About
Pico Off Road is a racing game inspired by the classic Ironman Super Off Road. There are 5 car colors to choose from (equal by parameters), three tracks that can be played in both directions. Player can choose from two modes - single race or tournament. There is one "hidden" mode: single race with 0 opponents can be considered as a practice.
Menu controls
- Z = confirm
- X = back
Driving controls
- arrows = turning, throttle, reverse
- Z = nitro
- X = throttle (for controllers if you can't press left/right + forward at the same time)
Tech
Pico Off Road uses combination of 2D sprites, 3D height map and real-time rendered meshes (cars).
Contact
Links


good starting point!
physic is solid 👌
couple of comments:
- put acceleration on a button, easier to play with mobile & gamepads
- acceleration is too linear/quick imho
- npc are on fire!
code wise, there is a good deal to optimize.
your 3d structure as a flat array of coords is actually not very fast for lua.
suggest plain vector3 tables for coords, makes face>vertex indexing a lot simpler AND faster.
A couple of functions can also be inlined.
Don’t overthink array allocation, no need to copy and transform as 2 different steps.
Good luck for the final steps!


Hi, thank you for suggestions!
I didn't optimize it yet. Most of that code is heavily influenced by debugging and looking into partial results. I need to reduce it by around 4-5KB from compressed size. Token count/char count is not a problem. From performance point of view it's good enough (90% of cpu at most), but I'll definitely try those vector3 tables.
By the way, acceleration is already mapped to forward and X buttons.


Version 2 uploaded:
- music and sounds added to the game
- AI difficulty settings
- tournament trophy screen (for first 3 places only :-) )
- some optimizations were made, more to come


New to it but I had no idea Pico 8 could go this far! Daunting and inspiring!


Pico 8 is surprisingly powerful machine. Even Pico Off Road could be much better, there are unoptimized parts of code, map and picture compression could be better, etc. So I could add more graphics, maybe whole new track? I'm just not willing to spend another month doing that :-)


Unbelievably beautiful. My only critique is maybe some collusion sounds? Other than that it’s amazing


Thank you. I know that sounds and music is far from the best. Next time I'll try harder or ask for help :-)
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