Thanks for the comment! Glad you like the art and music and agree that teaching the player how to play is a priority for future development.

I have a confession: I've never driven a car in my life, not even a lesson! Does that mean writing the code for car physics for the entire first day of the jam was a crazy idea? ...yeah, probably! 😅

Anyway, for now here's some tips: in order to win the race, you need to make it further than the rival on the same fuel tank + one nitro boost.If you just go straight for the boost, even if you time it well, you won't make it further because you didn't get any distance out of your regular fuel tank. In order to change gears in that initial section, you need to accelerate to a certain speed before switching up a gear or the engine will stall (it plays a sort of grinding sound effect and you slow down), but in order to hit your max speed you need to shift up the gears.

To start with, try holding accelerate until your speed stops climbing and the needle on the RPM counter (big gauge) is in the red zone, then press UP to shift to the next gear, and repeat that until you hit 5th gear. Don't start your boost until you're almost completely out of fuel (small gauge). Then, to improve, you can try to time it so that you switch gear before hitting the max to make the absolute most of your limited fuel.

Perfect gameplay would be:

1. Switching through your gears efficiently to get to gear #5 ASAP without stalling.
2. Using you full tank of fuel, with the nitro boost starting as soon as it hits empty but before you come to a stop.
3. Timing the boost well down to the last possible moment.

Note that the power of each boost scales inversely with the random timer you get assigned. A short boost time will be faster to make up for it, so in principle it's not too RNG-dependent (in practice, I'd like to test this some more and see how in plays out.)

For this jam version, I set the rival a set behaviour to play decently well but not perfectly, so it should be winnable once players roughly figure out how to play, even if they don't perfect it.

I'm not sure what you mean about sharing the video, because the "share-your-progress" channel is locked, but I hope this helps you (and anyone else feeling stuck) get a victory! ⭐ Good luck! 💛

Thanks for the comment! The trick with this one is that most of the visuals are actually written in code rather than sprites or spritemaps. So each parallax layer is vertical lines drawn each frame with the height given by a wave function which is re-evaluated every frame based on the distance of the "camera". Not gonna lie, it took a good chunk of the second day to figure it all out but I can see myself using this technique a lot so it's time well spent.

I learned that devs love to use "Perlin noise" for this kind of thing, but I think it's a bit much for the PICO-8 processing limits (maybe it would be fine here in 1D, didn't try). This cart literally just uses two sine waves: a low-amplitude, high-frequency "ruggedness" function on top of a low-frequency, high-amplitude function (for the overall mountain shape). Then each layer just uses slightly different amplitude and frequency values to feel visually distinct and of course a different scroll speed to help sell the illusion of depth. 

I'm glad you noticed the wobbly pixels on the most distant layer! For that, I just forced everything to use half the effective resolution by halving, rounding, and then doubling again (so the height always jumps 2 pixels at a time). Basically, lower res = "blurry" = "further away"; it's crazy what we can trick our brains into believing from such simple images! I should have done something similar for the x-axis, but I guess I got sidetracked.

Thank you for my first comment ✨

I completely agree with your suggestions, nothing beats a playable tutorial! It will be a priority if I continue to develop the game.