This game was made in Godot, and was my way of learning the basics of the engine.

I wanted to make a driving game that would challenge the players' natural urge to slow down when they see a turn. Trying to apply traditionally effective driving principles, like driving lines or braking, is not beneficial or even possible.

For the controls, I decided to follow my gut, and went with a very sensitive and aggressive turning, because it complemented the reaction-based gameplay I was going for. The game is tuned to my very average reactions.

The sand slowly obscuring the screen was a decision made pretty late, and it served as a theme appropriate solution to two problems:

1. How to display the remaining time between checkpoints without a HUD
2. Coming up with a reason for the player to want to drive fast, something with life or death stakes.

The two-colour (with shades in between) palette was a good decision, since sticking to it really sped up my decision making because I didn't have to worry about colors.

I drew everything with Procreate. I found a brush from True Grit Texture Supply's Chromagraph brush set that I got pretty familiar with, and I created pretty much every image in the game with that one brush. I think it made everything look pretty uniform.

I created all the sounds with a free synthesizer plugin called Surge XT. I tried to make the car sound brutal. The menu music and the end credits music relied heavily on a vocals VST-plugin by Spitfire Audio LABS.

I managed to create the game I set out to make, so the project was a success. I still enjoy playing it every time I do, and it is much more fun to come back to than Rock Pusher, since it is a new track every time.

This is the first game I've finished. I chose Pico-8 because of its boundaries, to force myself to make something small, in order to finish anything, and it worked!

The development still dragged on a bit too long, and I started to feel the familiar feelings of wanting to start a new project, which is why I only made ten levels.

Making the levels was the hardest part, but it got easier once I found a theme, where the levels would consist of basically two kinds of goals (not counting the introductory levels):

1. Making the enemies kill each other in order to reach the goal
2. Preventing enemies from killing each other in order to reach the goal

This gave me enough ideas for the amount of levels I needed, and was an exciting enough premise, if not anything revolutionary.

When it comes to the visuals, the guidelines I set for myself were related to the limited color palette and the fact that I wanted everything to be moving all the time. Every object in the game (except for the particle effect) has eight frames of animation, and the resulting wobbly effect is what I was going for.

I designed my levels using Pico-8's map editor. I wrote a script that would pick up certain items from the map and instantiate them as actors instead of static map tiles. Based on the sprite used, the script would determine which way an enemy is facing etc. This made iterating on the levels very easy and fun.

With the music, I wanted to make something cave-like, with some echoes and dripping water.