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Bone Shakers
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About the game
Bone Shakers is a racing game with a very particular cast: four skeletons on unicycles, wobbling round a track that runs through a stone dungeon. The road comes at you in a chunky pseudo-3D view, with torches and arches on the walls, and the whole screen is dithered in a pattern of dots that gives the dark corridor its gloom.
A race is three laps. You start on the grid with the three other riders, a banner tells you when each new lap begins, and when someone crosses the line for the last time the game announces whether you came first, second, third or last. There is nothing to buy and nothing to unlock: it is a quick, one-screen arcade race that you replay to beat your own placing.
James Howard made it in a few days for the unofficial Arduboy game jam of September 2018.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and press Z on the title screen; the race counts in with READY and GO and you are off.
The game keeps no records, but F2 saves the complete state of the emulated console at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Left / right | D-pad | steer |
| X | B | accelerate |
| Z | A | start from the title screen |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Keep the pedal down. There is no brake, and the track is made of long sweeps, so the skill is in small, early corrections of the steering rather than sudden turns.
Stay on the road, and ease off the steering. Leaving the track slows a skeleton right down, and so does steering, so take bends in smooth arcs. A lead is never safe either: the riders behind you are allowed a higher top speed than the leader.
Three laps are short. A bad first lap is recoverable, but a crash-prone second one usually is not, so settle down early.
Credits and licence
Bone Shakers was designed, programmed and drawn by James Howard. It is free software under the GNU General Public License version 3, and the complete source code of the exact build served here (the game, the Arduboy2 library and the Arduino AVR core, plus the script that compiles them) is hosted alongside the game. It is built with the Arduboy2 library by Scott Allen and others (BSD licence). The licence texts are linked from this page.