RED SQUAD: RECRUIT. EVERY PILOT STARTS SOMEWHERE

In Red Leader you're the last pilot of the last squadron, flying up the screen to break four fortresses. But nobody climbs into that seat on their first day. Before there was a Red Leader, there was a recruit.

That's the new game on the workbench: Red Squad: Recruit.

The story

The Dominion holds the Outer Reach, and the Rebellion is losing pilots faster than it can find them. So it takes whoever walks through the door: farm kids, freighter jockeys, the odd mechanic who swears they can fly anything with wings. Every one of them goes through the same training before they get anywhere near Red Squad.

Your instructor flies a captured Dominion fighter. That's on purpose. If you're going to meet those fighters out there, you meet one in here first, flown by someone who knows every trick it has and isn't shy about using them on you.

He won't shoot you down. It's training, and his guns are set to tag, not kill. But every tag counts, and he keeps score.

Pick a call sign

The first thing you do is pick your call sign, up to eight letters with the joystick. Then the instructor comes on the radio.

He talks to you through a small comms readout under the top of the canopy, typed out a letter at a time like an old teletype. Before the fight it's a briefing: the stick, the sight, the rules. During the fight it's something else. Put a bolt in him and you might get "GOOD SHOT, NOVA!" Let him put one in you and it's "TOO SLOW!" or "IN A REAL FIGHT YOU'D BE DUST." Spray bolts everywhere and he'll tell you to aim first. Lose track of him and he'll ask where you think he went.

He uses your call sign the whole time, which makes it personal.

The dogfight

The fight is flown from inside the cockpit. The sight stays fixed in the middle of the canopy and the stick turns the whole ship, the way a real ship would fly, and the cockpit sways a little as you bank. The stars slide past the canopy as you turn. Turn hard enough and you can go all the way round. That matters, because the instructor doesn't stay in front of you. He'll slide off the edge of the canopy, and you'll have to find him on the radar and haul the ship round after him.

The rules are simple: hit him ten times before he hits you five. His shots can't be shot down. You dodge them by turning, so the fight is about moving out of the way, getting him back in the sight, and firing before he fires first.

He doesn't make it easy. He banks into his turns, and when your bolts come close he rolls out of the way. When you do hit him, he flashes, rolls away, and comes back at you for more.

Land the tenth hit and you've PASSED. Take the fifth one yourself and you've WASHED OUT, and he'll send you back to the sim.

How it's made

Recruit is built on the same arcade kit as Red Leader, with something new on top: a cockpit. The cockpit is a full-screen picture painted pixel by pixel in the 64's own multicolor picture format. The game plays inside the canopy's windows, with the stars, the fighter, your bolts and his shots all flying behind the frame. The dashboard is live: score, shields, range, hits, a target lock, and a radar that shows where he is all the way round you.

Every step of it has been flown on real NTSC Commodore 64s, from an SD card, before the next step was built. A lot of what you see came out of that. The fighter's turns were doubled because they felt slow. The stars went from twenty to three, because real space is mostly empty. And the instructor used to roll constantly; now he only does it when you nearly hit him.

The fighter was drawn by hand too: head on, banked, and side on, at every size from a speck on the horizon to filling the canopy.

One of many

The dogfight is the first part of Recruit's training. Still to come are obstacle courses and a target range, flown as a vertical scroller like Red Leader, and a final exam against the instructors themselves. Pass it and you earn your place in the squadron.

And Recruit is just the start of a series. A couple of names on the whiteboard:

• Red Squad: First Mission
• Red Squad: Crash Landed

We'll say more about those when it's time.

We can't wait to get Recruit into your hands. It runs on any Commodore 64, and we'll post here when it's ready. Make an account and you'll hear about it first.