What’s Cooking Here Again?!
Once again, the keyboard is taking a proper beating in the lab. The old machine is running, the editor is open, and another experiment is slowly taking shape on real retro hardware.
This time the atmosphere is different from the clean circuit racing of Grand Prix 2D. The new idea leans more toward a city-night arcade feeling: a taxi, dark streets, neon lights, pickups, routes, traffic and fast little decisions under pressure.
Building with better tools
Every new project also proves why the toolchain matters. A game is not only the final executable file. It needs graphics, sprites, maps, conversion utilities, test files, packaging and a workflow that does not fight the developer every five minutes.
The Fantasy Foundry Retro Lab approach is to keep improving the tools while building the games themselves. Pixel editors, sprite tools, map utilities and format converters may look small, but they make it possible to create more ambitious DOS projects without losing the old-school spirit.
What the game may become
The project is still early, but the direction is already visible. The future game should feel like a compact DOS-era arcade title with a taxi theme. The player could drive through a city, pick up passengers, reach destinations, avoid trouble on the road and try to earn the best result before time runs out.
The visual tone should stay bold and readable: strong pixel art, a dramatic title screen, simple controls and a presentation style that feels at home on a 1990s PC. The plan is not to make a huge open-world simulation. The goal is a focused, playable and stylish retro game that can live comfortably on a floppy disk.
Small project, real machine
Developing directly around real hardware keeps the project honest. Screen modes, loading times, keyboard response, file sizes and memory use all become part of the design. That is exactly the kind of constraint that gives these projects their character.
For now, this is only the beginning. But the first signs are already on the screen, and the smell from the lab is suspiciously close to a new DOS game being cooked.
