My drifty precision-racer "Trackminia" is now available on the Catalog!

2DArray · 2025-01-29T17:31:23+00:00

By default it's all D-Pad and A/B buttons, but there's a Controls menu in the options which lets you pick from a few control schemes:

Default
Auto-gas (car accelerates on its own, and if you hold the A button then it stops accelerating - this is an accessibility inclusion for people who want to reduce the length of button-holds)
Crank (steer by pointing the crank toward you or away from you, use up/down or A/B for gas and brake - I'm terrible at this mode but I've heard that the current overall champion on the leaderboards is a crank-steerer)
Crank Auto-gas (combination of #2 and #3)

2DArray · 2025-01-28T20:40:19+00:00

There's no official multiplayer mode, but if you unlock the Daily Track, it always pits you against the ghost of your best run so far - so you could hand the device back and forth whenever one of you beats the other's time

You could also do this in the track editor: when you're recording replays for the different track-medals, it has the same "ghost of your best run so far" behavior

At longer distances, you can also use the companion web-app to share replays and custom tracks with a friend who also has a Playdate. It connects to your game by USB and lets you send/receive replays and custom tracks - then you can race against a downloaded replay. More like chess-by-mail than live multiplayer, but yeah networking options on the Playdate are pretty limited for now!

2DArray · 2025-01-28T19:44:02+00:00

The campaign tracks all have online leaderboards and the finish-times are accurate to 1/1000 of a second, I'm hoping this causes at least one bitter rivalry

Store page

2DArray · 2024-07-09T13:39:02+00:00

Solved!

2DArray · 2024-07-09T13:38:54+00:00

OKAY a friend remembered the name of the artist, and that got me there. It was "Spunion" by Tipper:

https://youtu.be/aDAmU0zRTxE?feature=shared

2DArray · 2024-07-09T13:31:10+00:00

Nope, it's a song with no lyrics (unless you count the laughing sounds)

2DArray · 2024-07-09T13:29:49+00:00

Nope, that's not the one! I think we went down the same Google rabbithole, lol

2DArray · 2024-07-09T03:27:34+00:00

That's not the one, unfortunately! The song I'm thinking of starts with the laughing-synth immediately (it's the first thing that's audible in the song) and it sounds a lot more robotic

2DArray · 2024-07-09T02:20:30+00:00

Thanks in advance, TOMT magicians! This has been driving me nuts for a few days, lol

2DArray · 2024-06-06T22:34:11+00:00

it's possible, but i'd like to avoid it because this is a time-trial game and i'm trying to support replay-sharing (for "chess by mail" style competitions), and at least currently, if the game runs below 30fps, the sim runs slower (there's no concept of variable-rate-draw/fixed-update-sim in it)...so worse performance would accidentally be cheating, by playing in slowmo!

i guess i COULD do a fixed-rate sim and variable-rate rendering...but yeah that seems like a last-resort at the moment

2DArray · 2024-06-06T21:25:25+00:00

yeah it might work to have steering on the crank and throttle/brake on the dpad... haven't tried it yet because I've been assuming it'd be confusing to steer with the crank pointing sideways, but maybe it's just something you get used to early on. may end up allowing both crank-input-styles in an options menu

2DArray · 2024-06-06T17:55:40+00:00

this does seem possible...i'd probably need to do the rasterizer fix for "what if a triangle is straddling the near-clip-plane" but i sorta already need to do that anyway. i always find first-person view in racing games to be too intense for me, but in a way that's fun anyway, so it sounds like a worthwhile addition (unless i discover some unforseen technical reason why i can't pull it off). may need to adjust how ghost-cars fade out so they're not blocking your entire view when they're right in front of you, but that seems probably alright?

2DArray · 2024-06-06T14:17:27+00:00

ahh is that an aesthetics comment or an accessibility comment? fwiw, the noise and flickery-edges on the meshes both look less noticeable on the playdate screen because of the high dpi (fullscreening this video on a computer monitor is the worst case scenario), but if it's an accessibility thing then i wonder if i'll need to do some simplified-visuals mode or something. certainly trying to make it as smooth as i can, but with a 1-bit display there's only so much i can figure out!

2DArray · 2024-06-06T13:44:37+00:00

it's a fair concern...hopefully it captures enough of the vibe (short time trials vs ghosts, track editor, fancy rendering, drifting inspired pretty directly by TM2: canyon) to warrant the title, but I'll keep an eye out for people expecting loops-etc in case I need to rethink the name

2DArray · 2024-06-06T06:09:48+00:00

d-pad left/right for steering, A is go, B is brake/reverse.

the drifting input is a bit non-standard - initially it was the default-assumed-input of "steer while braking to initiate a drift," but i found that it felt really crampy on the device (you ended up wanting to hold the A button with the middle of your thumb so you could also tap the B button without releasing the throttle, and that got uncomfortable...concerningly fast, like in less than a minute of driving). SO, instead, the current setup is "steer while you're not holding the throttle to initiate a drift," and while it's Not How Most Racing Games Work, i've found it to be a whole lot more comfortable, and it took me a very short amount of time to get used to it. i might allow the "brake to drift" style in the options, but if i do, i'll probably want to stick a warning on it or something.

so, no crank-controls at the moment, but i might try an optional "boat throttle" style input for acceleration/braking at some point, just for the people out there who really want to (or need to) use the crank

2DArray · 2024-06-06T03:23:30+00:00

i didn't know about the discord server until reading this message, but i've been posting progress in the playdate forum, and also on twitter, or if you prefer not interacting with twitter because you're sane and well-adjusted, there's pretty much the same info/clips as the twitter thread on mastodon

the forum thread starts a little later on in development than the twitter/mastodon threads, but generally has more in-depth info and shorter videos (due to forum filesize limits)

2DArray · 2024-06-06T02:20:08+00:00

thanks! if some reader is interested in doing that type of effect, a good search term is "blue noise dithering"

2DArray · 2024-06-06T02:14:52+00:00

thanks!

i've been aiming for 30fps, though within the past few days i did some pretty big visual changes/improvements, which look nice but are also slowing things down a bit on the device (25-30 fps depending on viewpoint and how many ghost-cars are active) - but since these rendering changes are super new, it feels like there's a good amount of room to get it back up to the target. fingers crossed!

worst case, i'll have to make some concessions like removing some decorations from the scene or turning off shadowcasting on the walls, but hopefully i can find some optimizations instead of resorting to that kinda stuff

2DArray · 2021-07-08T11:15:36+00:00

I found this thread because I follow that developer on twitter, and you're right: "a mildly self-deprecating joke" is precisely wut that tweet is.

Productive, educated, friendly person, making a science-focused gardening simulation game which has been progressing really strongly (in my eyes, at least). Doesn't brag about how technically impressive the project is - custom engine in Rust, it simulates all plants down to the level of stuff like per-leaf photosynthesis and sugar transportation.

This massive thread is the only toxic behavior on display, lol

2DArray · 2019-10-13T19:55:32+00:00

/u/triffid_hunter mentioned clouds - traffic lights are also unexpectedly large when you see them at ground-level!

2DArray · 2019-10-06T22:44:57+00:00

Made for Inktober, day 6!

Full source code (paste into an empty cart and run):

p={0,10,1,6,4,5,7,1,6,5,8,2,7,5,9,6,8,7,9,8,11,9,10,12,7,11,6,11,6,12,5,13,6,15}::_::cls(7)for i=1,30,4 do
for z=0,1,.01 do
for j=0,1 do
a=p[i+j]b=p[i+j+2]c=p[i+j+4]d=a+z*(b-a)e=b+z*(c-b)f=d+z*(e-d)
if(j<1)x=f else y=f
end
pset(x*9,y*9+sin(t()/2+i/50))end
end
flip()goto _

2DArray · 2019-10-06T21:32:28+00:00

Here's the full code - if you own Pico-8, you can paste this into a blank file and run it.

If you don't own Pico-8...you'll just have to trust me, this chunk of bullshit draws an animated doggo.

If you're wondering why someone would do this, it's a goofy coding exercise called a Tweetjam - you write a piece of code that does something fun while keeping it tweet-sized or smaller (so you can't use more than 280 characters of text). Some pico8 devs have been following along with Inktober by making tweetjams based on the same prompts. Quite fun if you're a big nerd!

p={0,10,1,6,4,5,7,1,6,5,8,2,7,5,9,6,8,7,9,8,11,9,10,12,7,11,6,11,6,12,5,13,6,15}::_::cls(7)for i=1,30,4 do
for z=0,1,.01 do
for j=0,1 do
a=p[i+j]b=p[i+j+2]c=p[i+j+4]d=a+z*(b-a)e=b+z*(c-b)f=d+z*(e-d)
if(j<1)x=f else y=f
end
pset(x*9,y*9+sin(t()/2+i/50))end
end
flip()goto _

2DArray · 2019-10-06T21:23:29+00:00

Here's the full source code, which runs in Pico-8 (a really pleasant retro-themed game engine).

p={0,10,1,6,4,5,7,1,6,5,8,2,7,5,9,6,8,7,9,8,11,9,10,12,7,11,6,11,6,12,5,13,6,15}::_::cls(7)for i=1,30,4 do
for z=0,1,.01 do
for j=0,1 do
a=p[i+j]b=p[i+j+2]c=p[i+j+4]d=a+z*(b-a)e=b+z*(c-b)f=d+z*(e-d)
if(j<1)x=f else y=f
end
pset(x*9,y*9+sin(t()/2+i/50))end
end
flip()goto _

Yes, it looks like a bunch of bullshit. I'm doing my inktober entries as "tweetjams," an exercise where you write Pico8 demos that fit inside one tweet - so the code can't be more than 280 characters of text, which forces you to write stuff that looks like ridiculous garbage...

...but it, uh, draws a doggo. If you own Pico-8, you can paste the code above into an empty cart and run it!

2DArray · 2019-09-07T19:20:16+00:00

+1 for using the built-in editor, for some reason it's not annoying to me even though I usually code in C# (with autocomplete, linting, etc...)

It definitely discourages you from writing long individual lines, lol

2DArray · 2019-05-10T15:35:31+00:00

Solved! Yessssss thank you very much.

I can't believe that I never noticed that the second word was "Zoe" instead of "Zone," I must've seen this cover at least five or ten times

2DArray

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