To be honest, this is not my first time making a Space Race clone. Some years ago I made an Arduino version of this game. At first by accident, since I was only playing around with OLED displays, and I was aiming to replicate some old Windows screen savers like "starfield" from windows 3.1. However, horozontally moving pixels sparked the idea.

Design choices

Game itself is very simple, in both programming and playing point of view. This simplicity leaves a lot of room when cloning the game. And in this case "cloning" should be in quotation marks. It's very easy to expand these old games with - for example - horizontal movements or particle system for explosions. It’s also easy to become too excited and go overboard with the modifications. In this case Pico-8 offers some limits with low resolution and small color palette.