QU1KSILVER

Race your marble from corner to corner through procedurally-generated mazes! Rack up as many laps as you can before time runs out! Use arrow keys to move, 'X' to start or reset.

This is my entry to the 2022 #pico1k jam, run by @Liquidream! This jam challenges entrants to produce a game in PICO-8 using only 1024 compressed bytes of code.

For the sake of posterity and reflection, here are some of the things I did to squeeze this into the size limit:

• Used a goto based program structure, rather than function based. This allowed me to use some routines which 'fall through', removing the need for multiple function calls.
• During the maze transition animations, instead of making a function to erase only the map tiles (to avoid drawing over the stars in the background), I instead just made the stars last in the draw queue, and made them only draw if they aren't drawing on any existing graphics.
• Grouped some routines together in a counter-intuitive, but space efficient way. For instance, the if statement that is used to draw end-of-game text also contains the routines for handling end-of-game input.
• Generated maps directly in the map memory using the binary-tree maze-building algorithm. Wrote that routine so it can produce maps with the opposite bias using the same code.

This was a real challenge, and I learned a bunch of new stuff from this jam! I hope you enjoy this little Marble-Madness-inspired racer!