Agent Seeker
A PICO-8 Spy Hunter demake/remake/homage
Overview
Agent Seeker is a fast-paced, reflex-taxing game built in the style of the original Spy Hunter, one of the greatest video games ever created. [no citation needed]
Drive your heavily-customized luxury sports car down an endless roadway, protecting innocent motorists from a rogue's gallery of menacing enemy agents. Use machine guns, oil slicks, smoke screens, flamethrowers, and armor-piercing cannons to stop as many enemy agents as you can!
Controls
Arrow keys/D-Pad: Drive (l/r to steer, up for gas, down for brake)
Z key / O button: fire machine guns (front-facing, infinite ammunition)
X key / X button: activate secondary weapon (Catch drones to gain limited-use secondary weapons)
You
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[8x8] |
You are the Agent Seeker, one of our top undercover operatives. Your skill behind the wheel is peerless, and your car, the Z-1983 Interdictor, sports the most advanced active anti-vehicle countermeasures the agency has at our disposal. Your mission: eliminate any and all enemy agents on our nation's roadways!
Civilians
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[8x8] |
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[8x8] |
Ordinary, everyday motorists, enjoying a pleasant daily commute. Don't shoot civilians or run them off the road, or you'll lose your combo and not gain points for a few seconds! (If a civilian crashes through no fault of your own, you won't get penalized.)
Enemies
Destroy enemies to earn points and increase your combo multiplier. If you take too long between destroying enemies, you'll lose your combo!
Tire Slasher
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[8x8] |
Weak against weapons, but equipped with deadly tire spikes. Don't hit them from the sides!
Bulletproof Bruiser
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[8x8] |
Heavy and well-armored, these brutes will shrug off machine-gun fire and try to run you off the road. Return the favor!
Spikelayer
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[8x8] |
Souped-up box trucks that get ahead of you and drop tire spike strips. They're tough but not bulletproof!
Secondary Weapons / Drones
Throughout the game, you'll have the opportunity to gain drone-delivered secondary weapon systems. These powerful weapons vastly increase your car's firepower, but have limited ammunition. Catching drones can be a challenge!
Oil Slick
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with green highlights to gain an oil slick. Oil slicks are applied directly to the road behind you. Any car that touches an oil slick will skid out of control and crash!
Smokescreen
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with blue highlights to gain a smokescreen. Smokescreens will temporarily blind drivers in a wide cone behind your car, which will often cause them to veer off the road and crash!
Flamethrower
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with pink highlights to gain a flamethrower. Flamethrowers will blast a gout of flame out both sides of your car, incinerating anything too close. The flamethrower works against everything, but is highly effective when dealing with Tire Slashers!
Armor-Piercing Cannon
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[8x8] |
Catch the drone with orange highlights to gain armor-piercing cannons. The AP Cannon replaces your car's machine guns with high-caliber anti-vehicle cannons. While their rate of fire is lower than your standard machine guns, a single round can take out anything it hits!
Development
Hi, everyone! Say hello to Agent Seeker!
I'm finally to a version one of this started-as-a-personal-jam project, a fun demake of the old Spy Hunter arcade game. I built the original version on a self-inflicted SFO-DCA plane jam, but I had so much fun making what I could on the plane ride that I decided I had to flesh it out some more, and here we are.
I can't even begin to imagine how many quarters I poured into the original Spy Hunter (thank you, George Gomez!) Hopefully, I've captured the fun and challenge of the original without losing too much of that PICO-8 charm.
Have fun, Agent Seeker!
Updates
Version 1.01: A Little Change In Scene
- Added cool transition screens!
- Also updated the license so you can play around with it and see my horrible, sloppy code!
- That's it!
Version 1.0: Agent Seeker, you are go!
- Updated music: now 27% better than before
- Improved adaptive music algorithm: more responsive, fewer weird hiccoughs
- Improved ambiance: added trees and overpasses
- Added flair: your car goes psychedelic once you hit 15 combo
- Updated title graphic: now 36% better than before
- Gameplay balance: Tire Slashers will no longer deploy their slashers when they're under the effect of a smokescreen
- Minor annoyance fixed: Once the player crashes, the score penalty is removed promptly to show end-of-game score
- Performance bug fixed: new tire skids were continuing to be created ad infinitum on the game over screen. Fixed that madness.
- Added polish: improved skid algorithm
- Added polish: fixed drone approach algorithm
- Fancy gadgetry: your car's glovebox now contains a powerful spring-loaded boxing glove, designed to quickly and effectively incapacitate a hostile passenger. Should you ever need to use it, simply press the leftmost button hidden under the cap of your gearshift. It's a real knockout, agent!
WIP.5: Adding polish!
- Rad new title screen added
- Improved "burning" effect
- Extended top-tier music
- Some small copy edits
- Added highly advanced system capable of pinpointing your exact position, to within a few meters, anywhere on the globe. Research calls it their "Worldwide Telemetry Feature". It's available in your car's secret dashboard (which, sorry again, is inside the car, very small, and hard to see)
WIP.4: Balance and flow!
- Added speedometer (choose metric or standard units in the pause menu!)
- Reduced minimum score for first enemy from 50 to 30
- Fixed bug where spike strips could have negative speed (weird)
- Added to top speed of car to better reflect it's extreme spy nature (causes some tearing in the scenery, but what can ya do)
- Fixed bug where resupply drones would keep coming after player crash
- Fixed bug where alt fire would rapidly drain cannon ammo without firing cannon
- Added champagne bottle chiller to center console of player car. Again, hard to see
WIP.3: challenge and cleanup!
- Major update: Added HARD MODE (score 100k points to unlock!) Tougher AI, tougher course, more points, higher combo chain max, and more!
- Improved AI
- Improved music tracking/looping algorithms
- Improved crash tracking, made running enemies off the road more forgiving
- Adjusted color on spike strips dropped by Spiker enemies to make them look less like flames
- Added a martini glass holder to the player's car. It's very, very small and a little tough to see ;)
- Lotsa little bugs and adjustments
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