Hi all,

It's been a little while. Thanks for your patience!

Throughout 2023, I was very busy shipping Evening Star's recent 3D Platformer game Penny's Big Breakaway, which consumed most of my focus and energy.

Now that it's out the door, I've brought my attention back to Zero Zero!

When last I was working on this game, I was trying to make do with an editor I had built using JS/Electron. It wasn't really a quick or easy process to add functionality to the editor in that form, so I rebuilt it using Beef (the programming language we used for Penny), Dear ImGui, and implot. It's now much easier to develop and maintain.

Once I rebuilt the editor, I set out to continue making the Out Run-style pseudo-3D look work. I had made some test props back in late 2022, but needed to build out a pipeline if I wanted to have a good variety of props. I figured making some low poly 3D props in Blender and baking them out as sprites would work...

Not so bad! Then I started wrestling with a few technical limitations of making this approach work:

• Due to the CPU speed, you can't feasibly scale props in real time as they get closer from the distant horizon. You need to supply pre-scaled copies of each sprite, in every size you need. This quickly grows to hundreds of sprites, and RAM usage really becomes a bottleneck on Playdate hardware.
• I didn't want to bake in the dither patterns... I want the patterns to stay consistent in screen space. This means I would have to write a custom indexed pattern draw, which would be hard to make any faster than, or even as fast as, the plain bitmap draw.
• In my pseudo 3D prototype, I'm already dropping frames when more than a few sprites are drawn on screen. (Drawing the track eats a lot of processing overhead)

On the other hand, Grand Tour Legends had great success going with a pre-rendered video approach. This works perfectly for Zero Zero, because movement is along a track anyway...

So, why not give it a try! I did a quick test using data from BlenderGIS, just to get a sense of what I was dealing with:

I liked where this was going. So I kept pulling on this thread and...

(Please forgive the compression artifacts in the video...)

Obviously a ways to go in terms of properly decorating the environment, but I think I am going to pivot and go this direction for the visuals.  Maybe it loses a bit of the retro flair, but I think the overall impression is significantly stronger. What do you think?