Bent Chrome

Welcome to the Rustbelt Circus

Bent Chrome is the busted-love letter to Twisted Metal we were promised on late-night cable but never got. It’s a top-down vehicular bloodsport where the air tastes like burnt copper, the neon never shuts off, and every fix-it ticket gets paid in shrapnel. You pilot scrapyard nightmares through corporate-owned arenas, cashing in on spectacle so the rest of the city keeps pretending the lights still work.

Status (June 2026): Bent Chrome is being rebuilt from the chassis up on Godot 4.7. The controls and flow below are the target spec — the current build boots a placeholder shell while each system gets re-welded one at a time. The old prototype is parked in legacy/.

Installation

1. Grab the code: git clone https://github.com/b3p3k0/bentchrome.git && cd bentchrome.
2. Run the installer for your OS:
   • Linux: ./RUNME.sh
   • macOS: ./RUNME.sh
   • Windows: double-click RUNME.cmd, or run RUNME.cmd from Command Prompt or PowerShell
3. Play the game — now and every time: launch with ./PLAY.sh (Linux/macOS) or double-click PLAY.cmd (Windows). The installer pins Godot 4.7, verifies the official download, and imports the project assets for you the first time.
4. Staying current — no git required: open Settings → CHECK FOR UPDATES in-game. If there's a newer build you'll see the changelog; hit DOWNLOAD, then RESTART, and the next launch through PLAY unpacks it, reimports, and boots the fresh build. Because updates arrive on that launcher, always start the game with PLAY rather than calling godot directly.
5. Manual setup, if preferred: put Godot 4.7 on your path and run godot --headless --path . --import once, then launch with godot --path . (you'll just have to apply updates by re-running PLAY).
6. Builds: When standalone binaries arrive they’ll live under dist/. Until then, run straight from the source checkout and pretend crashes are deliberate explosions.

Getting Started & Controls

The game starts with a splash screen offering Single Player, Multiplayer, Story, or Settings. The story screen shows game background with 'Press any key to return'. Settings keeps everyday display options up front; Developer Options opens a separate playtesting panel where Developer Mode is the master breaker for DEVGOD. That choice stays remembered while the breaker is off, but cannot affect a run until it is switched back on. (Want to jump straight to a particular arena? That's what Single Battle is for.) Settings is deliberately arrow-only: Up/Down selects, Left/Right changes values, Right enters --> rows, and Escape backs out with every change already saved. Choices persist between sessions.

Pick Your Lane

Single Player opens the garage door with three lanes, with Road Trip ready to go by default:

• DRIVER'S ED — the practice yard. The sign-up window asks what you're here for: First Time Driver runs the full eight-lesson course (driving, braking and boost, both trigger fingers, scavenging and repairs, floors and ramps, jump pads, every nasty surface the wasteland serves, and a smash-yard finale — each lesson checks you actually DID the thing before moving on), while Just Here for a Test Drive hands you the same yard with no lessons and the exit already open — a no-stakes place to feel out a new ride. Nobody shoots back in either. When you're done, drive out the big EXIT tunnel on the north wall (it stays gated until class lets out), or bail any time from the pause menu.
• ROAD TRIP — the campaign. Sends you past the DMV below on the way to the garage.
• SINGLE BATTLE — one arena, one brawl. Same DMV, then the fight card: every open melee arena in tour order (the under-construction stops hang greyed as coming attractions — bosses and the highway keep their campaign exclusives). Pick your battleground, pick your ride, and go. Winning shows the classic panel — no tour to rejoin — and Restart re-runs the same arena with a fresh three lives.

Pick Your License

Road Trip sends you past the DMV before the garage, with Road Raging Commuter highlighted for a new trip. Three license classes, one campaign each — pick before you drive, live with it until you quit back to the title:

• LEARNER'S PERMIT — soft hits, lazy trigger fingers, bosses that let you breathe. The Rustbelt, with training wheels.
• ROAD RAGING COMMUTER — they mean it out there, but you'll get a word in edgewise.
• REVOKED LICENSE — the ride as intended. Full damage, full cadence, bosses off the leash.

Player Selection

License in hand, you'll land in the Player Selection screen where you can browse through 9 hardened drivers and their combat-ready rides. Each character has unique stats and backstory that affect their performance in the arena.

Player Selection Controls:

• Navigate: A/D, Left/Right arrows, D-pad Left/Right, or left stick X-axis to scroll through characters
• More Info: W or Square/West face button to open detailed character bio and expanded stats
• Confirm: Enter, Space, or Cross/South face button to select your driver and enter the arena
• Close Bio: W or Square/West face button again to close the character bio popup

Each character has five core combat statistics rated 1-10:

• Acceleration: How quickly your vehicle reaches top speed
• Top Speed: Maximum velocity in straight-line runs
• Handling: Responsiveness and control precision
• Armor: Resistance to collision damage and weapons fire
• Special Power: Effectiveness of special weapon systems

After confirming your selection, you'll drop directly into the Test Arena to put your chosen driver through their paces.

Combat Controls

• Movement: steer-to-drive. W/Up throttles, S/Down is the brake pedal (hard, but nothing here stops on a dime) and backs up once you're crawling, A/D or Left/Right steer (left stick does the same on a controller). Weight is real: a motorcycle snaps off the line while a truck grinds up to speed, and lifting the throttle coasts you down gradually — the heavier the ride, the farther it rolls. Every ride carries real brake lights: dark crimson at rest, bright red while the pedal fights its current direction; handbrake slides keep their own skid language.
• Handbrake: Left Ctrl / east face button. Yanks the rear traction — the car slides and rotates while shedding speed gently. Charge the corner, pull it, swing the nose, release, launch. Drifting is a lifestyle.
• Camera View: tap G / north face button to toggle a pulled-back tactical overview; tap again for the combat view. Both depths, the persisted toggle, and velocity look-ahead are configurable under Settings → Graphics. Lost yourself in the pileup? Tap T / right-stick click to flicker your car bright for a moment.
• Machine Gun: Left click or Space. Infinite ammo, chip damage, fires off the nose. Watch the heat bar — redline it and the gun locks out until it cools.
• Selected Weapon: Right click or K fires whatever slot is active. Cycle slots with the mouse wheel (or / to step forward on keyboard): your car's signature special (recharges on its own — don't hoard it) plus four missiles with four personalities — fire (medium hit, steady tracking), homing (light hit, vicious tracking), power (heavy hit, flies dead straight; lead your shots), and rear (Fire Missile numbers and tracking, launched blue from the tail). The wheel skips anything empty and a dry slot auto-cycles to your next armed weapon — every click gives you SOMETHING, no dead clicks mid-brawl. All nine signature specials are live — flame columns, lock-on taser zaps, body-check leaps, charged rams; every driver fights different. One trigger discipline for the whole rack: touch any weapon but the machine gun and the rest of your heavy hardware locks out for two seconds — pick your shot. (The machine gun runs on its own heat and never pays that toll.)
• Ammo: missiles are scavenged, not printed. Grab the green M (fire), cyan H (homing), orange P (power), and blue R (rear) crates around the arena; crates respawn, your patience won't. Rear missiles start at zero, just like mines. There's no slot limit anymore — hoard a whole trunk of one missile if that's your style. Every collectible carries a high-contrast hot-pink ring around its larger drive-over surface, including chase medkits and nitro—clip the circle and the road pays out. One P stash is behind something you'll have to break.
• Mines: red X and purple J crates load your rear dispenser — you start with zero. Land mines (X) drop behind you, arm in a second, and use a proximity fuse slightly wider than the painted disc; a near pass still counts. Jump mines (J) keep their tighter contact trigger and do no damage at all; they just launch your pursuer into the air pointing somewhere unhelpful. Hold the fire button to lay a trail.
• On fire? Burning cars actually burn now — and a shot of boost blows the flames out. Physics said no; fun said yes.
• Boost: hold Shift / left bumper for gap jumps, last-second dodges, or heroic mistakes. You start with 100 boost, holding it burns 5 a second, and nothing refills it — twenty total seconds of nitro per round, spent however you dare. Blue bar on the dash. (One exception: the blue nitro bottles littering Route 666 Roulette. Highway rules.)
• Repairs: hit the white pad with the red cross while hurt and it snaps you into a two-second lightning tune-up. The fight keeps moving while you're pinned, solid, disarmed, and invulnerable; when the bar fills, the pad throws you back onto the exact course and speed you brought in, wrapped in the same two-second blink shield as a respawn. Two charges per round, 45 seconds between them, and it only answers to human drivers — the mob can spin donuts on it all day.
• They shoot back: every opponent runs the same arsenal you do — machine gun, missiles, their car's signature special — just on a lazier trigger finger. Cover matters now. You're the main event without turning the arena into a team fight: one rival (two in a packed field) works you while the others keep the free-for-all loud, then the spotlight rotates. Rivals stick to a fight, lead a moving car, and commit to drive-bys instead of circling forever. Pressure still comes in waves: hound you too long and they peel off to line up a fresh run, and even a wounded opportunist must come back after a short getaway. Last car standing? It becomes a duel — pass, separate, turn back swinging. They'll trade paint with each other too, but there's a code in the wasteland: nobody finishes a dying rival. That pink slip is yours to collect.
• Pause: ESC — resume, restart the arena, or quit while you're behind.
• Winning and losing: wreck every opponent and the round ends in lights; get wrecked and it ends in a shrug. Either way you get restart, a new ride, or the exit — no limping around an empty arena.
• HUD: the dash on the left tracks HP, speed, MG heat, boost, and your weapon slots (with a key cheat-sheet at the bottom); the right side carries a full-city minimap — streets, park, smashables (they vanish when you break them), the repair pad, and every living rival map-wide, painted in their ride's color with a contrast rim — plus the opponent roster with a health bar per name, dimming to dark red as you retire them. Same-floor rivals are dots; ^ and v keep the terrace read. A rival beyond the camera gets the same paint-matched color on its triangle riding the play-square edge and pointing toward the trouble; land your own off-screen hit and its marker answers with a clean expanding ring, while a fatal hit earns the full little burst. Route 666's experimental GPS keeps its own local highway window. Most fire follows the nose. The blue rear rocket is the trick shot that doesn't.

Two ways up, learn both: jump pads are the striped caution pyramids — hit one with speed from any side and you're airborne; ramps are driveable slopes — no launch, just climb. Gravity takes a small bite going up and pays it back going down, while the surface still matters (a grass ramp is a hill, a snowed one is a prayer). Triangular corner slopes fill the diagonals, so a blocky eight-sided hill is as round as this wasteland needs. The ground catches a fixed northwest light and its pattern foreshortens down each face; your car and its shadow rise continuously with the grade. Any open ledge is a way down; one storey is free, two costs you.

The ground knows what you're driving. Ice spins the tires and lets the nose swing while your momentum keeps its old appointment; enter straight and you'll stay honest, start correcting and you're bargaining with a slide. Cricket is built for the dirt—faster, sharper, and her Leap hits 15% harder when launched there—with a smaller grass advantage. Hammertoe's big tires shrug off more rough ground, while Smoky and Razorback's 4WD softens (but never erases) grass, snow, dirt, shallow-water, and mud penalties. Mud is its own wet-soil surface: launch and top speed suffer, the rear wanders, and pavement-tuned Cyclone suffers most. Everybody else keeps the standard surface rules, and nobody gets a special deal on ice.

The wasteland is not empty yet. Downtown office workers, vendors, vagrants, and badge-flashing police still work the sidewalks; the suburbs have joggers, bikes, loose dogs, skaters, and stubborn lawn mowers; skiers and a deer herd haunt Mountainside Mayhem; dockhands pace every level of the harbor; hard-hatted crews work all three storeys of Ground Floor Gore. They scatter from a charging car, but they are scenery rather than objectives—no score and no punishment. Police take harmless potshots. Anyone caught by the real fight leaves a brief red stain, and tires crossing it carry a short pair of red tracks down the road.

Gunfire talks back now: machine-gun rounds throw a few faint sparks from walls, cars, and containers; missiles answer with a tight flash and ring; rounds passing through the living scenery leave only a tiny red fleck and keep flying. These marks are visual only—no hidden splash damage, shove, or camera kick.

Smoky's Taser and Bumper's Blunt Blaze are brief bad news: two seconds of beam or flame, then a full fifteen seconds before either can fire again. Smoky and Bumper regrow a charge every 90 seconds; Lackey stole both barrels and pays 120 seconds per shared charge. Finishing either of his barrels locks the pair for the same fifteen-second silence.

On Piers of Pain's stacked battlefield, tracking missiles can arc between floors without ghosting through the destination's defenses: cover on both the launch floor and the locked target's floor can take the hit, while scenery on an intermediate terrace is passed over. Power Missiles keep their straight same-floor flight, and explicitly cover-piercing weapons keep their exception.

After Piers of Pain, Ground Floor Gore is where the road turns ugly: an eight-car construction yard fighting through a rainy dusk — every car running headlights, worklights burning until somebody shoots them out, every explosion blooming against the gloom. A dry dirt recovery loop rings three mud basins, a poured floor-2 foundation sprouting the first columns of a skyscraper, and a floor-3 scaffold ring circling a courtyard fight pit — every guardrail up there is flimsy enough to smash through and yeet clean off the deck, and the trash on the ground bursts out of your way instead of stopping you. The south is dirt-pile country: one giant spoil heap with a mine crate on its crown and two smaller heaps with a saddle worth drifting, every face driveable, launch off however you came. Heavy machines are permanent cover; containers, fuel barrels, the crew's parked cars, and eight porta-potties are not. The dark-blue generator starts spitting sparks the moment you hurt it, and at its last quarter of health a warning ring gives you 1.2 seconds to break line of sight or leave floor 1 before the wounded grid arcs. Destroying it trades that recurring hazard for one large, impartial electrical blast. Survive the site and Goliath's Arena waits next.

The campaign is a thirteen-stop fight card, and three stops are still behind sawhorses — roll up to one and the loading screen waves you past with an UNDER CONSTRUCTION card; press any key and the tour detours ahead. Arena Assault opens the card for real: a floodlit demolition-derby pit barely bigger than the two cars in it. One rival, one health station dead center, ammo hugging the walls, and nowhere to hide that doesn't explode — the dirt infield is loose, the outer asphalt lane is fast, and the barrels by the mine crate are exactly the trap they look like. It's fresh off the welder, so the card still offers a detour if you'd rather skip the exhibition match. Then Piers of Pain: the harbor fights on three levels. Dirt flats down by the waterline, warehouse streets above them, and rooftops and a container-ship deck above those — jump pads go up, any ledge goes down, and sky bridges span the rooftops: take them on top or duck underneath, same for the crane booms. The chain-link along the quay will not save you; it barely slows you. Short drops are free; drop two storeys and your suspension sends the bill. Machine guns and dumb rockets can't cross floors, homing missiles arc happily between them, and the deep water past the quay keeps every car it catches (watch the bubbles). The minimap tracks the stack: a red dot is on your floor, ^ is above you, v is below. Downtown Derby: streets carved between rooftop-topped buildings, a park with grass, dirt, and a pond that eats your momentum, and scenery that breaks — some walls hide better loot than others. Now with a skyline: two blocks wear driveable rooftops joined by a bridge, a parking-garage ramp grades up one, the jump pad clears you onto the other. Freeway Firefight: a long concrete ring with a grass infield, leftover guardrails that crumple if you look at them hard, and broken-overpass jump pads. Lackey's Arena: a military staging yard and one very large problem named Lackey. His breach cannon is a turret now — it turns to face you no matter which way he's driving, so the old trick of dodging his nose is dead; outrun the barrel instead. Up close he burns, at range he zaps, and both drink from the same magazine. The yard itself takes sides: container cover crumbles as the fight rages, the fences won't save either of you, and his front armor still laughs — the engineers cut corners around the exhaust. Circle him. Beat him and learn the ugly truth — he was only the doorman. Suburban Savagery: little houses that were not built to code — bulldoze your own shortcuts, but mind the lake. Past the suburbs, two more sawhorse stops — Terminal Terror and Slaughter on the Strip — wave you through to the highway. Route 666 Roulette is the one stop you can refuse: the card asks STAY ON ROUTE or DETOUR, and detouring costs you nothing but the story you'd have told. Stay, and the rules change — a three-minute forced sprint up a dying highway with The Buzzardz on your tail. They're not the competition; they're a swarm — dirtbike scouts that swerve in close to spray and peel off, beater sedans lobbing rockets at where you were, and bed-gun technicals rolling in from ahead and drifting back through the field, thumping the whole way. Behind all of it: the horde itself, a wall of dust and headlights that always — always — keeps up. Your dash swaps the minimap for a GPS that reads the road a few turns ahead; the countdown is your only finish line. W sprints, and S is a real brake: stopping to let the pack scream past you is a legal play — the wall just makes it a loan you repay with interest. Thread the potholes, smash the logs (they cost momentum, not much else), hit the launch pads to fly over the mess, and grab medkits and nitro bottles off the asphalt without lifting. Die and you respawn rolling at 45 — the run never stops. Mountainside Mayhem: iced switchbacks, a couple of cliffs that do not give your car back, and a summit now — the eight-sided snow hill climbs from every direction, the top is slick, and the crates up there are worth the slide. Ground Floor Gore: a rain-soaked construction site at dusk — three storeys of dirt haul loops, poured foundation, and scaffold ring, with every guardrail on the ring built to snap and hazard tape marking the drops it used to guard. Shoot out a worklight and that corner goes dark; wound the site generator and it starts biting back. Headlights on. Then the storm breaks over Capital City Carnage: the ruined monument capital in a full thunderstorm — thunder rolls, the sky tears white, and for a heartbeat afterward your eyes swim in the dark while the rain slashes sideways. The Potomac owns the west side: shallow banks slow you, the deep channel simply keeps you, and only two bridges cross it (rails optional, in every sense). Fight down the Mall past the algae-choked Reflecting Pool and the memorials, crest the Monument knoll — the only high ground in town — for the crates at the obelisk's feet, and mind Pennsylvania Avenue: it runs diagonal from K Street to the Capitol through a traffic circle, exactly like the real one, and the food trucks on Constitution explode the way food trucks should. And the White House? There's a wrought-iron fence, a very nervous suit, and a helicopter on the south lawn. Break the fence and the clock starts: kill the bird on the ground for an easy bounty, or chase it into the sky — it climbs out of reach in stages, and if you're good enough to drop it from altitude, the whole city stops to watch it spiral into the Ellipse and pay out the crash site. This is the last regular fight, so it goes big. Then Goliath's Arena: the road ends at a stadium with your name on the fight card. Goliath — the coliseum's undefeated king — fights in two acts. Trailered, he keeps his distance and lets the trailer battery talk; crowd him and you meet the grille or the tail (sixty feet of trailer swings like a stegosaurus with a grudge — the skid marks are your warning). Aim for the hitch: the armor forgot the connection. Break the trailer and he doesn't quit — he revs. Bobtail, he hunts you in a rhythm: when the stacks belch black smoke, get OFF his line, because the charge doesn't steer — and a semi that misses you keeps its appointment with the wall instead. A stunned truck is a free truck. One more tip from the pit lane: all that armor was paid for from below. There are exactly two crates of land mines in the building — the stands are a ramp, drive up the seating anywhere, lap the crown, drop through the corner tunnels, and go get them. You get three lives for the whole campaign — die in an arena and you respawn at your start point with a two-second shield; run dry and it's back to the top of the fight card with a fresh slate. Between levels, catch your breath and press any key.

FAQs

Keyboard or controller?
Both. Same steer-to-drive scheme either way — throttle, brake/reverse, steer — with the same inertia and drift.

Can I remap controls?
Yep—Settings > Controls. If something refuses to bind, log an issue and we’ll slap it back into shape.

Can I build my own arena?
Yes. tools/editor.sh launches the level editor: drop in blocks, ammo crates, terrain patches, and up to four enemy starts, then hit Playtest. Levels are plain JSON in your user://levels/ folder — swap files with other drivers freely; they're data, not code, so nothing in them can run on your machine. Full manual in docs/level_editor.md. (An in-game custom-levels menu is still in the garage — for now the editor's Playtest button and a --level= launch flag are the way in.)

Multiplayer when?
NOW. LAN parties are back: title screen > MULTIPLAYER. One of you hosts a garage (pick a port, set a password if your friends can't be trusted — they can't), everyone else finds it in the LAN browser or dials the IP direct (works over the internet too if the host forwards the port). Four seats, up to eight watching from the bench, and the host runs the whole show — the simulation lives on their machine, so bring your beefiest box to host. The screen remembers your last address and garage setup (never your password), and the callsign field spins itself a name from the wasteland's roster — hit ↻ for another, type your own, or stock the wheel yourself by editing user://callsigns.txt (plain text, one name per line).

Two flavors: Grudge Match (humans only, settle it) and Grand Melee (the empty seats fill with AI at whatever difficulty the host picks). Four rulesets: Rotation Brawl (endless scoreboard scrap, optional kill/time caps, host calls it from ESC), Frag Target (first to N), Timed (most wrecks at the horn — ties split the crown), and Lives Elimination (run dry and you're benched, last one rolling wins). Every car is one-of-one on the floor — first come, first serve on the roster, and the carousel tags claimed rides.

The bench is a lifestyle: observers get a free camera (cycle drivers with the weapon keys, WASD to roam, G to zoom) and an I GOT NEXT queue — pick your ride when you opt in, and when someone gets wrecked you take the wheel while they ride the pine. Changing wheels mid-queue sends you to the back; you were warned. Hosts can kick, ban sticks (by IP, survives restarts), and modded builds get flagged — or bounced, host's call.

How does saving work?
Campaign checkpoints between arenas, inventory persists, permadeath stays in the roguelike lane.

Performance target?
Locked 60 FPS on mid-range GPUs. Send logs and specs if it dips; we’ll optimize instead of guessing.

Sometimes my weapon fires in the "wrong" direction This is by design - get good and learn how to do trick shots ;)

"wHy DiD u UsE aI???" Because I can't code and I can't draw and instead of spending hours learning how to do both I did this instead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Contact, Support, Contributing

• Issues and feature requests: open a ticket with logs, repro steps, and screenshots of the carnage.
• Contributing:
  1. Fork, branch, and keep changes scoped to one arena/system.
  2. Arena work starts with docs/arena_field_manual.md and its copy-paste brief.
  3. Run tools/smoke.sh and tools/test.sh (both headless, both must pass) and attach short clips/gifs with your PR.
  4. Lore-friendly commit messages earn imaginary salvage credits.

Acknowledgements

• Inspirations: Twisted Metal, GTA ‘97, Escape from L.A., Running Man, Cyberpunk 2020, and every late-night VHS taped over a local news broadcast.
• Engine: Godot 4, propped up by caffeine, duct tape, and a graveyard of broken RC cars.
• Shoutout to the players still willing to redline through a skyline held together with neon gum and corporate propaganda. We see you. Bring a helmet.

More lore, vehicle dossiers, and survival tips land here once the arenas stop actively collapsing. Until then, strap in and let the sparks fall where they may.