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[assemblerbot]

Pico Off Road - racing game for fantasy game console PICO-8

Status
The game is finally done. You can play it in browser or download standalone build from Itch.io for free. Have fun!

History
Two months ago I've discovered fantasy console PICO-8. It reminded me the old times when I made my first commercial game in Java MIDP for Nokia 3510i :-) I knew that I have to make a game on PICO-8! I've started roughly 5 weeks ago and the game is almost complete. Sorry I didn't post anything during the development but writing a blog post is for me much harder than implementation of whole new feature into a game

About
The game is inspired by excellent old game from my childhood - Ironman Super Offroad. Basically it's just about racing on rough maps and each racer can use Nitro to accelerate for a short time (very useful for jumping over obstacles ).

Tech
Racing part of the game consists of 3 major systems:

• real time rendered cars (rasterized 3D meshes - 230 triangles per car)
• physical height map in the background with collisions and ai navigation points
• sprite map - that's what the player see (handcrafted and manually fit to the physical height map)

I used Cabinet isometric projection because while it looks relatively good it allows me to fit the 2D sprite map to the 3D physical map nicely. All the big images are compressed by my implementation of LZ77 compression that is also available at Lexaloffle forum. I'm going to put the full source code and all tools I've created in the process to a public git repository.

Links
Lexaloffle forum
Itch.io
GitHub

[assemblerbot]

The Pico Off Road is almost complete. I'm going to test it, fix all remaining bugs and release it.
You can play the game on Lexaloffle forum as usual.

 Have fun!

[vdapps]

Brutal that you finished it so fast! I can imagine this pure joy of developing of such tiny little game. In simplicity, there's beauty.

[assemblerbot]

Completely playable game with UI and two tracks was done in two weeks. Making that music took rest of the time :D

Yes, it's very easy to make a game on PICO8. And LUA also supports that simplicity. I threw away standards, architecture, class structures and all that huge management I usually need for standard game and just focused on pure simple drawing and simulation. Very relaxing. 

[mtorc1]

I think I never played a racing game with that kind of isometric top-down perspective but i really enjoyed it. It's like a bystander would watch overlook a derby.
Very nice!

[assemblerbot]

Well, the game is inspired by fantastic old classic Ironman Super Off Road I used to play as a kid. I loved that game and never saw any other game like it - even tough many have tried but they missed the point I think. Converting it to 3D/high resolution is a bad idea and kill the charm the original had. If you haven't check - that's how original old game looked like on Amiga:



By the way, car sprites in that version were not painted but raytraced from the 3D model which is absolutely mind-blowing if you imagine doing something like that in 1989 

[vdapps]

Nice curiosity. I can't imagine in what they ray-traced it. I recall 3DStudio4 for DOS around 1993 I guess, so maybe earlier 3DStudio version. Those were times. :D