Single-player Escort Mode is Here!


Yeah, I know this is a small bump in the version number to 0.9.2, but this really is a major update (I just didn't anticipate a major feature add after declaring 0.9, and don't care to go to 0.10.)

Anyhow, I wasn't expecting to add a single-player mode to this retro-mod of River Raid (since you can just play River Raid for that) but I kept trying to see how far I could escort Player 2 while testing... so I eventually gave in and built an autopilot for P2 and now I have a bonafide 1P mode.  Who saw that coming?  Welcome to the new 1P Escort Mode!  Everything here should still be doable on the Atari 7800 should I ever take this that far (well, the audio here has more layers than the 7800, to be precise).

I made a few tweaks from the basics for the 1P game, to tune it better for the difficulties of escorting.  Refueling is twice as fast.  Blowing up the bridge is worth twice as much.  This has turned out to be a terribly fun mod so far... but I feel like at least one more tweak is needed to make it great.  That is, I need to somehow make it fair when an enemy crosses from just above an island to kill the escorted B-25-like airship.  Well, more fair than just learning the map well enough to know where the best path with the best odds is.  Thus, I'm considering firing a missile to the rear as well... but that just feels funny.  I'll dwell on it more.  Suggestions welcome.

Added:

  • 1P Escort Mode complete with leaderboard.

Changed:

  • A bit more polish on the title screen and menus.  Besides background color shifting, re-tweaked the art in 24 colors instead of 13.  The new mode is so fine it was begging me to one-up the art as well.
  • Changed the names of the 2P modes from "Easy Lives" and "Hard Lives" to "Joint" and "Own It."
  • Not a change, really, but note that 1P mode assigns the keys differently to Player 1 than 2P mode does (arrows and space instead of WASD and space).

Fixed:

  • Banking acceleration had a typo that made it a smidge off from the original (or, well, what it was intended to be since I did opt up front to smooth the jitter/turbulence out of the original while still hitting max speed at the same time).

Known Issues:

  • Dying can very rarely put you in a different land (at least, while running from the dev env).  I haven't been able to reproduce this bug reliably in order to fix it.  It seems to have something to do with dying near the end of a level -- perhaps, especially, a dark-green level.

Files

river-raid-squadron-linux32.zip 8.6 MB
Version 0.9.2 Feb 07, 2022
river-raid-squadron-win32.zip 4.1 MB
Version 0.9.2 Feb 07, 2022

Get River Raid Squadron

Comments

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1-player mode could have both WASD and arrow keys enabled, so there's a choice.

Yup.  Considered it.  There are some reasons why I didn't jump at that with this release.  Perhaps not very good reasons.  But reasons.