things have been quiet here for the entirety of 2020. Maybe we could call it intentional? Auto Fire has made great progress, but the updates posted to the web just never made their way here, and that's criminal. In the light of 2021 we apologize, and appreciate you sticking with us.
Auto Fire has made significant strides, and there's a lot to talk about!
Less Suffering, More Superstars
Something that seeps from of the cracks of Auto Fire's early footage is the standard desert post-apocalypse Mad Max thing. That dust-n-misery vibe is actually not quite accurate.
Yes
, there are deserts, and yes there was an apocalypse... of sorts. However, most of humanity is holed up in high-tech walled cities, protected from the dangerous world outside, and they are... bored. Drivers are their heroes. The life of a driver is both a fight for your life and a hustle for followers... and the new UI helps reflect that. Rusty metal is out, smart tablets are in.
There is a larger emphasis on characters... They are more prominent in encounters and they now are equipped to refer to each other in dialogue (which will continue to grow). The player's "feed" takes the place of a traditional Roguelike combat log, fielding Toots by your opponents as well as the chatter of each sector's residents.
Expanding the Fleet
The core fantasy of any vehicle game is acquiring more awesome cars and decking them out, so now the player can purchase better rides in citadels, and swap them out as they desire. Some of these professional rigs look pretty great, but just remember that the scrubs out in the wastes have new gear also... it just happens to be cobbled together from whatever rusty scrap they could find.
Hitting the Road
Sectors are now connected to each other via a
highway map
that must be braved to drive across the state. These are lawless routes with all the hazards of traveling long distances, and will ultimately be the setting of
convoy missions
as well. Eastbound and down!
Bigger and Better
The cars are always the stars of the show in Auto Fire, and originally the buildings were deliberately scaled down to help communicate the gridlines and avoid obstructing the player. However, those tiny structures inspired city roads to be two tiles across... this was just a little too cramped for enjoyable driving. As a result, everything has received a scale overhaul, bringing the world up to give a greater punch. City roads are still two tiles across, but there's now room for sidewalks that you can drive on if you need more space to maneuver.
More and More
The past year has had a lot more than that, and there's more to learn as the weeks continue forward:
- Ordnance is required for specific explosive weapons. Most weapons have unlimited ammo but use cooldowns, but for extra punch sometimes rockets are what you need.
- Entering new areas now requires gas. Cars have power cells for combat maneuvering, but real fuel is needed for scouting missions and long distance travel. A few weapons use gas as ammunition also, but are best used sparingly.
- Armor is now distributed around a vehicle in "plates", which helps players see which sides are more heavily armored on each vehicle.
- New visual effects!
- New environments, terrain and grass!
That's just the beginning... there's a lot more to see. All we can ask is that you stick around, and we'll
see you on the road!
MORE ABOUT THIS GAME
Talkin' 'bout My Generation
Desert generator at full power!
Something that is really enjoyable to me, believe it or not, is refining ways to generate cool maps. To see the result of a mad pile of code and some assets turn into something you can play can be a bit addicting. I’ve certainly got a lot to do for entirely new content, but since I was working on creating new types of maps, it was worthwhile to look back at how I was generating outposts.
Auto Fire
uses a few different generators: one for rolling terrain, one for piecing together city blocks, one for populating hand-crafted levels... Originally I had been using the straight terrain generator that I use for battlefields and the overworld maps... a method of laying out blobs of varying terrains using Voronoi regions. If you're unfamiliar those may sound froo-froo-fancy but for grids they are almost embarrassingly simple: Throw a bunch of spots down on the map that have a particular terrain type: mountains, clearing, rough terrain, etc. Test every tile on the map and mark it as part of whatever spot it is nearest. Add some noise and various other properties of each spot/region, plow roads to get you from place to place and you're pretty far along. It's at least enough for stuff like the overworld, where the specific terrain isn't so important.
For outposts, however, that was only part of the equation… I needed walled areas, I needed an “inside” and “outside” area. I wanted buildings to make the interior more interesting. I managed to piece together features like the walls and special setpieces like water towers and little dwellings. In the end the placement of buildings were random, which created a lot of unbelievable areas and many dead-ends… a curse for a driving game where speed is king.
The buildings were also single-tile affairs… This scale mismatch was deliberately set on early in the game’s development for cities, but have since been changed to a double scale that allows buildings to be more interesting and for roads to have more width in cities.
What I realized is that I had a really refined measure of control in cities, with varying width roads, support for passability and large crafted areas, and just overall a less random feel.
Cities are constructed using 8×8 blocks (which was 4×4 back when buildings were single-tile) that are crafted to hold a 2 or 4-lane road connector or a 1-lane alley (either left or right side). Each block has one or more exits, and a bunch of places where optional exits can be punched through if the system needs to create extra loops.
So why not do this with desert maps? Walls can be made this way of course, but we don’t want a desert map to look like Manhattan… Luckily there are a ton of tricks to keep roads from being straight and buildings falling in irregular patterns. This generator set used 4×4 tiles and almost entirely 1-lane roads, which can meander within a block like a Carcassone tile to keep things from looking too precise. One set of blocks can be used for the inside of the walls, and another for the lighter desert features outside. Everything’s great except that terrain needed to come back into the fore.
And so it did! Parts of the terrain generator came over to the block generator to give the map a more natural appearance… considering it was largely giant squares. With it we got terrain rendering thanks to Microsplat and some pretty nice grass from Advanced Terrain Grass. Our road-plowing routines guaranteed passability and some other code helped give the driveable spaces a little bit of vertical rise and fall.
So “why now” might come to mind… “You’ve had outposts for years now, so what’s the big deal about revising them now?” Fair question. The main reason is my recent investigation into new map types: Industrial parks! Dueling arenas! Race tracks! I have some examples that I’ve hand built with assets I have, but I want to get those generating also… and this same method will work for all of them.
Highways are also a culprit, because they are okay maps, but the road is arrow-straight and can’t really incorporate curves. With my current overworld system I can’t draw two-lane roads without using this block method. Also, a road that curves gently like a highway or race track is best laid out on an 8×8 tile… or even a 16×16. These things are all possible in our brave new world!
That’s the big news of February… Stay tuned to this channel for more developments. Excelsior!
Dark Future had its good moments when you had to control more than just 1 car.
It works, I tried the game like three years ago and if the actual content back then was boring because development had just started and difficulty was put very low on purpose with enemies making very low damage the fundation of movement and combat were already good enough.
I've played itch.io version a bit from the start (as far as I know it doesn't have save game feature yet).
thanks, it looks like a combination rogue like movement combined with car wars. I think I read or heard somewhere that the itch.io version is easier or more simple or something just to show proof of concept...anyway, it looks pretty cool even if it never fully reaches car wars detail I guess, it seems like he has plans to make it more complicated and detailed, but not sure in what ways.
