Grand Hostage Police Car

When getting ready to program this episode, I had a bit of a dilemma over how I should proceed with the implementation of the episode. The choice was between having the game play in three dimensions or having the game play as an overhead map. Obviously I went with the second choice, but it was a tough choice and came down to the purity of the puzzle.

With the three dimensional option, the city would be drawn in a three-dimensional view, with the steering wheel becoming the interface for moving through the city. This would add to the look of the episode, but would have the problem of the player not knowing the location of the cop cars making the episode much more difficult to solve. The second problem is that the three dimensional view would seem to be lacking without animation, and making the game real-time is not really practical using the three dimensional rendering technique I used in earlier episodes. Flash does not support hardware 3D rendering, and until Flash 8, there was no direct access to the bitmap data, and it never existed at the time.

The two dimensional view didn't look as good as the three dimensional one, but had the added advantage that it would be easy to show the player where all the cops were so that the player could properly solve the episode. It also had the added benefit that the drawing of the display was much easier than the three-dimensional version.

As it turns out, the hardest part of creating this episode was the artificial intelligence. Figuring out how to control the cops turned out to be a big challenge though, as you will see, the solution to this problem is fairly simple.