# Night Cruising

## Controls

`LEFT`/`RIGHT` arrows - change lanes
`UP`/`DOWN` arrows - faster or slower, or change menu items
`SPACEBAR`, `ENTER` - choose a menu item
`F11` - toggle fullscreen
`F12` - quit instantly

## Original README.txt

```
"Night Cruising"
by PsySal
December 7, 2008, 1.5 hrs to deadline

*** Official Compo Entry! ***

Here is a game, it's a narrative about a man who has lost something,
and is trying to replace it.

Drive down the highway, taking stops along the way. Arrows are all
you need for driving, and use spacebar for story sequences.

You get points for:

1- travelling KM
2- passing cars
3- bonuses

The game is (should be) winnable, I haven't won it yet but everything
is in place. I'll have to try it tomorrow just to make sure.

No sound effects, only one type of vehicle, and some other ideas
that I had for it didn't make it in, but overall I'm quite happy.

Enjoy!

PS: If you've got the song "Night Cruising" by Fishmans, that would be
an excellent soundtrack.
```

## July 21, 2026

This is a restoration of an old Ludum Dare 13 game I made.

I have had some people-- or, maybe, one person multiply-- mention that they connected with this game. So, I've brushed the dust off and made it work with SDL2.

Right now this will build for me on Linux, but requires my "packages" repository to be checked out adjacent to it. So this isn't really meant to be buildable by anyone, but it's close to that if I can just make my packages repository available or otherwise tune the dependencies. Either way, as a next step I'll try and get some binaries up on itch.io.

Something interesting about this game-- the rendering uses a kind of display list, built in lua, and then drawn in game::render => game::render_command (). I'm not really sure why I did that, but I don't mind it. It avoids a ton of callbacks for drawing things, and also avoids needing to coordinate a "scene graph" between the C++ part of the game and Lua (note: coordinating a scene graph would be the normal and proper thing to do.) As I write this, I vaguely remember that this was the first time I tried combining Lua and C++ into a game (but... was it really, or is that just a false memory?)

## July 22, 2026

Another interesting observation I was thinking about today: this game has two playmodes: a menu based text adventure and a more arcade piece. Augmenting some kind of live action mode with a text adventure mode is something I did with Venture the Void (made before this game) and maybe to some extent with The Real Texas. I also built other games this way.

Text is incredibly efficient at painting pictures in another's mind, it's something I need to remember because overall I think it's been a successful pattern for me. Here the text part adds a whole lot of dimension to what would otherwise be a really simple, maybe pointless experience. But OTOH the driving parts just give it enough of a tactile sense of realism to sell it.

As I write this now, kind of late at night, and it's a work night, every night is a work night, another thing I remember is that I based the dimensions of the roads and the stripes on the road on reality-- I don't remember if the game encodes pixels to meters anywhere explicitly, but I definitely did the math and some looking up of things like lane width, length of highway stripes, car size, and so on.

Anyways-- these are just reflections, looking back.

## Releases

- 1.1.1 - build fixes to make it work on windows
- 1.1.0 - working version July 21, 2026
	- started with pre-compo version
	- cleaned up, build working, made it work with SDL2
	- got it playable, realized it was an incomplete version
	- found the 1.0.0 compo zip file on an old HDD, merged changes in, got it working => 1.1.0
	- this should play identically to the compo version
- 1.0.0 - compo version
	- this exists in .zip format only, I don't think I will put it into git
- 0.1.0 - pre-compo version
	- this was my starting point
