Reactorcore Game Designs
Free to forkNo licence and no copyright claim: build this game under your own name, or lift one idea from it. Why?
Vector Thunder is the 80s action show you wanted to be in. A futuristic super vehicle, disguised as an ordinary car, launches from a mobile headquarters and becomes whatever the chase needs: a car, a motorcycle or a turbo helicopter.
It plays as a top-down, semi-auto-scrolling pursuit shooter. You steer with WASD while a turret follows your mouse, and you fight through randomized waves of gang cars, bikes and trucks, built fresh each mission in the manner of Nova Drift.
The goal is old-fashioned street justice: clear the crime out of a city, then move on to the next one. It grows straight out of Knight Rider's talking car, Street Hawk's super bike, Blue Thunder and Airwolf's helicopters, and the hangar launches of SWAT Kats.
Anyone who grew up on, or later fell for, 80s action TV: the gadget-packed car, the bike that does the impossible, the helicopter nobody can catch. Players who love top-down vehicle shooters and want a clear-cut justice fantasy, without moral fog or a hundred-hour commitment.
WASD and the mouse. The turret turns a little slower than the pointer, so aiming has weight.
Power and freedom: one machine that can be anything the moment needs.
Meaning: making a city safe again, and seeing the list of saved cities grow.
Excitement and mastery: high-speed pursuits, and knowing exactly when to switch form.
It avoids draining autonomy (missions in any order, the boss can fall whenever you catch them) and time (a city is a short campaign that keeps your place).
The shows promised a role: be the vigilante with the super car. Games built on that fantasy usually hand you one vehicle and one scripted story, finished in a weekend.
Here every mission asks which form fits, every city is a generated campaign of eight missions and a finale, and there's always another city. The role never runs out.
It looks like a sleek civilian sports car. It isn't. The Vector is a transformable machine with three forms: a helicopter, a car, and a motorcycle that is actually the cockpit, ejected from the car or the helicopter to go where they can't.
All three can land or drive on water, floating like a boat or, at speed, skimming like a hydrofoil. None of them can dive. All three carry a laser, missiles and a machine gun, and a turbo rocket for jumps and dodges.
A handsome vigilante, as the genre demands, who works outside the law because, in the cities they visit, the law is usually part of the problem. Somewhere out there is an anonymous supporter: someone the pilot once helped, who now quietly helps back.
The Vector launches from a mobile headquarters, a big rig on the highway or a boat in the harbor, which carries it from city to city and refuels, rearms and repairs it between missions.
Eradicate crime, city by city. Each city has its own mix of the corrupt and the wicked: drug gangs, crooked corporations, police gone bad, shadow organizations, mastermind villains, mayors who rule like dictators, rogue private armies. They're generated for each city and defined by what they do, never by who they are.
You drive or fly the Vector from above while the camera scrolls along the route. The body goes where WASD sends it; the turret goes where the mouse points, at its own slower pace.
The design lists the functions but no keys, so the layout above is a suggestion. The HUD shows the three bars that matter: fuel, generator time and ammunition.
01 · Moment-to-moment
The road scrolls on, waves of gang vehicles pour in, and you weave, boost and fire. A tunnel ahead means the car; an alley too narrow for it means the bike; a blocked bridge means the helicopter. The pleasure is in reading the road and switching at the right moment, then getting there in one piece.
02 · Low metagame
Each city is a campaign laid out as a map of eight missions you take on in any order, and when they're done, a final mission against what's left of the city's crime. The boss doesn't always wait for the finale: you can take them down in any mission they turn up in, even an early one.
| Mission | The job |
|---|---|
| Rush | Beat the clock, or outrun a spreading blast wave |
| Prey | Fight off a chaser on your tail |
| Pursuit | Chase a target down and stop it |
| Explore | Get from A to B through whatever is in the way |
Every mission comes with the same small print: do it without blowing up.
03 · High metagame
The overarching story never ends: street justice, wherever it's needed. Every city you clean up goes into a catalog of cities saved, recording who held it and how you freed it: the gang you broke, the chief you exposed, the mayor you ran out of town.
New cities are generated, each with its own mix of villains, so there's always another one down the highway. The catalog is the record of the pilot's career, and the people in it remember.
04 · Practical game flow
Pick a city, pick a mission off its map, and launch. A mission plays like an episode's big chase, a few minutes long; a whole city fits an evening or two.
The game saves after every mission. If the Vector is wrecked, the pilot ejects on the bike and limps back to headquarters; the target got away, but the mission stays on the map to try again, and nothing else is undone.
There's one mode: street justice, an endless series of city campaigns, each one generated and finite.
The heart of it
Each form trades size for freedom, and each mission is a puzzle of when to be which:
| Form | Good at | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Helicopter | Flies, takes off and lands vertically, goes far, clears tall obstacles | Takes up the most space, so it can't go into much |
| Car | The fastest; fits tunnels and large building interiors | Bound to the ground and the open road |
| Motorcycle | Squeezes through narrow spaces; trials-style parkour over obstacles no car could drive on | The smallest and lightest of the three |
The bike isn't a separate vehicle: it's the cockpit ejecting from the car or the helicopter. While you ride it, the empty body follows on autopilot, the way a certain talking car used to, and docks back on when you call it.
Road combat
Pursuit mode (hyperthrust, cruise) gives every form an extra burst of top speed, and turns the boat into a hydrofoil. The turbo rocket is the trick move: a jump over a roadblock, a sideways dodge, a dash through a closing gap.
The weapons sit in a turret that turns slower than your mouse. Your pointer can be anywhere in an instant; the gun has to swing round to it. That small lag is the whole feel of the combat: you lead your targets, plan your sweeps, and position the vehicle so the turret is already facing the next threat.
Natural limits
Every form needs fuel to move or fly, and its systems run on a generator with a limited operating time. Ammunition is limited too, with one exception: when the laser's main battery runs dry, it keeps firing in a weak emergency mode, so you're never left helpless.
None of this is busywork. Headquarters refills everything between missions; the limits only exist inside a mission, where they make you think about which form to use, how long to stay in pursuit mode, and when to spend the missiles. And nothing sinks: on water, the Vector can float for as long as it likes.
The detective half
The Vector carries special abilities for situations guns don't solve: a directed EMP pulse, a directed microwave beam that incapacitates people and animals, an oil spray, magnesium countermeasures against missiles, a smoke exhaust and a sonic emitter.
It also sees more than you do: optical, thermal, infrared, x-ray, "smell", acoustic and biosign vision. Its analysis modes take material samples (chemical makeup, type of energy, which weapon from the police and military databases) and run a lie and stress detector. Out on a mission, they show who's hiding behind a wall and what a gang is really carrying.
Never the same chase twice
Like Nova Drift, every mission rolls its enemy waves fresh: which vehicles, how many, in what formation and from which side. The goons drive cars, bikes, vans and trucks; the bosses bring heavier things, a killdozer, a monster truck, a gunship, a tank or other military hardware.
Because the city's villains shape the pool, a city run by a rogue private army fights differently from one run by a drug gang, and the same mission type plays out differently every time.
Taken from them, kept by you
Each city's crime outfit has an edge of its own, a supercore: stolen military armor, a hacked traffic network, a fleet of jammers. Take it from them and they lose it for the rest of the campaign, and you keep it, ready from the first mission of the next city. You can carry up to five; stealing a sixth means letting one go.
The cities in your catalog remember, too. The anonymous supporter, and sometimes the people of a city you saved, send a friendly event into a mission now and then: a tip-off about a route, a roadblock that moves aside, a fuel drop on a rooftop. It's the world returning a favor, not a reward for playing a certain way.
Tonight, on Vector Thunder
A city where the gangs own the streets, the police own the gangs, and the mayor owns everyone. One vigilante. One machine that looks like a car until it doesn't.
When the road ends, it flies. When the alley narrows, it rides. When the chase is over, it rolls back into the truck, and the truck rolls on to the next city.
Car. Bike. Helicopter. Justice.