VOID LANCER

VOID LANCER

A biomechanical shoot 'em up for the Commodore 64

Fly the Void Lancer into a world grown out of flesh, bone and machinery. Inspired by the art of H. R. Giger, VOID LANCER is a brand-new horizontal shooter written from scratch in 6502 assembly for a standard PAL Commodore 64 with a 1541 disk drive.

Ribbed tubes, xenomorph skulls, egg chambers, bone cathedrals and resin hives scroll past in smooth, pixel-by-pixel hardware scrolling while you blast your way through six long stages to six giant bosses.

Features

• 6 stages, each about two minutes of scrolling, each with its own landscape and its own version of the enemies: veined flesh, ivory bone, cracked fossil stone, intestinal biomass, glossy resin
• 6 giant bosses built from characters and moved pixel by pixel, each with its own attack patterns and weak points: the Biomech Core, the Ovomorph Mother, the Idol of Bones, the Pilot, the Brain Golem and the Hive Queen
• Power-up bar: collect capsules and pick what you need — Speed, Missiles, Double shot, Laser, up to two Options, and a frontal force field
• Fair collisions: hitboxes measured on the real sprite graphics and pixel-accurate terrain — if it hit you, it was really there
• Original SID soundtrack: 8 tunes (title, three stage themes, boss, stage clear, game over, stage intro) and sound effects, and the music keeps playing while the game loads
• Procedurally rendered "airbrush" graphics in the spirit of Giger, squeezed into C64 multicolour
• Full-screen title picture with an open lower border and a wavy sprite scroller, plus an attract-mode demo
• Extra lives at 30,000 points and every 50,000; after the sixth boss the game loops with a higher difficulty

Under the hood

For the demoscene crowd: an IRQ- and DMA-tolerant 2-bit fastloader with LZ77 decompression streamed straight to the final addresses (with a KERNAL fallback for SD2IEC, 1571 and other devices), double-buffered hardware scrolling with character parallax, a split between the HUD and the playfield, a 32-sprite multiplexer, giant bosses moved through XSCROLL/YSCROLL with their next position pre-rendered in the hidden buffer, and PETSCII directory art.

How to play

Download the .d64 disk image and run it on a real Commodore 64 with a 1541 drive, or in an emulator such as VICE (File → Smart attach / Autostart). The game is designed for PAL machines.

LOAD"*",8,1 RUN 

The fastloader is used on a 1541 (or with true drive emulation in VICE); on other devices the game falls back to the KERNAL loader.

Controls

Downloads

• voidlancer.d64 — the full game (6 stages)
• voidlancer_demo.d64 — demo version: the first stage and its boss