Tag Archives: Car Wars

Car Wars Pocket Box Kickstarter Unboxed

About a year ago, I pitched in on a Kickstarter that was near and dear to my heart… the reprint of a vast library of early-80’s games from Steve Jackson Games. Many of these games came in a specially designed “pocket box” that was more durable than a ziplock bag and were the perfect size to fit on paperback book racks in stores.

These little guys held the first copies I owned of Car Wars and its supplements as well as other titles like Ogre. The manuals were small, and inside were super-folded maps as well as thin sheets of game counters that you cut out yourself. Perhaps these weren’t the honkin’ miniature-heavy boxes you see nowadays, but it was amazing how 5 bucks could buy you in to a whole world back then.

So today a big ‘ol box showed up. It was bigger than I thought it would be, although I did recall pledging the mammoth $200 “Car Wars and seven more games” package as a tip of the hat for everything SJG gave me in 1983. While I bought nearly everything from the Car Wars line back in the day, a number of cross-country moves separated me from my collection, and only a precious few pieces remained… This was a chance to get them back into my grubby little hands.

The first thing that struck me when taking the first of the contents out was how chunky big these new pocket boxes are. They were streamlined to remove the now-unneeded clasps and hooks, but they’re also a lot thicker.

The first set is the classic boxes of Illuminati, along with some Illum-themed folders as a bonus. We’ve got Illuminati Deluxe, but it’s great to have the real deal.

Ogre and its sequels/spinoffs/addons! Yes! What classics, and I’d always wanted a copy of Battlesuit in particular. I love these folders as well.

I’ve certainly never owned a copy of Undead or Kung Fu 2100, and it’s been soooooo long since I’ve played Awful Green Things (I think literally since it debuted in Dragon Magazine?). These are some awesome treasures.

Finally get to compare a new Pocket Box with the old. I put an original copy of Ogre against the new one… It appears about double thickness.

Now I should say that all those other SJ games were great, but I was eager to hit the star attraction and crack open the vaults of Car Wars loot. Look at the size of these crates!

Opening box #1… With Convoy peeking out at me like a long-absent friend.

And so it begins… Car Wars, Truck Stop, a couple expansion sets, the arena book, Convoy, GURPS Autoduel and a spare pocket box to put the expansions in. It starts strong!

I’m so glad to have a printed copy of this version of GURPS Autoduel. I have no problem with Darryl Elliott’s cover for the 2nd edition, but Denis Loubet’s original cover is my absolute favorite Car Wars illustration ever.

Convoy was one of the best supplements, as sort of choose-your-own adventure with Car Wars battles along the way. Whenever I wanted to immerse myself in that world or think about Auto Fire, I’d page through a bit of this guy. The book was one of the hardest losses from the move (or whenever it disappeared), and the PDF was I think my very first purchase from Warehouse 23.

I cracked open the bonus pocket box for the first time and it feels nice and solid. Feels similar to a slightly-undersized clamshell VHS case (for those that know what those feel like).

Once again, comparing old (right) versus new (left).

Comparing the old with the new here (new on top), the inside was lovingly recreated with all the usual inserts, with some bonus surprises including a set of two d6’s (which conveniently fit in the larger boxes!).

The new edition (right) is pretty much a direct scan of the original books (aside from a small note in the header), so this is as close to 1983 as you can get. This does mean you should expect whatever typos and game-balance quirks existed at the time.

My old copy (left) has a promo for Sunday Drivers for $5, while this reprint advertises Crash City (Sunday Drivers’ revised name) for a slightly higher price. The reprint also promotes Car Wars Deluxe, which was released closer to the mid-80’s. Not sure of the exact year of each.

These tiny little bonus notebooks they tucked into each pocket box are delightful.

Keeping with absolute authenticity, there are uncut counter sheets included as the originals had, but there are also die-cut versions of every counter so you don’t have to crack out the scissors.

The die-cut counters have a bit of extra thickness to them, which is great: The original 1/2″ x 1/4″ counters in particular were so thin and light that they were very hard to handle, and don’t you dare sneeze…

Moving on to treasure trove #2!

Two more expansion sets, Crash City, an Autoduel Quarterly collection and one of the Uncle Albert’s Catalogs, along with Zombietown and another bonus pocket box. Zombietown USA for GURPS Autoduel is one I’ve never owned and am eager to dig into.

Opening Box #3!

There’s some beefy stuff in here: Autoduel Champions(!), Chopper Challenge, the vehicle counter expansion set, another Uncle Al’s, and the AADA Vehicle Guide. A couple bonus pocket boxes and two folders are also tucked in here…

This book is iconic to me, and I’m super-glad they reprinted it with the foil cover… It’s so pristine it feels locked in time. (The AADA stands for the American Autoduel Association, natch).

The vehicle counter expansion set is chock full of game pieces for all the vehicles in the AADA guide above. They’re double-sided so you can flip them when destroyed. You can see from comparing the cut-out to the die-cut sheets that it wasn’t just a quick job to transfer them, they had to completely revise the layout to switch over.

Comparing new with the old again… Autoduel Champions was a crazy supplement that added Champions-style superheroes to the game, although more importantly it was the only way to get helicopter rules at the time. Notably, it also served as a Champions supplement, providing autoduelling rules for that game. I had completely forgotten that it included giant vehicle and helicopter counters for play to match the larger Champions scale.

R.I.P. Aaron Allston.

While I loved all the color cover art, this piece by George “Speed” Webber was my favorite piece of interior art (Sorry Denis!). When I was a kid I must have recreated this drawing half a dozen times in varying media including pixel-plotting on my Apple II plus.

Finally to bundle #4!

Good ol’ Off Uncle Al’s maks a couple more appearances (so great to have all four together again!), another arena map expansion as well as the offroad duelling supplement. One of those cool bonus folders along with one last pocket box fill the gaps, and finally a copy of Boat Wars! That’s one of the few supplements I never owned, should be fun to check out.

The off-road expansion was lovingly crafted, with those cool trike counters and one of the very few color maps they printed. I also loved getting full-sized expansions because the maps didn’t have to be folded a dozen times over!

Looking back on all the Car Wars loot, I feel it’s money well-spent.

And with all those other games I think it might have been an alright deal for $200 even back in the 80’s… The platypus seems to agree.

One last peek at the rad little notebooks from the Car Wars packages…

…and a look at the bonus pocket boxes once I got stickers on them to hold my expansions. The stickers were extremely hard to peel from their backing, but I got them on okay. The stickers are a bit narrower than the boxes themselves, however, so I can’t say they’re particularly centered.

Anyway, feels good man. My collection is finally back to beefy.

Auto Fire v0.6.08: Toots on the Highway

It’s been about a month since the last update of Auto Fire, and I’ve been focused on the content arc.  In between hitting “refresh” on the Kickstarter page for Car Wars Sixth Edition (really excited to see car combat come surging back), I managed to assemble a build with a good chunk of stuff.

The upcoming goal is to really focus on content generation, bulking out how sectors are laid out and how quests are encountered within them.  This helps draw players through the various sectors and really gives some needed context and narrative to the play arc.

Some notable elements below are 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 tweets by your opponents as well as residents of the current sector.

More gameplay-relevant is the introduction of highway maps between the various overworld sectors.  These will continue to evolve and reflect the hazards of traveling long distances.  Eventually they will be the setting of convoy missions, but first things first…

As always, you can download the work in progress at Itch.io…

Try out the newest developments!

Gameplay

  • Rockets from watch towers now take a number of turns to reach their targeted destination.
    • When you’re trying to take them out, make sure to keep moving!
    • Rockets will aim for a spread around the intended target when sighting in.
    • Some (but not all) delayed projectiles can even predict where you’ll be when they hit, forcing you to keep maneuvering.
  • Various world objects are now destructible and break apart using physics.
    • Guard tower, water tower, trash pile
  • Line of Sight for firing now properly checks sight rather than actual blocking which means that crates and little things won’t block your shots (finally!)
    • Added Line of Sight blocking to several buildings and entities that were not blocking.
  • Extended the sight radius for vehicles. They now check in a square radius rather than a circle…  which results in cars pursuing you from a good amount away.
Those windmills were just meant to be knocked down…

Visuals

  • The overworld no longer slows time because it’s already an abstraction and doesn’t need even more… this is only reserved for combat maps.
  • Occupied (combat) locations show explosions and smoke to help players know that they will be driving into a combat zone.
  • When a player clears a map of hostile forces, they are informed with “Cleared!” upon returning to the overworld.
  • Adjusted the camera so it lags slightly when moving.  Is it good? The jury is still out on this one…
  • The machinegun muzzle flash ejects bouncing shells.
  • Adjusted where rockets come out of a watchtower.
  • Adjusted the default quality level, which was for some reason defaulting to ultra-low Atari 2600 mode.
  • Revised overworld explosions since they are, again, abstractions.
  • Lowered some mountain terrain that was poking up through the fog of war.

Environment

  • The map generator works with maps chopped into multiple terrain chunks rather than a single one, helping performance on some larger maps.
  • Fixed the placement of the highway in highway entrances.
  • Highway entrances are now skinnier than they would have been.
  • Revised environment items:
    • Skid decal for danger zones.
    • Added some new shacks for the desert to replace some of the trash ones I was using.
    • The watchtower and other points of interest in the desert have been beefed up a bit with some new breakable elements.
    • Barbed wire is chunkier and easier to see.  It breaks with physics also.
    • Ground decals under watchtowers, outposts, garages and homesteads are more transparent and hopefully less… ugly?
  • Fixed some issues with setpieces when they are laid out in desert combat maps.
Clever maneuvering or collateral damage?

Content

  • The tutorial is spread out to include special encounters where you can get instructions on how to play.
  • Overworld sectors are now connected by long highway maps that must be traversed, which have some barricades and watchtowers along the way.  
    • More to come with these.
    • Highways now generate appropriate names and state highway numbers.
  • Population is now more aggressively associated with faction, so that dropping a new gang into an existing map changes the experience.
    • The boss quests are also determined by the faction, so each faction can have its own quests based on what location they might find themselves in.
  • Overworld enemies now explode immediately after you finish an encounter rather than one move later (which was confusing)
  • Introduce a new intro encounter for bosses when encountered in the field.
  • Camera zooms in on intro boss when played.

User Interface

  • Added highway signs indicating what sector we’re heading for.
  • The Highway designation is seen when entering a highway map.
  • The combat log is now the equivalent of a social media feed, bringing in more of the publicity elements that will ultimately define your quest for fame.
    • The feed contains information about kills and items that are acquired.
    • Boss barks now manifest as Tweets (or “Toots”)
    • Added new citizen tweets about various agents and parties.
  • Adjusted the encounter portrait to use large portraits now.
  • Improved the ability of quests and encounters to refer to you, locations and other characters.
  • Improved the automap title information to show the map and its current difficulty level.
  • When a contested area is defeated, display CLEARED! floating text.
  • All popups use black borders rather than metal.
Hitting the open road!

Balance

  • Adjusted weapon drop rate down in general.
  • No weapons dropped at tutorial.
  • Tutorial cars and tutorial level crates no longer drop weapons.  The only weapon you get at the very start is the single weapon you get after beating the first battlefield.
  • Adjusted the bosses after the tutorial so they don’t kick you in the nuts.

Audio

  • Properly called TargetSpotted when a vehicle spots the player.
  • Spotted sounds now use a cooldown in general so there aren’t honks all over the damn place.
  • Adjusted the default music volume, which was previously too damn loud.

Miscellaneous

  • Cleaned up a bunch of stuff to reduce the size of the game on disk and memory.
  • Fixed bugs with returning to conquered maps.
  • Fixed a variety of bugs related to killing things before their projectile lands.
  • Fixed issues with tossing loot
  • Added collision to city road tiles so physics works properly with them.
  • Fixed a variety of issues with grass
  • Added killall and noclip console command for development.
  • Try to avoid accidental triggers of entrances.

New art from an exciting guest artist!

​I just wanted to take a moment to crow about Auto Fire’s new title image, which was commissioned from legendary car combat illustrator Denis Loubet​!  

​This is super-exciting and my inner 1984 kid is absolutely nerding the hell out right now. He’s created art for a lot of my favorite things from that decade from Car Wars and Autoduel to Ultima and Champions. He did almost all the art for the original Car Wars​ pocket box, and created so many iconic works from that world. I feel like he was pretty instrumental in establishing what I thought was key to the Car Wars universe: The people and culture around the cars being as important as the cars themselves. It’s something that I think has been lost a bit and would love to be able to bring back.​

In another coincidence he also just so happened to create the cover art for the very first game I worked on​ (which I only participated on for a couple weeks), and I even met him when I interviewed at Origin waaaaaaay back in 1993.

Anyway, it was super-exciting to finally have a chance to work with him!  He did a fantastic job.

DISCORDATION

So this blog continues to be a main platform for documenting the things that I’ve been working on, but I wanted more immediate access to enthusiasts for the car combat genre. A new Discord has been launched as the answer to this.

Not just for Auto Fire, I wanted to participate with fans of Car Wars, Gaslands, Dark Future, Mad Max, and any other type of media where a motor vehicle shoots at another motor vehicle. Click below to join up!

Click here to join the Auto Combat Zone Discord!

Tricking Your Ride

The Seattle summer has finally gotten into full swing and it’s harder to stay inside, but in spite of this I’ve pulled together some time to work on Auto Fire’s core player systems…  and this involved a lot of time with Photoshop and Word as well as with Unity and Visual Studio.

As a rule, I design in a a very top-down way…  Visuals, mockups, and models are very important for me to get my head around the design as well as to communicate it to others for feedback.   My objective with Auto Fire was to keep the spirit of the deep car customization from games like Car Wars, but to streamline it for a smoother play experience.

I was a  huge fan of Car Wars back in the eight-e’s, but building a car for the game involved a wholllllle lot of pencil lead and eraser nubs…. like, blackened rubber crumbs all over the damn place. Players had to choose their body style, chassis, engine, tires, armor, weapons and equipment, all while balancing out limited space, weight and engine power to push everything forward.  It was great, but it was a solid half-hour (more or less depending on your experience) to make a good build…  If it helps you get a feel, think of the time investment of rolling up a new pen-and-paper character or, say, building a new Magic deck.

Incorporating mechanics for hardcore things like weight and spaces wasn’t impossible to pull off, but things like switching out weapons or changing gear can feel like something of a chore…  I felt I could do better.  For years and years now I toyed with the idea of applying a Diablo-style inventory grid, perhaps combined with the damage grid system from a number of FASA titles (I personally was a fan of the Renegade Legion series).  The idea had some promise, in that players had to find space on their vehicle for various weapons, and make tradeoffs to clear space for special equipment, huge engines, or cargo.  In addition, damage could be allocated square by square, penetrating into the car and damaging components as it reached them.

Being a top-down designer, my preferred way to hash out problems like this is to mock up the interface, move parts around, and visualize how it will feel for the player.  As I played with the parts I started to realize that applying “damage templates”, is really a kind of magic made for pencils and templates and the tension of rolling locations and hoping the template doesn’t include your driver or engine.  In a digital product where you don’t color in the squares yourself, it threatens to descend a bit into indecipherable noise.  In addition, when rearranging a car into different configurations, the spatial rules of vehicles started to clash with the system…  often the only extra room for a driver or engine was in the back corner or something.  It just didn’t feel like a vehicle the way I wanted.  Finally, I really wanted to incentivize the player to socket in new equipment as it is encountered, acquire new cars and choose various ones to meet the specialties for specific missions.  Ideally buying a new car gets you more than just a new set of numerical stats and grid layout.  “Vehicle loadout Tetris” still fascinates me and I’d love to try a PnP version of it or implement it into a arena-based game, but I’m steering away from it for this particular project. (See what I did there, wakka wakka).

Sooooooo in the end I went back to something a little more akin to decking out gear in an RPG, but there are some nuances that I believe will feel fresh when applied to vehicle loadouts.  When decking out a vehicle, the starting point is always the Chassis.  This is the body that everything else is built upon…  The player can acquire them at car dealerships, receive them as mission bounty, or salvage them in the wilds as loot.   Each chassis has some base stats that any equipment will modify, such as handling, armor, and fuel capacity.  It also has some built-in equipment as well as slots that can be customized…  Each vehicle body ultimately sports a fairly unique configuration.

Some chassis can sport large engines, but have limited handling.  Some can hold huge amounts of armor, but can only mount a large tank weapon in the front.  Some might have a turret mount, but the armor cannot be upgraded.  Some have a slower engine that cannot be replaced, but can haul an amazing amount of cargo.

Chassis and equipment can be found with mods that add additional bonuses and abilities that make finding loot interesting.  Weapons can be placed on any side of most vehicles, but heavy weapons need special mounts to be used, and turret slots are fairly rare.  Ram Plates can have explosive charges or sharpened edges for added effects.  Engines define a vehicle’s top speed, but it can also have acceleration benefits or a larger fuel capacity.  Tires can improve handling, but they can also resist damage from spikes or add to stealth properties.  An Armor Frame can boost a car’s armor, make it fireproof or laser-reflective, or even add mounted blades to slash on-foot enemies when driving adjacent to them.

Cargo Capacity is one of the most important reasons for players to change up their rides, as each chassis has a different number of cargo slots.  Most found equipment can be picked up without concern for weight or space (again, I didn’t want being out in the waste recovering gear to be a hassle), but cargo slots are used to hold major items for courier jobs like scientific gear, or priceless art, or passengers.  Rather than always running at capacity, however, a smart Driver may leave an extra space available in their vehicle during a run. This way they are prepared in case they run into special salvage out in the wilds, or a civilian who needs transport to safety…  for a hefty price, of course.  And if you find a crate of priceless military tech as you pick your way through a wrecked convoy and have no room…?  Well, you can always kick that sorry bastard to the side of the road to make space.

So all of this has to come together into a playable whole, of course.  I’ve got a lot of the core systems and definitions together for dozens of pieces of gear, but the next step is to implement the garage interface where players can buy and sell equipment as well as reconfigure their loadouts.  And there’s much more to do to make sure that decking out your car is as interesting as it possibly can be.  It’ll be an interesting summer.

Auto Fire Status Update – May 2017

In case you’re new to Auto Fire, here’s an overview.  If you are familiar with it, here’s a hint of what’s been happening over the past few months…

Overview

Auto Fire is a turn-based roguelike auto combat RPG set in the roads and cities of the shattered American west.  Enhance your vehicle, take on missions and build your name in a world where the only way to thrive is to drive.

Auto Fire is a deep, randomly-generated experience that combines the free-roaming adventure of games like Autoduel and FTL with the turn-based precision driving of games like Roadwar 2000 and the original Car Wars tabletop game.

An important part of the game is the player’s relationship with his or her car, and the ability to mount bigger and better weapons and equipment.

My Background

I’ve been a game developer for 24 years, both as a programmer and a designer.  In my past I have worked on titles like Heretic II, Jedi Outcast, X-Men Legends, and Dead Space 2 and 3.  These days I do design exclusively for my day job, and I miss programming.  I was also a big fan of the tabletop vehicle combat games of the 1980’s and want to create something worthy of that world.

Tools

I use Unity 5.6, Visual Studio, Adobe Photoshop.  Blender and Perforce when I get desperate.

Update

Over the past couple of months I’ve been reworking the weapons systems to allow for special attacks over time such as machinegun bursts and oil slicks.  An equipment system is in place that allows for secondary abilities to be mounted on the car such as radar sweeps and targeting computers.  These systems are coming on line as well as a new inventory system.

A city map can now generate complex environments with special boss arenas and repair stations.  The starting enclave has now been enhanced with new assets.  New music, vehicles and effects have worked their way into the build as well.

Here’s an update of what it looks like.