Paradroid

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Here you can find the latest version of my remake of the classic Commodore 64 game - Paradroid by Andrew Braybrook.

This is an open source project - with the source code available on github.

  Background

Your task is to clear the freighter of robots by destroying them with twin lasers or by transferring control to them. You control the 001 influence device. This device, when placed over a robots head will allow you to take control for a short time.

Use these controlled robots to destroy all other rouge robots on the ship.

You play the game using the keyboard - the default keys are the arrow keys, with the left control key as the action key.  The controls can be reassigned using the options within the game.

    Story

A fleet of Robo-Freighters on its way to the Beta Ceti system reported entering an uncharted field of asteroids. Each ship carries a cargo of battle droids to reinforce the outworld defences.

Two distress beacons have been recovered. Similar messages were stored on each. The ships had been bombarded by a powerful radionic beam from one of the asteroids.

All of the robots on the ships, including those in storage, became hyper-active. The crews report an attack by droids, isolating them on the bridge. They cannot reach the shuttle and can hold out for only a couple more hours.

Since these beacons were located two days ago, we can only fear the worst.

Some of the fleet was last seen heading for enemy space. In enemy hands the droids can be used against our forces.

Docking would be impossible, but we can beam aboard a prototype Influence Device.

The 001 Influence device consists of a helmet, which, when placed over a robot's control unit can halt the normal activities of that robot for a short time. The helmet has its own power supply and powers the robot itself, at an upgraded capability. The helmet also uses an energy cloak for protection of the host.

The helmet is fitted with twin lasers mounted in a turrent. These are low powered and have a slow recycle rate.

Most of the device's resources are channeled towards holding control of the host robot, as it attempts to resume 'normal' operation. It is therefore necessary to change the host robot often to prevent the device from burning out. Transfer to a new robot requires the device to drain its host of energy in order to take it over. Failure to achieve transfer results in the device being a free agent once more.

An Influence device can transmit only certain data, namely its own location and the location of other robots in visual range. This data is merged with known ship layouts on your C64 remote terminal.

Additional information about the ship and robots may be obtained by accessing the ship's computer at a console. A small-scale plan of the whole deck is available, as well as a side elevation of the ship.

Robots are represented on-screen as a symbol showing a three-digit number. The first digit shown is the important one, the class of the robot. It denotes strength also.

To find out more about any given robot, use the robot enquiry system at a console. Only data about units of a lower class than your current host is available, since it is the host's security clearance which is used to access the console.

  Download

Paradroid is available for both windows and Linux. It uses the SDL2 library for graphics, Angelscript for game scripting and Chipmunk2D for physics.

The windows archive should be self contained, with all the required DLL files included.

The Linux version requires the following libraries:

libsdl2-2.0-0

libsdl2-image-2.0-0

libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0

libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0

libchumpunk7

Non C64 tile images have been used with permission from the freedroid project.

     Donate

If you enjoy this remake - or would like to see additional ships please consider donating to help fund development