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

frenchie14.itch.io

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

#1

Post by frenchie14 »

I've been spending a lot of my spare time over the last year creating this little racing game. It's built in PICO-8, which is a really fun “fantasy retro console” that's been mentioned on HN several times. The console has strict limits and I wanted to see how far I could push them

The source code for the game is over here: https://github.com/maxbize/PICO-8/tree/master/Driftmania. It's a bit of a mess, but I'm happy to answer any questions on it or development of the game. Cheers!

EDIT: For those not familiar with PICO-8, there's only a few inputs: arrow keys, Z/C/N, and X/V/M

Show HN: Driftmania – an open source PICO-8 racing game
frenchie14.itch.io

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

#2

Post by freedomben »

Whoa dude, this is really cool! Nice work! You should definitely include this on your resume/CV because if I were reviewing your resume and saw this, I'd be very interested :-)

For those not familiar with PICO-8:

> PICO-8 is a virtual machine and game engine created by Lexaloffle Games. It is a fantasy video game console[1] that mimics the limited graphical and sound capabilities of 8-bit systems of the 1980s to encourage creativity and ingenuity in producing games without being overwhelmed with the many possibilities of modern tools and machines."[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICO-8

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

#4

Post by freedomben »

AugusteLef wrote: post #3

Just played it for 10 minutes! Great game. One remark: to start the race, you need to select "restart level" even if you just started the game. I would suggest starting the race by simply pressing enter.

Ah yes, I hit that too. Selecting "Continue" (which didn't make sense since this was my first load) just exited the menu. Didn't take me long to try "Restart" but it is a little confusing.

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

#5

Post by hombre_fatal »

Aside, I just realized Vimium doesn't get disabled inside iframes on pages where it's disabled, nor can you disable the iframe domain from the parent page since the iframe regex won't match the parent url. I had to disable the whole plugin for "x" to work in the iframe. Seems like an oversight on Vimium's part.

As for the game, it's satisfying to ratchet down to the 39 second threshold for the gold medal by figuring our drifting. I realize I was overdrifting and easily beat 39 seconds once I stopped drifting much sooner along the turn.

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

#7

Post by VyseofArcadia »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #5

Aside, I just realized Vimium doesn't get disabled inside iframes on pages where it's disabled, nor can you disable the iframe domain from the parent page since the iframe regex won't match the parent url. I had to disable the whole plugin for "x" to work in the iframe. Seems like an oversight on Vimium's part. As for the game, it's satisfying to ratchet down to the 39 second threshold for the gold medal by figuring…

I just ran into this also. Incredibly annoying.

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

#8

Post by vunderba »

Nice work, gives me very Micro Machines vibes for the NES. The only thing I don't like about PICO-8 is that its completely closed source. An open source alternative that seems very promising is Pyxel. It has similar retro / pixel art limitations, a built-in sprite editor, music tracker, etc.

https://github.com/kitao/pyxel

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

#9

Post by VyseofArcadia »

What was your workflow? Last time I played around with PICO-8 I found the built-in editor to be inadequate. Using an external editor was also annoying for reasons I don't quite remember, but I remember having to close and re-open PICO-8 all the time. Not exactly a the tight, seamless iteration loop I was hoping for.
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