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In fact, I was inspired by that game. I played it on the ZX Spectrum when I was a child.

IIrc the alien movement paths are generated using quadratic beziers, a kind of smooth curve generator from control points.

Thanks for playing!

I try to avoid peek/poke whenever I can. I use poke() to enable rendering to sprite sheet, which is necessary to setup sprites, although you can also use a memcpy() from screen buffer to sprite buffer instead. But rotated sprites require some calls to tline() and before using that function, some poke's are required.

I agree. The game definitely has that arcade feel. The ZX Spectrum was the first computer my father brought home. I have very fond memories of playing on it and also creating small BASIC programs. I hope one day I can create a full game for that legendary computer.

Nice and beautiful game. Congratulations!

With the space taken up by the text on a daily menu in a nearby restaurant, I would only write less than a half of the game. But with the money you have to spend to have that menu, I would be able to buy a triple A game :-P

Thanks!

Nice road graphics!

Great game! Starfield reminds me of Elite/Frontier.

Nice game! You're really getting the hang of PICO-8 and size optimizations.

Thank you so much for your kind words. I had a great time playing your game Arlo. I hope you soon release a new game for our beloved ZX Spectrum.

Yep, the blue color from PICO-8's palette is quite useful as a background when you want an 8-bit gaming aesthetic.

¡Muchas gracias! Al principio, a mí también me parecía magia. Pero una vez asimilas las técnicas y los patrones para conseguir código compacto, es sencillo y divertido, casi como encajar las piezas en un puzle que resulta ser un juego. Recomiendo este ejercicio a todos los que tengan ilusión por recrear juegos sencillos de la vieja escuela. No hace falta una idea complicada, cuanto más sencilla, mejor. Por cierto,  Dozznar me ha permitido presentar un mini Randoom condensado en 1K 😅

Wow! Great game for the old good ZX Spectrum 48k. It's absolutely amazing what you have achieved.

I finally had the time to try out Randoom Ancient Stones and enjoy it. I found the game very fun and addictive. The arcade gameplay is very well done. The graphical aesthetic is very pleasant and fun. The music is excellent. In short, a great game and perhaps the C64 Game Of The Year. 🎉

Congratulations to the entire team involved for the magnificient work they have done! 👌

I also wholeheartedly appreciate the special mention. The truth is, I don't deserve it. 🙏

By the way, are you planning a port of the game to Amstrad CPC? If you can't find anyone who's up for it, I'll volunteer for the programming part. 😅

Muy buen juego! Enhorabuena!

With a budget of 560 chars you get something like this. But with 1K compressed bytes you get something better. Try this one: https://itch.io/jam/pico-1k-2024/rate/2989753 It has got some drifting, 4 different tracks and AI cars, but there's no collision between cars.

Thanks! It was inspired by your voxel graphics entry.

Nice game! It's amazing how much map data you've managed to include . Plus the game is challenging. I haven't finished it yet.

Thanks!

Thanks! At first, I thought it was impossible to mix voxel landscape and a shooter in just 1024 compressed bytes, but it worked!

Thanks! I wasn't sure if I could make a game after allocating a lot of compressed bytes to the voxel landscape. Moreover, the game had to be 3d, adding some complexity to the mix. But somehow, I could make a game meeting the size constraints.

Thanks a lot! I'm looking forward to your next ZX Spectrum game!

I agree. I always wanted to make games but found the process too steep because I couldn't manage big projects efficiently and ended up losing motivation. With this kind of limited scope projects, I'm able to build many games in a short time and the constraints push me to focus on the main concepts and features. I tend to overcomplicate things and found this is a good exercise to improve my problem solving skills and complexity management. I also love maths and procedural generation. Both of them are very useful when you try to make big things with little code.

Thanks! Yep, too many subsystems working, each one taking their toll of compressed bytes. Voxel landscape had to be tweaked to leave some CPU for the game. With this kind of perspective view it's difficult to aim to enemies and sometimes it's a bit confusing. Although I think I solved depth sort cleanly with all entities in the same table, 3d games usually require a lot of code, so many planned features had to be dropped to get down to 1024 compressed bytes. I think I left collision detection a bit buggy, but it's not a big issue. No difficulty ramp is maybe the worst issue.

Thank you for your nice words, as always. I wasn't sure about edge and off road behaviour. Going off road reduces speed a lot, but I think it allows for a fast recovery most of the times. As I didn't have enough bytes for skidding particles/smoke, sfx was the cheap option. I look forward to your entry!

Ninja running and jumping with smooth animations + ninja stars + ninja attack = nice game!

Nice game! Very smooth and addictive gameplay. A great remake of the classic puzzle game. I'm not good at this game, I can't get the 1024 block.

Thanks! Development came along very well so I didn't have to resort to (very) dirty tricks to gain some extra bytes. AI is simple: they adjust angle to go straight to the next waypoint but they take their foot off the accelerator a bit when they are turning. So, they are very fast on straight sections but slow down on curves. I tried this simple logic and tweaked the parameters a bit. Surprisingly, it was enough for a decent AI. Different cars have slightly different parameters and different waypoint offsets, so most of the time they differ in their path.

Yep, that's a bug I was forced to make in order to save some compressed bytes. Yep, That's an important feature I consciously added to improve road visibility and reduce distractions for the focused player. Good catch!

Thanks! To be honest, I was also quite surprised because even though I kept adding more features, there was still a fair amount of compressed bytes left. I ended up spending them on the 4 tracks, track selection, and the minimap.

Thanks! In the 80s and 90s some very good top down racing games were made: Super Sprint, Hot Rod, Super Off Road, Slicks, Badlands, Super Cars, Death Rally, Micro Machines, .... just to name a few I can remember. I played many of them a lot when I was young. This is a tribute to all those fun old games.

Last year, PICO-1K Jam 2023 took place in September. I don't know if it will repeat dates this year. It's a bit different approach as 1024 compressed bytes is huge compared to just 500 chars.

And yes, resetting score when missing a putt is achievable in 500 chars. I can't remember why I didn't implement it. Maybe because I found it was too difficult to chain successes with no difficulty ramp in place or because I had plans to include sfx.

Nice! Amazing goal! It's so great there isn't enough chars in the universe to make an accurate tribute in a PICO-8 TweeTweetCart.

Thank you! I will think about your suggestion and go for a "full" golf game. Maybe it could happen as an entry for the upcoming Pico-1k jam.

Good game! The controls feel good and no excesive "jellyfish flapping" is needed. It becomes difficult when there is no room to approach from above. I'm glad you were able to take advantage of some code tricks from Star Fall 500.

Nice tribute to Fruit Ninja. I remember that game with great nostalgia.

Nice game! Since the reload time is a bit long, accuracy is important. I find it easier to hit enemies by shooting a little to the left.

At first, I thought this game could be more challenging and fun. But I had to reduce the complexity of the code to meet the 500 character limit. As a result, feel and control are considerably worse than anticipated.

Thanks! Sorry, it's my fault for not explaining how the tilt indication works. Arrows indicate direction of inclination. The larger the arrows, the greater the slope. It's a bit frustrating when the distance to hole is very long, but I didn't have enough chars to include increasing distance and a difficulty ramp. Anyway, I think an average player could make a hole about a quarter of the time.