Rainbow Road

http://java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=451

mirror

For some reason, it appears to render a lot smoother if you run it offline. If you want to give it a shot, download the source and uncomment out the main method.

Well made! I like it! Really got that Kart feel - too hard for me though, I can hardly stay on the track!

Spectacular in 4k!

That was great, good entry mate.

Awesome! Some great nostalgia here. So many of the original game features are here. Mini, homing-shells, and even the purple shells.

A few bugs, though. At one point, I had 3 mushrooms, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t use them. Then suddenly, just AFTER driving through a new set of boxes, I could use them. I think the culprit might be the mechanic to stop the “spinning” of the items after one has hit a box. Seemed to jam firing occasionally.

Great game, though. Incredible for 4k.

PS. I was disappointed when I couldn’t drive over the side at the beginning and land further along on the track. That was a cool (and fatal) way to cheat in Mario Kart 64 ^^

I could literally hear the sounds in my head from the original game…oh the nostalgia :’)

If this doesn’t win the competition, I will give up all hope on humanity.

Thanks for playing.

What you are describing is actually not a bug. I was running low on bytes and I had to simplify some features of the game. I was forced to drop the golden mushroom sprite, which gives the player an endless amount of boosts for a limited time. Instead, the player randomly receives 1, 5 or 10 mushrooms. However, the game only displays the final 3 mushrooms. In your case, you probably had 10. And, you do get a boost every time that you hit C; however, I was also forced to drop the fire/smoke thrust images that normally would indicate a boost was initiated. The only visual cue is the increased speed of the road and other players. Consequentially, it may look like your mushrooms are not getting consumed, but they are! When you get down to the final 3 of 10, they will individually disappear from the item box.

I’ll try to come up with a different way to display the golden mushroom.

This absolutely needs to win, remember playing this on my dad’s SNES :slight_smile:
…How the hell did you fit this into 4k ???

@Ultroman
I posted a new version that properly displays all the mushrooms that you are carrying.

Very cool! Just tried it again, although I got 5 at the most. Can I ask why you didn’t just drop the “fake item box” sprite and use the “item box” for those? Then you could fit the golden shroom, and it could be 1 shroom, 3 shrooms and the golden shroom, like the original

Really good ! Now, could it be possible for you to :

  • add a speedometer ;
  • make progressive difficulty levels, if the player can finish a race in the 3rd position at least ;
  • describe all items and indicate all controls in your instructions.

I believe he’s already out of space

Ohh, amazing…

Good question. In an earlier version, I actually did have logic that produced flipped sprites. But, since only a single sprite, the fake item box, needed to be flipped, it turned out that it saved more bytes by simply packing in the pre-flipped version. Similarly, I had logic to recolor the white mushroom, which also didn’t make the cut.

Unfortunately, as you race toward the 4096 byte wall, you need to put on the breaks. Nonetheless, I experimented with many variations of the track that included things like extreme banking. As cool as it looked, it made me very dizzy.

Several features were dropped including one of my favorites: the mini-map, which enabled the player to determine how far ahead or behind the opponents are situated.

For past submissions, I wrote long game instructions. But, I found that the vast majority of players never read them and the reality is: why should they?! A game should be approachable without any external instructions. And, in this case, most players are already well familiar with the items and if not, the player can discover what they do through playing the game.

Very cool! I consider the bar officially raised… :wink:

Impressive indeed that you fit this all in 4K and thanks for providing the source code. The game mechanics are pretty involved (AI, multiple actors, collisions, sprite loading, rendering) so it’s good to know it is possible to squeeze it all in somehow.

The only thing that seemed unusual to me was using X as the accelerator instead of the up arrow, but after playing it for a bit I think I see why you chose it like that.

Anyway great job!

Really great game, i liked it a lot. But for some reason I was not able to get any item while running in the road. I run over it and I just didn’t get it, like a collision detection not working. it’s just for me? I’m running on chrome ubuntu 12.

When you drive into an item box (the box with the questionmark on it), the item roulette (randomizer display) doesn’t start to spin?

Two bugs. I’ve also commented on Java4K.

  1. The game flickers seriously sometimes when I use the banana item.
  2. The player sprite sometimes becomes smaller.

But a nice game for 4K. Can’t believe my eyes to see the game in < 4K. The source code itself is 38.9 KB. Did you use any other compression? I see generally .class files are more in size than their sources

Does the player sprite flicker or is it the track or full screen flickering?

Before the player sprite became smaller, did the background flash white? Did the player drive slower when small?

I think that’s just one of the debuffs you can get on you that decreases your speed while small.