I decided to switch my starting project, from last year's (ThiefRL 2) to the year previous (Goblin Gold). The latter is closer to what I'm after. Here's what it looks like:
Next I got the basic car movement working, with an eight-way car sprite to show which direction it's driving. With a bit of animation to show the motion it works okay.
After playing with the controls on a hex grid, though, I decided it was too awkward. I kept trying to move vertically. Plus I thought maybe I'd offer diagonal movement as a car upgrade. Most people aren't used to using diagonal movement, so if you offer it as a separate thing they purchase they might consider it more carefully.
So I switched things to a square grid:
It's still super-ugly, and still has all the old stuff left over from the previous game. I'd hoped to get farther on terrain creation; I'll have to do that tomorrow.
The point of car movement is to go fast. I've been thinking about scales, to try to figure out what will push the player to go fast. Realistically the car will need to have its top speed be around four or five squares per turn, I think, so that's the rough movement speed multiplier you'd be working with. (Unless I have enemies that move at sub-one-square-per-turn speeds.) If you accelerate to four squares per turn and then decelerate, you go about 4*5 squares (two times the sum of the numbers 1 to 4). The rest of the map would be covered at top speed. So for instance if you had to go 256 squares, it'd take about 67 turns (as opposed to 256 turns to move a square at a time). So that's 189 turns saved.
I'll probably have some enemies that have to be attacked at speed (ramming), and some that require you to be at a standstill (sniping), or something like that.
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