Show HN: Driftmania – an open source PICO-8 racing game

This is a great game, one question: what does ghost mode do?

Yes, I'm well aware of that - but your average viewer isn't going to notice expanded resources, however they ARE going to notice things like time-to-first-byte and network transfer.

EDIT: Just to be clear since I can't edit the older comment - instead of bundle size it would have been better to say that the "network transfer size" is roughly comparable.

I took a look at what's a part of my car controller[1] if you want some inspiration. A lot of these wouldn't make sense in an F-Zero type game

- Wheel modifiers (which wheels are on road, grass, boost tiles, etc)

- Control loss when airborne

- Slow turning when at low speed (a bit different from yours since the impact drops to zero very quickly)

- Speed / accel penalty when hitting a wall

- Visually rotating the car (this is what happens when a player presses the turn key but the actual velocity rotation is handled separately)

- Boost handling

- Nudge the car to the side a little if it's trying to turn but is blocked by a wall

- Acceleration, friction, breaking, and drift-breaking

- Corrective side force (basically an extra friction perpendicular to velocity like you have)

- Artificial speed limit (alternatively, you can include a drag component which applies a force proportional to the square of speed, but I've found it hard to get this feeling good in the past)

- Velocity rotation to align velocity direction and visual direction. This is a minor effect - it's mostly handled by the other physics

- Gravity

- Out of bounds checks

I think you've got the main pieces already. What's more important is understanding what you want your game to feel like and continuously tweaking until you get there

[1] https://github.com/maxbize/PICO-8/blob/master/Driftmania/dri...

You need a README, with screenshots.

"Decent" feels like the correct word to describe the RGB30.

To be clear, I'm ultimately glad I bought it, and it's germane to this discussion that the release of the RGB30 is what got me interested in PICO-8 in the first place (I had apparently purchased a license years ago as part of the Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality on itch.io and didn't even realize it until late last year). Also, the 720p 1:1 display is one of those developments that in retrospect feels so perfect for this form factor it ought to have been obvious, but it was a weird move at the time and they deserve full credit for taking the risk.

Having said that, I want to love this thing, but I just can't. Mainly because the D-pad sucks. It's not unusable, but it's worse than my Miyoo Mini and Anbernic devices, worse by a mile than my 8BitDo controllers, worse still than my Hori Fighting Commander, worse than even my Steam Decks (which have sort of weird D-pads themselves)... you get the point. It's annoying that the device on which I would prefer to play 8 & 16 bit games at a 1:1/8:7 resolution has—out of everything I own—by far the worst controller for exactly those games.

The ergonomics also leave a bit to be desired. Again, like the D-pad, it's not so uncomfortable as to be unusable, though I much prefer pairing it with a 3D printed grip I bought from ComfortGrips on Etsy¹. That obviously makes it a much less pocketable device, which isn't a big deal for me, but might be for others.

Finally, I hesitate to critique the software experience, because on the whole I'm incredibly impressed with how much improvement I've seen (both in terms of quality and frequency of updates) to JELOS in the nearly five months I've owned the RGB30. But the fact remains that that confusing preference conflicts, occasional crashes, frequent sleep/wake flakiness, ridiculously bad battery drain when asleep or even fully powered off (which thankfully has been cleaned up in recent updates)... they're all just facts of life with the RGB30. It was honestly kind of shocking coming from OnionOS on the Miyoo Mini which is absolutely rock solid in comparison. But that's obviously a less powerful device with a completely different form factor.

Anyway, as lagniappe correctly pointed out, PowKiddy makes budget devices, which means they're generally inexpensive enough to take a flyer on despite their limitations, and the RGB30 is arguably the best thing they've ever made.

1. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1602072205/powkiddy-rgb30-comfo...>